John Vaillant is a Vancouver author, most recently of The Jaguar's Children, a novel about illegal migration.
----------
When I read the British right-wing UK Independence Party candidate Peter Bucklitsch's chilling tweet (now retracted) in response to the collective horror and sorrow for the Syrian toddler who washed up dead on a Turkish beach, I was frightened by the image it conjured: "The little Syrian boy was well clothed & well fed. He died because his parents were greedy for the good life in Europe. Queue jumping costs."
What flashed immediately through my mind was not the little boy, nor the cost of "queue jumping," but the actual cost of jumping – as from a burning building: The cost paid on Sept. 11, 2001, when innocent people were forced to jump from the Twin Towers in terrified despair. Those images tally with horrific accuracy the true cost of "jumping" – from the untenable known into a lethal unknown. Today, a similarly stark and desperate calculus faces millions of families in their failed or failing homelands, not only in the Middle East, but across the globe.
Not only are entire families embarking on potentially doomed journeys, shepherded by criminals, but also some parents are now compelled to set their children adrift alone. In Central America, many parents now consider it safer to send their children north at the mercy of total strangers, than to risk keeping them at home where gangs are certain to enlist them, or kill them if they refuse.
Unfortunately, we already know what it takes to make a sane, rational person – a parent – jump from a burning skyscraper. Now, we are learning what it takes to make a parent allow themselves, and even their children, to be sealed inside a truck such as the one found in Austria containing 71 bodies, four of them children. With agonizing slowness, we're beginning to perceive – perhaps to feel – how bad things have to get before people are willing to pay more money than they earn in a year to be packed like animals and 19th-century slaves into a railway car or the hold of an overloaded fishing boat. And we're seeing with terrible regularity just how cold-blooded human smugglers – and some politicians – can be.
Being smuggled is a traumatic experience that can last for days. There is terror and pain in the putrid, claustrophobic, confining dark, and it can be likened to the conditions on the upper floors of the World Trade Center towers before they fell; the fear can be unbearable, the need for air and water overwhelming. But so is the need for food, shelter and a safe environment in which to raise one's children. In these ways, it is neither rational nor just to assume that Syrians, Afghans or Salvadorans are any more careless or "greedy for the good life" than those of us already living it. Who in their right mind would willingly abandon their home, their native land and all they know, for the hostile and humiliating limbo of an Iraqi refugee camp or, for that matter, a U.S. detention centre? For most of us, it would take something few Canadians have experienced on their home soil, something equivalent to the Twin Towers on Sept. 11: A total collapse in order, safety and hope that can no longer be endured, and from which no relief is in sight. How long would we last if Islamic State fighters burned down our town?
Nonetheless, across North America, Europe and Australia, conservative politicians are advocating for more fences and higher walls. This is magical thinking of a dangerous kind – like drawing the curtains when your neighbour's house is on fire. The magnitude of this man-made crisis – nearly 60 million people are now displaced by war, conflict or persecution – is taking on the characteristics of a natural catastrophe, immune to public opinion or national boundaries, and overwhelming in its magnitude. Even with the most liberal of policies, the granting of asylum and the establishment of refugee camps are merely stopgap measures. Say what you will about Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's refugee policy, but he got one thing right: "It is simply not acceptable to pretend that you can deal with this terrible crisis by only dealing with one small aspect of the problem. It is much bigger than that."
There is really only one truly effective solution: The home governments allowing and, in some cases, engineering these mass tragedies must be called to account. This – confronting the bullies and sociopaths who thrive on and profit from this chaos, and compelling them to extinguish the fires they've lit in their own homes – is the real work, and it will be one of the international community's, and humanity's, greatest tests in coming decades. The families now drifting in the Mediterranean, riding trains across Mexico and being packed into cargo trucks on the highways of Europe need, and deserve, the same impassioned response we so readily offered the victims of Sept. 11.