A Manifesto of sorts regarding disparities in Western opinion towards immigration

A Manifesto of sorts regarding disparities in Western opinion towards immigration

There has never been a me that doesn’t live here. I have never had a home that was not here. What does this mean about leaving? And what does it mean about going to a place where there are people who have never seen their homes?

What does it say about a society who lives in extreme comfort — a society where many own multiple homes – who denies refuge to people with nothing. Are we as a society simply conforming to the norm of a brutal and nationalistic world? Or are our actions exceptional, standing out as a beacon of imperialism? My thoughts sway towards the latter.

In the late 1930s, the United States had a chance to save 20,000 jewish children fleeing Nazi persecution, by means of a program that would have mirrored the British Kindertransport. The rhetoric used by opponents of that program – which most likely doomed a vast majority of those young refugees to brutal fates in concentration camps – is eerily similar to language we’re hearing today.

The Syrian refugee crisis is once again demonstrating America’s fear of the unknown, of the different. Which is to say, itself. When politicians think of refugees, they think of inventory, of numbers, of cost. When I do, I think of children.

Where are they now? I imagine bodies piled into rows of houses. Where? out in the margins.

History is made up of stories. History in school is made up of numbers. There is no humanity in academic history. Wars and depravity occur when governments manage to dehumanize the day to day the way they have done with history. My goal is to combat this. I want to find those stories. Tell those stories. Rehumanize history.

I want to recreate humans out of what history has made into objects.

Your point of view is determined by the narrative you are given. Vision. Point of view. The warped, non-linear key to our perception of reality.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.

Would you believe me if I said that? If you would, well. I would say we are in the midst of a catalystic cultural state of unobservant. War is the definitive antonym to peace. War is dying soldiers crying for their mother (Saving Privet Ryan – I’m looking at you), it’s wandering gangs of orphaned children, its separated families, its countless people laying in ditches with their guts hanging out. I digress. But if you must come at the refugee crisis from a self serving perspective, think of things in terms of safety.

Half of Syria’s refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow up into adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps. The camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.

We have a very structured process for taking in refugees. It takes almost two years to transition from another country into the United States through the refugee process.

No one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you

breath bloody in their throats

the boy you went to school with

who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory

is holding a gun bigger than his body

you only leave home

when home won’t let you stay.

To live without a home is to live without roots. Can you imagine? No place  to call your own. Every single position, carried with you at every single moment. What do you do for food? For shelter? Water? In you get sick, where do you go to recover? When everyone around you is in chaos, who do you trust?

I saw a human head once. we were walking and then there was a rocket and people died. I’m trying to forget it, but you can’t forget something like that.

An indelible fact: A child should not have to endure these experiences for the same of adult greed.

Text drawn from:

  1. Rachael Corrie
  2. Ellen Umansky
  3. Azareen Van Der Vliet Uloomi
  4. Class discussion
  5. George W. Bush
  6. Samantha Power
  7. James Lankford
  8. Warsan Shire
  9. Bohammed Sheni via Ruth Maclean