Europe's child refugee crisis

February 21, 2017 12:35 AM

At an age when most kids need supervision to do their homework, hundreds of thousands of minors are crossing continents alone. [SL The New Yorker]
posted by The Illiterate Pundit (15 comments total)

A desperately urgent piece that needs to be read by every British MP. (And Australian MP, and US member of Congress.)

Liz Clegg is a hero.

One of her initiatives, supported by a grassroots group called Help Refugees, had been to give the children cell phones, topped up with credit and with emergency numbers keyed in. In April, 2016, her daughter, a fellow-volunteer, received a text from a seven-year-old Afghan boy named Ahmed. “I ned halp darivar no stap car no oksijan in the car,” it read. Ahmed was trapped in the back of a refrigerated truck that had made it through the tunnel. “No signal iam in the cantenar,” he continued. Clegg and her daughter sent word to the British police, who pulled the truck over and rescued Ahmed and fourteen other stowaways before they suffocated.
posted by rory at 1:27 AM on February 21, 2017 [15 favorites]

His unyielding goal, from there, was to make it to England. He fantasized about seeing Big Ben. “The place that I love is the London Eye,” he told me. “I have researched it on Google.”

Hey, fellow English people, take a minute to think how lucky you are. This bit made me well up with tears a bit.
posted by ambrosen at 3:09 AM on February 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

“I have researched it on Google.”

What a world we live in. Refugee kids travelling from Afghanstan to the English Channel, navigating by GPS, googling their destination, carefully saving evidence for asylum claims in the cloud. Every now and then this century comes up and hits one in the face.
posted by tavegyl at 3:25 AM on February 21, 2017 [17 favorites]

.... and a useful reminder for those who deny these kids entry just how interconnected this world is. There is no reason to assume that a child refugee from Eritrea isn't as much a digital native as anyone in western Europe or South Korea.
posted by tavegyl at 3:27 AM on February 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

Thinking about my last comment about Big Ben, which seems so banal, I think that the real thing is that I'm angry that people in England can't see that virtually everything that refugees want from the UK is things that get better when more people are involved in them.

And the out of pocket government expenditures of resettling refugees are pocket change, compared to, you know, a ring road around Norwich, or the cost overrun on electrifying my train to work.

The cost of dehumanising and isolating ourselves? Well, the human cost is unquantifiable but clearly high. The financial cost? Look at the value of the pound since June 23rd.
posted by ambrosen at 3:43 AM on February 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

What this doesn't seem to address is that the Dubs scheme has been abandoned, with only 350 of the pitifully small starting figure of 3000 children that the UK agreed to take having made it to the UK.
posted by biffa at 3:45 AM on February 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

What I wouldn't give to be around in a 100 years, when the kids of these kids (in the UK or wherever they end up) are running the world (and I say that as a good thing). With luck they'll be tolerant and even encouraging of whatever the contemporary migrant flow is, understanding that borders (and walls!) are anathema to human progress, and that blending makes culture stronger, not weaker or less safe.
posted by chavenet at 3:49 AM on February 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

I just cannot understand how anybody who is a parent can read an article like this and conclude that these children should be kept out of their country. They're children. For God's sake.
posted by forza at 3:51 AM on February 21, 2017 [15 favorites]

The same way that they conclude that the Benefit Cap should throw children who are already here into poverty, and tax credit limits should punish children for having the temerity to be born. Lack of empathy, denial of consequences, being selective with facts, all the rest of it. People will distort reality and morality to a remarkable extent in order to believe what they want to believe.
posted by howfar at 5:04 AM on February 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

They're children. For God's sake.

I agree with your comment entirely, but the right-wing media narrative on this one stuck: they aren't children. If they were, we'd have some degree of responsibility, but they aren't, so we don't. Oh, and they've got smartphones, so clearly wherever they came from can't be that bad.
posted by threetwentytwo at 5:07 AM on February 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

What a world we live in. Refugee kids travelling from Afghanstan to the English Channel, navigating by GPS, googling their destination, carefully saving evidence for asylum claims in the cloud. Every now and then this century comes up and hits one in the face.

The Silver SwordHandset.
posted by Buntix at 5:49 AM on February 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

I just cannot understand how anybody who is a parent can read an article like this and conclude that these children should be kept out of their country. They're children. For God's sake.

Having spent a frustrating amount of time arguing with some of my fellow Brits online about this, the answer appears to be:
a) they're not children, as conclusively proved by the tabloid press;
b) even if they were children, it would be lovely to help everybody but we have to look after our own children first (as summarised by the Daily Mash: "We need to look after our own first, say people who would never help anyone");
c) left-wingers* don't really care anyway, you're all just 'virtue signalling'.

There is still a vestigial flicker of human conscience in there: nobody is quite prepared to say "I don't care, fuck those kids", there's still an element of rhetorical gymnastics needed to convince yourself that you wouldn't ever quite say that. But there is a nastiness out there that seems much closer to the surface in more places than it's been for many years, and it doesn't take many follow-up questions before you get to "they're the first wave of a Muslim invasion force out to destroy our culture, and you're naive if you think otherwise."

We have never been a perfectly tolerant country. We have had massive issues with structural racism. We pat ourselves on the back for saving the Kindertransport kids, while conveniently ignoring the number of Jewish asylum applications we turned down. Even so, this recent swing towards total bastardry has been noticeable. Maybe we have the same number of bastards and they're just happier to be open about it, I don't know, but it is really, really disturbing to hear just what level of far-right awfulness is now considered totally fine and acceptable for public discourse. And from people I've known for years and years and years, people I grew up with.

I am deeply saddened and disappointed with my country at the moment.

(* in current UK political discourse, 'left-wingers' are anyone to the left of Oswald Mosley. Who at this rate I expect we'll soon hear described as a common-sense bloke with Legitimate Concerns About Immigration.)
posted by Catseye at 5:51 AM on February 21, 2017 [8 favorites]

forza: "I just cannot understand how anybody who is a parent can read an article like this and conclude that these children should be kept out of their country. They're children. For God's sake."

From the poem Home by Warsan Shire:

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land

posted by mhum at 9:43 AM on February 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

You're right, catseye. Mosley just wanted to start a conversation about immigration.
posted by knapah at 10:49 AM on February 21, 2017

Great find, thanks for sharing. A report released in Australia this past week has stressed the potential in properly welcoming and harnessing the skills of refugees (and highlights that we're not very good at it): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/21/finding-jobs-faster-for-new-refugees-a-triple-win-for-australia-report-finds.

The study itself can be found here.
posted by Tasmanian_Kris at 1:49 PM on February 24, 2017