Human Cargo by Caroline Morehead (Vintage) £7.99 This is a world-wide review of the managemical of
- primarily as experienced by the migrants themselves. The retells the accounts Liberians in Cairo. She reports on the perilous crossing from North Africa to Sicily.
She visits the US/Mexico border at San Diego and Tijuana - where 1,700 are known to have died trying to cross between 1994 and 2001.
Australia's immigration policy - a template for racist states - is covered. And a chapter on the iniquitous British "dispersal system" centres on the harrowing life of a man driven to suicide in Newcastle.
A recent UN report indicates that more than 4 million refugees have gone back to Afghanistan since 2002 - an unreported ticking bomb, if Morehead's account of the lack of assis lallle programmes is anything to go by.
And there is a chapter on the Palestinians - 4.2million of who dispersed across the Middle East - the largest and most intractable of the "refugee problems" according the UN Something else you wouldn't glean from the world's press.
This global overview makes upsetting reading, but takes the reader beyond the realm of the "exceptional case".
Morehead rails
adamast arbitrary distinctions between those fleeing persecution and "economic" and other migrants. She exposes the absurd processes by which a "refugee" has to satisfy the authorities.
And she highlights the barrage of new obstacles thrown up by the "war on terror" -with refugees labelled as terrorists and many western counties ceasing lo lake annual quotas as they used to.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has its roots in the aftermath of World War II. 40 million had drifted across Europe, stateless and displaced and the refusal of many states to welcome Jews Ileeing persecution and the holocaust Was 1CCCILL memory.
A short history underlines the continuing controversy OVCI the definition "refugee". As early as 1964 the Organisation of African Unity lobbied for a more generous interpretation that did not require proof of grounds to fear "individual persecution".
The 1970s saw an upsurge, with vast camps established in Africa and Asia. In the 1980s refugee numbers rose from 10 to 17 million.
The highpoint of 18 mil lion in 1992 was not a product of the ending of the cold war as many claim, but the fruits of two decades of wars, strife, poverty and famine.
Although now down to 9.2 million - this is largely due to the arbitrary exclusion of "internally displaced persons" (another definitional problem) of whom there are 25 million and to the return of millions to places with little intrastructure. Football
The UNHCR has always been a ponlical football. There was a 21 per budget cut between 1992 and 1997 during the period of greatest need.
The principal loser was
where, by 1999, UNHCR was spending just one tenth of what it spent in the Balkans, despite Africa being home to nearly half the world's displaced people.
The position of children is scandalous. Half the world's refugees are under 18 and 5 per cent of these are unaccompanied.
They have the same obligation as adults to "prove" their refugee status and are consequently to be found in prisons and detention centres across the globe.
Not surprisingly refugee affairs are described as "profoundly dysfunctional". Governments spend $10 billion annually trying to keep a relatively small number of asylum seekers out (half a million applications welc made in 2002 to 37 countries) - twelve times the sum those governments give UNHCR to look after 17 mil lion people.
The author does not address root causes, nor pose solutions - beyond calling for "managed migration", all ambiguous formula suggestive of immigration controls.
But, as she puts it, "Why snould somelning as arbillal y as where one is born determine where one is allowed to live?
Entrance restrictions, borders and boundaries, often themselves accidents of history, stand as barriers to a more equal world, protecting the privileges of those who live in the richest, safest, least crowded states".