Finding a place of refuge

Be­fore I go on to earn your con­tempt as a bleed­ing-heart lib­eral and a so­cial jus­tice war­rior who puts po­lit­i­cal cor­rect­ness be­fore com­mon sense, let me start by say­ing I don't think we should let just any­one into the coun­try. Nor do I think it is nec­es­sar­ily good to wel­come peo­ple into our so­ci­ety who have no re­spect for our rules or tra­di­tions. It has taken us decades to free our­selves from the yoke of church dogma and there is no place here for re­li­gious ex­trem­ism. Our pub­lic ser­vices are lim­ited and hugely ex­pen­sive to main­tain and not to be squan­dered on peo­ple who can­not make a con­comi­tant con­tri­bu­tion. Women here fought hard for their equal­ity and are ex­am­ples that some cul­tures around the world would do well to fol­low.

So, now you're think­ing: “Oh no, Neil's a fas­cist!”, but the first thing that came to mind when I read the tes­ti­monies of asy­lum seek­ers who fled their homes to find refuge in Cat­alo­nia (pages 28 to 35) was that it could so eas­ily be me! If there is any­thing to take from the sto­ries of these peo­ple who fled their coun­tries, to save their lives, who came here look­ing for some­where to live a nor­mal life and be left alone to do so, it is that they are just like you and I. What would we do if we were being per­se­cuted daily, if we risked being drummed into the mil­i­tary, if our front doors were being kicked in and our moth­ers dragged off to be tor­tured, if we left the house every day won­der­ing if it would be there when we got back? We would leave if we could, all of us would.

And that is all these peo­ple we lump to­gether as “asy­lum seek­ers” or “refugees” have done. There are many ins and outs to this drama in­volv­ing many thou­sands of dis­placed, des­per­ate peo­ple seek­ing safety, but the bot­tom line is that they are just peo­ple, homo sapi­ens like us, who need a help­ing hand. We can ei­ther offer help or turn our backs on them (and there are ar­gu­ments to be made for ei­ther thing), but we have to de­cide. The ar­ti­cle on pages 34/35 points out the mean­ness of the Span­ish au­thor­i­ties' asy­lum pol­icy. To let in a few hun­dred here and there be­cause you have no other choice, you might as well seal the bor­der. Or elect a dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ment with a dif­fer­ent ap­proach.

One thing we could do to help these peo­ple in much larger num­bers is to stop treat­ing their coun­tries as po­lit­i­cal bat­tle­grounds. The Rus­sians sup­port one side, the Amer­i­cans the other. In the mid­dle are nor­mal peo­ple who just want to get on with their lives and who would pre­fer to ex­pe­ri­ence Cat­alo­nia dur­ing a mem­o­rable hol­i­day, not as a final refuge .