This year, Refugee Week takes place during the General Election 2024. The irony of this has not been lost on us here at Migrants’ Rights Network. It is something of a juxtaposition to narrow our focus to simply ‘celebrate’ refugees when migrants’, including refugee, rights are being increasingly weaponised in cross-party political campaigns. Moreover, Refugee Week 2024 should require reflection given the numerous ongoing humanitarian crises and genocides happening across the world that are deliberately and inadvertently creating refugees .
Refugee Week largely focuses on celebration or the notion of ‘contribution’ of refugee communities. Specifically, the theme of 2024 focuses on the concept of ‘Our Home’ and celebrating what home means to us all. But what is ‘home’? Do our ideas of home in the Global North (and who is entitled to make a place their home) rest on ideas of deservingness, “integration” and surface-level safety? And should we instead be striving to create a collective home based on ideas of respect, justice and liberation?
‘Defying the odds’
Refugee Week and the wider migration advocacy it reflects will either hone in on push factors such as persecution, war or other forms of violence without consideration for colonial legacies, or neocolonialism, or geopolitical factors. They often fail to tackle the interconnected pervasive imperialism that drives displacement in recent decades, how it subjects racialised people to border controls, and how the Global North decides who is deserving of safety.
There is an ingrained fixation on migrants, including refugees, ‘defying the odds’. Specifically, a fetishisation of marginalised individuals achieving ‘success’ (usually monetary success) despite the traumatic journey they endured- rather than focus on barriers they have actually faced like systemic racism or militarised borders. Narratives around ‘contribution’ or ‘achieving success against the odds’ has its roots in capitalism, colonialism and an emphasis on ‘hyper-individualism’ (focusing on self-fulfilment rather than the collective needs of communities) when our focus should be on identifying and tackling the racist systems or norms they had to interact with. We should instead focus on why migrants, including refugees, had to make traumatic journeys in the first place.
Moreover, ideas on what the refugee experience should be in a destination country resort to ‘integrationist’ ideals that reinforce conditional belonging. The idea of the UK as a ‘safe’ home is subjective. We must also think about safety beyond the physical. Those who come from a place of civil unrest may be escaping physical violence, but psychological trauma can and does persist. In the absence of adequate psychological support systems, how can a place truly be safe? For many marginalised groups, the UK is not safe: for queer, including trans+, people, for people seeking asylum in cruel accommodation, for racialised people who experience disproportionate police violence and incarceration. The list goes on.
This is more important than ever at a time where people from Palestine and Armenia (specifically Artsakh) to Sudan, Congo and East Turkestan (as referred to by the Uyghur Human Rights Project) are being genocided, exploited or forced to move while refugee camps are being destroyed or are offered no safe means to start a new life. Closer to home, refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong find themselves in uncertain situations as a result of temporary protection offered to them by the UK.
Towards liberation
It’s time to rethink what kind of society we want to create. This Refugee Week, our reflections should guide us towards a conception of home as a site of justice, safety, respect and liberation.
Home should be a place free from violence: free from colonialism, capitalism, racisms and other systems of oppression. Home should not be a place where racialised people must achieve extraordinary achievements in order to be granted respect. Nor should home subject you to borders, surveillance trauma or death. The violence of the immigration system, alongside other systems of oppression, subjects marginalised communities and migrants, including refugees, to traumatising, segregated and even fatal living conditions, in the form of detention, inhumane asylum accommodation or high rise tower blocks.
Liberation is about freeing ourselves from another’s control- for migrants, including refugees that means freedom from immigration systems and racist social norms. Liberation is about creating a world where everyone has access to the resources they need, not one where people must ‘contribute’ or ‘integrate’ in order to be respected or praised on the grounds of ‘deservingness’.
‘Home’ should be a place of liberation wherever that may be in the world. We fundamentally believe in a world where everyone is free to move but no one is forced to move. That means the right to choose your home. For many displaced people, they can’t choose their home: their home has been taken away.
More refugee week content:
Coming soon!