To be or to not to be -A refugee’s dilemma
Leaving one’s home is never an easy choice. In fact, for more than 80 million refugees it was not even a choice. When their countries of origin became the centrer stage of violence, conflicts, wars, political unrests , economic meltdowns and environmental calamities, they had no option but to move away.
Unfortunately, 21 st century upheavals have caused such migrations to happen on a gigantic scale repeatedly and in geopolitically vast stretches of globe. As a consequence, the challenges brought about in its wake are equally daunting for any population to handle. Worse, the routine nature of such occurrences has turned Homo sapiens callous and insensitive. Nonetheless, such uprooting needs to be fixed, and fixed organically for a better, safer world.
It is with this intention that in 1950 the UNHCR burgeoned out- to globally safeguard human rights amidst turbulent security challenges. In 1951, the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees had to stipulate that “it is an obligation of the international community to provide safety to individuals when their originating countries are unable to do so” , clearly marking this out as a global issue needing collaborative efforts. Not missing out on the economic cost it would entail , the 1984 Cartagena Declaration exhorted the member states “ to foster the self-sufficiency of persons during the time of refuge”.
These worked to provide a template for the anticipated refugee settlement issues , but left the interpretation to the host nation. It is here that political manipulation has crept in. Though ‘cosmopolitanism’ was supposed to guide the refugee resettlement process, it has begun to oscillate between ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’. In all fairness, it is understandable that continuous large influx of refugees has overwhelmed and exhausted the receiving nations. What migration psychologists term as “accommodation fatigue” of host population, manifests either as government and public apathy or resentment or outright hostility. No wonder, the refugee narrative highlights an experience of prejudice , oppression, and even a refugee hierarchy based on preference for some nationalities.
On the other hand , the abuse of asylum procedures by unscrupulous and evil-minded( asylum shopping, economic manipulation and even misuse of such programs by terrorist groups) is the reason why ‘refugee’ has come to connote ‘threat’ , and purportedly caused rise in right-wing sentiments in receiving nations. This has alerted the governments for ‘thorough vetting’ and not to seek assimilation but integration of the arriving population. It is worthwhile to deliberate about how these two words differ.
The terms may seem interchangeable but actually have widely different strains running underneath. According to Berry’s model of acculturation- Assimilation occurs when individual adopts the cultural norms of a dominant or host culture, over their original culture; Integration occurs when individuals are able to adopt the cultural norms of the dominant or host culture while maintaining their culture of origin.
Racism, Anti-migration sentiment, Xenophobia, Islamophobia have spawned a host of terms like North vs South refugees, deserving vs undeserving refugees, civilised vs uncivilised refugees. Such mindsets dictate the policies insisting only on refugee integration. If at all assimilation survives , it survives only in an intrusive assimilation or restrictive assimilation format.
The question now is what are the options for the stateless persons or forced-to- become-refugees-by-circumstances individuals :
Identity preservation at all costs or self preservation at some cost?
The Shakespearean quandary- To be or to not to be continues to haunt....the individuals, the nations and the thinking man in all of us.