Fear of refugees must not shape the response to Afghanistan’s crisis
Two defining images of 2021 depict people fleeing. One is the sight of people desperately chasing after a US air force jet along the runway at Kabul airport, as the west’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan came to an end. The other is of passengers, evacuated from a forest fire on the Greek island of Evia, watching from the deck of a ferry as the skyline is etched in apocalyptic red.
In both cases they tell us about the speed at which people have to abandon everything when disaster strikes – there is rarely time for an orderly queue, for correct papers and possessions, when you are forced to flee – and about the power held by those who control the routes to safety.
All too often, our response to disaster is dominated by dire predictions – that there will simply be too many people to help, that they risk pulling us under too. The shadow of the 2015 refugee crisis – a sudden rush of people across Europe’s borders that “should not be repeated”, in the words of Armin Laschet, Germany’s likely next chancellor – is shaping the west’s response to Afghanistan. The doomiest observers see a dry run for the coming wave of climate refugees: as the analyst Anatol Lieven recently put it, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report “are harbingers of a storm that may test western democracy to destruction”.
Yet it’s crucial we resist these fears.
Migration is far more complex than the dominant narrative of the “refugee crisis” would suggest, and rather than indulging in speculation about what the future might hold, what matters most is how people’s needs are addressed in the here and now.
The blame game that has enveloped the UK government in recent days, as criticism of its sluggish efforts to evacuate Afghans at risk of Taliban reprisals has grown louder, is an example of what awaits us if we fail. The Home Office, accused by “senior military sources” in the Sunday Times this weekend of obstructing efforts to expand resettlement, strongly rejected the allegations. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has condemned the Foreign Office for spiriting its diplomats out of Kabul and leaving “18-year-old squaddies” to process visa applications.
Similar arguments are taking place elsewhere in Europe – and further afield – as governments scramble to respond to the Taliban’s rapid takeover. Much of the surface-level rhetoric is highminded: “asylum must be granted to those in danger of persecution”, declared David Sassoli, the president of the European parliament. But the responses of European governments, including the UK, are being shaped just as much by the exaggerated fear of migration. Emmanuel Macron said this week that France would stand by “those who share our values”, but also called for a “robust” EU plan to stem “irregular migratory flows towards Europe”. Some countries are insisting that deportations of rejected Afghan asylum seekers continue: Austria is demanding “deportation centres” in third countries, if people cannot be safely returned to Afghanistan itself. The British government, even as it belatedly mulls an expanded resettlement for Afghans at risk of Taliban reprisals, is pushing ahead with a borders bill that will punish those people who seek asylum in the
UK the “wrong” way, by travelling here under their own initiative.
Europe’s border policy is increasingly shaped by the desire to avoid a repeat of 2015, a fact that has encouraged governments on its periphery to manipulate the issue: in the past 18 months, Turkey, Morocco and Belarus have all tried to exert political pressure on a variety of issues by allowing groups of migrants to cross into EU territory. But displaced people do not, in general, all head for rich parts of the world: developing countries host the vast majority of refugees. When people do try to reach the west, it is because they have not found security elsewhere, and it is usually only those with the money, the contacts or the willpower to brave already harsh defences who try to do so.
In truth, people have been fleeing Afghanistan in greater numbers for several years due to a war, as Human Rights Watch remarked in July, whose “primary and defining characteristic … has been harm to civilians caused by massive human rights abuses and war crimes by all sides”. It has suited governments engaged in the pursuit of that war to obscure this. Asylum seekers, said the then-home secretary David Blunkett in a premature moment of triumph in 2002, “should get back home and recreate their countries that we freed from tyranny, whether it be Kosovo or now Afghanistan”. By 2015, a British court had ordered that deportations to Afghanistan be suspended, on the grounds that the country was unsafe. The government had the deci
sion overturned on appeal the following year.
The spectre of a new wave of refugees can serve many political ends. It can be used to justify tougher border policies; it can be held up as either an indictment or an endorsement of western military intervention depending on one’s political preference. Yet rather than moralising, our conversation should be based on the realities of migration as it is, not as our political leaders might like it to be.
While the UK and other governments need to step up their evacuation and resettlement efforts, this will not be sufficient. According to the latest figures given to me by the UN refugee agency UNHCR, there have already been 550,000 people, about 80% of whom are women and children, internally displaced in Afghanistan since the start of the year; many are now sleeping rough in Kabul without access to basic goods or medical assistance. They join a further 2.9 million who had been internally displaced by the end of 2020. Countries including the UK have slashed aid to Afghanistan in recent years; the UNHCR is asking for increased funds to cover people’s needs until December.
There must also be a concerted international effort to help Afghanistan’s neighbours keep their borders open and offer shelter to those who need it. This is where the majority of the Afghan refugee diaspora – one of the world’s largest, the product of 40 years of invasion and civil war – is based, and where most people are likely to remain. But countries like Iran and Pakistan cannot be expected to do this alone: Canada’s offer to resettle 20,000 vulnerable people should be matched by the UK and other countries with the capacity to do so. The UK should also introduce an amnesty for Afghan asylum seekers already here, and make it easier for families to reunite.
As the west’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is now picked over, the national debate is likely to turn inward, with commentators mourning Britain’s loss of international influence. The people affected by the war – and by what might come next – do not have this luxury.
Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe and Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britain’s Far Right
fairgrounds, scheduled to host the Homegrown Americana Festival on Labor Day weekend, is instead housing those who lost homes and fire crews working to contain the flames.
Rather than merch tables selling memorabilia from a weekend of music, vendors stationed near the fairgrounds are hawking Dixie fire commemoration T-shirts complete with big bold letters that read: “Largest single fire in California history.”
Quincy is safe and beyond the fire line. But residents are still shaken. Smoke has filled the skies in summer or autumn for the last three years and the foreboding glow of yet another dangerous fire has hit home. Many in the tight-knit community have close friends who live in the areas that weren’t as lucky.
“It has been heartbreaking,” Bray said, noting that residents across many of these towns know one another. People have been congregating in her store, which posts the latest fire information on a bulletin at the entrance, sharing stories of loss. “People have been living here for generations and suddenly they’re just having nothing,” she said. “It’s surreal.”
A few miles up the road, the Pine Hill Motel is fully booked with people who lost their homes in the fire and those working on the incident. The motel’s owner, Sonny Madarang, said he has had to cancel bookings for the fair, but for the last few years most of his business has been catering to crews rather than tourists.
“Our clientele are people coming to college and worker guys – firefighters, dispatchers. We have been really busy for a couple years because of those guys,” he said.
Madarang said the hotel was trying as best it could to help out the fire refugees. It was hard to stomach the losses, he added.
“I feel sorry for those guys,” he said. “I don’t see why they couldn’t stop the fires in Greenville, Canyon Dam and all those places.” He’s hoping the catastrophic fires have at least protected
Quincy for a while. “We got burned all the way around us,” he said. “Now we got pretty much all that fuel burned off – but I guess there’s still a lot of fuel.”
Madarang and his family moved to the mountain town decades ago from Santa Rosa looking for a different pace of life. He’s not ready to leave yet. “I like it here because you don’t have to rush around,” he said. “The only thing is the fires.”
Connor Caiazzo, 20, who works at local restaurant, Jeffrey’s Pub & Grub, was born and raised in Quincy and said that a lot of what made it special was also lost during fire season. The dozens of Pacific Crest Trail hikers who typically stop in for food during the summer haven’t come through and the tourism that supports the town has had to slow. “There’s a lot of outdoor activity,” he said. “So when you’ve got something that affects pretty much the only thing there is to do around here, it sucks.”
It’s also been scary. The losses experienced by nearby communities had also been felt in Quincy, he said. “Seeing a town like Greenville go up in flames, a town with so much history – it is just scary for a lot of people.”
Ally Blesse, 32, has also lived in the town for her whole life, but she and her family now are thinking about leaving. “It’s been crazy and really hard to deal with,” she said. “Everybody is panicking.” But, she said, it had been heartening to see the community rally around its neighbors. She works at the Quincy Natural Foods Co-Op, which has been distributing donated food to evacuees.
“We are a very tight-knit community,” she said. “It’s been incredible to see the outreach and the overflowing love. People are learning to be more gentle and calm.” But it’s not enough to keep her there. “My family and I have talked about giving it one more summer and then packing up and getting out.”
mate strategy director at the League of Conservation Voters. “We need to think about what kind of changes to our physical infrastructure we need to make to make sure those changes don’t exacerbate the problem of climate change.”
In addition to mitigating emissions and decarbonizing existing schools, architects and sustainable engineering organizations are designing and building net-zero schools from scratch.
Wyck Knox, an architect at VMDO Architects, led the design of Discovery elementary school, the largest certified net-zero energy school in the country, which opened in 2015. The design team prioritised considerations for site footprint, solar orientation, building construction and energy.
The 97,588 sq ft building features insulated concrete exterior walls with high thermal mass, bioretention areas that clean and slowly release all of the water from the site, a geothermal well field which supplies heat at a consistent 118F (48.8C), low-flow plumbing fixtures that exceed the energy and water savings targets set by Arlington public schools, and 100% LED lighting. The school also features 1,706 roofmounted solar panels which were purchased for less than the original budget.
“That was kind of the big breakthrough accomplishment that allowed the [Arlington] school district to say, ‘Why would we go back now that we’ve seen that we can get a school to generate all its own clean energy and then some, and put extra clean energy on to the grid for the original price?’” Knox said.
As a result, Knox’s next school project was designing Alice West Fleet elementary school, the second of three net-zero energy schools for Arlington public schools. Completed in 2019, the school contains energy-saving features such as optimum solar orientation. Multiple studies have found that schools with optimized daylight increase student performance as natural lighting regulates melatonin and reinforces circadian wellness.
In addition to optimized daylight, Alice West Fleet is equipped with high-performance HVAC systems and small individual heat pump units that provide the proper amount of conditioned air only when and where it is needed. The conditioned air is created by exchanging heat with the ground through 72 560ft deep wells underneath the school.
The third net-zero energy school, Cardinal elementary school, is set to open in September and will feature a stormwater detention vault to address flooding concerns after the area experienced a record-breaking and damaging deluge in July 2019.
Addressing the challenges surrounding these projects, Wyck said: “It’s really about balancing all the competing interests, particularly in urban and dense suburban areas,” adding: “It means having a broader conversation with more people … as resiliency requires comprehensive solutions.”
With many American schools undergoing sustainable transitions, they are becoming living laboratories for students as classrooms design educational assignments based on sustainable initiatives, such as calculating the amount of daylight a school building saves.
“It really isn’t just about building more sustainable schools, but also cultivating that sort of sustainable mindset in the schools,” Tony Hans said.
It doesn’t take higher construction costs. It takes a paradigm shift
Tony Hans