“The 21st century is being defined by displacement. Much of that has to do with conflict and war. A lot of it has to do with climate change. Even more has to do with economic instability.”
That’s the assessment of Georgina Ramsey, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware and a political and legal anthropologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork with refugees and displaced people. With a million refugees escaping Ukraine in the face of a large-scale military invasion by Russia, she can discuss the context of this situation and global displacement is becoming “a predictable aspect of life.”
Among the topics she can discuss:
How the European Union’s humanitarian response to the Ukraine situation is a stark contrast to past reactions to refugee flows where the focus was on securitization and limiting mobility.
“What we’re seeing with the European response generally is an unprecedented opening up of their borders. Ukrainians moved across national borders to seek refuge within an overwhelmingly welcoming set of nations wanting to provide protection to them (at least temporarily).
Just for comparison, if you look at the response during the 2015 refugee crisis which saw hundreds of thousands of Syrians seeking asylum—or even the crisis on the Belarus-Poland border just three months ago—many refugees who were attempting to cross borders into Europe were being stopped, put into detention centers, deported and just generally being used as political pawns. We saw countries like Hungary, France and Austria actually putting up physical barriers to stop refugees crossing.”
The Biden administration’s apparent “hands-off” response to the Ukrainian refugee situation. The stress of having just gone through a rapid response to the Afghan evacuation is an important factor.
“Right now, resettlement organizations in the U.S. are fighting to have the Biden administration create a legal process that would automatically transfer the parolee status of those evacuated Afghan people into asylum status. Because if they continue to be classified as parolees, technically, the U.S. government could still turn around, in say the next election cycle, and deport them. Moreover, resettlement organizations have been gutted by funding cuts from the previous administration and the economic impact of the pandemic. With all these complications, there is a question of whether the U.S. is equipped to manage another rapid refugee resettlement process.”
RSS