The world today is facing a refugee crisis that is straining humanitarian resources to the limit. The ongoing civil war in Syria, the expansion of ISIS, and ongoing war, famine, and drought in African countries like Somalia, Uganda, and Kenya, have force hundreds of thousands of people from their homelands. There simply are not enough resources to process the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers in the world today. Efforts of the United Nations (UN) to find homes for the refugees are often hindered by the governments of the nations slated to receive them.
According to the UN, a refugee is a person who has left his country out of fear of persecution for race, religion, nationality, or political opinion, and cannot return to his country for fear of persecution. An asylum seeker is someone seeking protection whose refugee status has not yet been determined . The UN also forbids punishing people who reach a country seeking asylum or refugee status. Governments often attempt to limit refugees under the guise of protecting their borders or protecting their “way of life”. This is evident in the debate in Australian in 2011 over Malaysian refugees. During the debates in the Australian Parliament, refugees were divided into two categories, the genuine refugees, who had been going through the process in refugee camps for years, and the boat people, who came straight to Australia from their homeland via boat. The argument was that the “boat people” should be returned to their homeland and they are illegal immigrants for seeking asylum directly (Rowe). Australia is not the only country to use similar arguments to keep refugees out.
The current debate in the United States is similar to the Australian debate in that the political leaders use derogatory labels to make the idea of accepting refugees detrimental to the security of the country. In the case of the Syrian refugees, the current argument is that the government cannot properly screen the refugees to determine whether or not they are members of ISIS, therefore the United States should not accept any of the refugees from that region. The vast majority of the refugees from Syria have fled their country because their lives were in danger because of the ongoing civil war. Whole cities have been destroyed and there are not enough resources to survive. In general, the fact that the majority of the refugees from Syria are Muslim casts suspicion on them since extremism among Muslims from the Middle East is perceived to be on the rise in the West.
Regardless of the reason, the United States is employing the same tactic as Australia to limit refugees out of concern for protecting the borders and protecting the “American way of life”. This does not bode well for the thousands of refugees who simply seek a safe place to live and the opportunity for a future.
References
Rowe, E. &. (2014). 'Genuine' refugees or illegitimate 'boat people': Political constructions of asylum seekers and refugees in the Malaysia Deal debate. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 171-242.
