Migrant or Refugee? name: Michael Agege ________________________ Human Geography: Unit 2 Part I. Read the article below from the New York Times on the difference between a migrant and a refugee. The difference between the two is a fundamental understanding you’ll need to move forward with this unit. Answer the accompanying questions in complete sentences. *note: the article is from 2015, but while the migrant crisis in Europe has changed and only gotten more complicated, the fundamental differences between a refugee and a migrant still apply http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/world/migrants-refugees-europe-syria.html?_r=0 In your words, what is a refugee?
Investigating the Problem When answering the question of why refugees in the Kitchener-Waterloo region have difficulties finding employment, I think it is useful to make the distinction between obstacles that occur at the level of individual refugees and those that exist at a system level. Drawing this distinction will help to focus recommendations at addressing these obstacles in a more effective manner. INDIVIDUAL LEVEL OBSTACLES Among the individual obstacles, the majority of obstacles can be further broken down into two further categories, skills and competing priorities.
Children make up half of the 21 million refugees universally (Figures at a Glance). A refugee is a person that has been forced from their home due to war, persecution, or natural disaster. Refugee children endure many traumas such as: loss, stress, prolonged stays in refugee camps, dangerous escapes, violence, and even cases of rape and murder. The horrors these children experience leads to a struggle to find their identity. F This can be vividly seen in the novel, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, by a ten-year-old girl named Ha.
Unfortunately, the communities around them are also becoming increasingly overwhelmed, so even relations there are crumbling. Cases and anecdotes from our European counterparts suggest that many refugees do not seek to achieve employment or work to learn their language and culture, on top of committing a variety of violent and non-violent crimes. According to Raheem Kassam and Chris Tomlinson in their article “Migrants Committing Disproportionately High Crime in Germany,” Syrians have are responsible for ten thousand, three hundred and forty-eight individual non-border related offenses, and three thousand, one hundred and eighty-six assaults. Statistics such as this, coupled with our ongoing conflicts with terrorists in the Middle East, especially ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Qaeda, lead many to oppose welcoming refugees as they fear they may either be a menace to our society or a terrorist hiding in the ranks. On the economic side of this, while refugees do not appear to have a major effect on wages, they tend to rely on receiving benefits while being less likely to be employed, especially if they are more recent arrivals.
The Refugees journey is often unsafe and dangerous compared to Immigrants whose journey is much more relaxed and luxurious. Immigrants and Refugees share many things in common but the life of the Refugees is much harder.
It is in situations like this that the government needs to step up and provide assistance to these refugees. One way that the government can help is to provide an education for the refugees. “Employment seems to be the critical factor in moving the refugee into the mainstream of society,” so the government needs to help the refugees get a job (Stein 27). Vietnamese refugees often had more professional white collar jobs before they were forced to emigrate from Vietnam. In 1977, approximately thirty percent of incoming refugees had professional jobs while most of the rest had blue collar jobs.
As nations are submerged in internecine turmoil and devastation, civilians suffer immensely and if not massacred, are compelled to leave their country in trepidation, searching of a new home - a future; refugees are one of the most vulnerable members of our society and their population is proliferating. For many of these refugees, their home turns out to be the nesting site of notorious terrorist organisations who intend to take in and brainwash these individuals to adhere to their needs. In the past year or so, most refugees have been coming from Syria; in 2014 it was Afghanistan. Contrary to Western criticism that the Middle East is not doing enough, 95% of all Syrian refugees are now hosted in neighbouring countries. Turkey has welcomed 1.59 million refugees while Lebanon brought in 1.15 million.
I am writing to you today to express my thoughts about the refugees and internally displaced people who are currently going through hard times, all over the world and have been for a long time, especially in developing countries. 86 percent of refugees and internally displaced people come from developing nations. Syria and other countries in Europe’s Middle East, the Mediterranean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia are specifically areas that are extremely involved with the refugee ad internally displaced people crises. These struggling people have all been pushed out of their homes because of violence, war or persecution, and the refugees are trying to seek refuge in other countries as when they cross an international border there are
There are many differentiates between America and China in diet, lifestyle. First of all, there are many differentiates in diet. American like eat fried foods such as: burgers, pizza, fries etc. Opposite, Chinese people like cooking. Different types of vegetables to cook together, while Americans like to eat raw vegetables, such as salad.
There is little doubt that the issue of refugees is a global problem. While it most immediately affects developing nations, there is a strong argument that modernized countries should help by allowing higher levels of immigration. This is certainly not an easy issue though, because historically, immigration has caused as many problems as it solves. Every year there are thousands on refugees on the move. Where are they moving?
Countries surrounding Syria such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have seen a giant influx of refugees crossing into their borders. European countries like Italy and Greece have seen refugees coming from across the Mediterranean into their country while other European nations like Germany are accepting the immigrants with open arms. Germany has dozens of refugee centers welcoming the Syrians; however, many flee to neighboring countries out of convenience and a shorter distance of travel. Neighboring countries that take these immigrants aren’t doing it completely on their own will, but they have received funding from many first world countries, with the US leading the way. Although there are lots of funds for these camps, some are in bad shape, Greece hosts “nearly 60,000 refugees in deteriorating conditions” (Ignatieff), and many others are struggling to keep up with the intake of refugees.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote in “A Farewell To Arms,” that “war is nothing more than the dark, murderous extension of a world that refuses to acknowledge, protect, or preserve true love.” As a former refugee, I know what it feels like to be force to live in a foreign country, and the difference that people can make in the lives of others when they welcome strangers, simply because of our shared humanity, humbly in love. I was taken to the United States when I was 17 years old as a refugee on December 4, 2000, through a refugee resettlement program undertaken by the United Nations and the United States Department of State with a group of South Sudanese boys, now young men; who have been known in the international media, especially in the United States as the “Lost Boys of Sudan.” Our story is a real story of human tragedy and resilience, unlike the Lost Boys of Peter Pan, who decided to never grow up. Leaving behind our country of origin and everyone that we loved and knew was not really our choice.
Making the crisis even more urgent is the fact that more than half of all refugees in the world are children ("Refugee Facts”). In response to the refugee problem, in 1980 the United States passed the Refugee Act. It sets the standards for refugees to enter the United States ("Refugee”). An agreement was put in place after World War II because of all the refugees from Europe.
More or less every person who has access to news and information know about the current refugee situation, which is mainly caused by the terror group ISIL. Of course terror isn’t the only reason people are fleeing from their countries and seeking better conditions. Hunger, poverty and lack of human rights are also among the reasons people chose to travel to Europe and then risking to get kicked out because of the politics in the European countries they enter. The UN recently reckoned that approximately 4.000 refugees are coming to Europe, every single day. Many countries in Europe have problem coping with the large amount of refugees and it could make a possible threat to these countries economy.
Finally, from the Syrian civil war, 250,000 unfortunate people have died. When multitudes of people migrate to one country, that country would, in turn, become extremely pressured. “The pressures caused by massive influxes of people can be overwhelming”(“What's Driving the Global Refugee Crisis?”). Every year, Germany alone spends 21.7 billion dollars on anything which is refugee related, and with oncoming demand in Germany, this number continues to grow higher. The European Refugee Crisis has also displaced nine million Syrians’ homes, making it troublesome for countries to house them.
