U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi on Monday said a record 123 million people have been displaced from their homes around the world – a number that has more than doubled over the past decade.
Grandi said nations should not attempt to deal with the problem by tightening their border controls. Instead, he demanded more liberal asylum policies from the countries migrants are attempting to enter.
“You might then ask: what can be done? For a start, do not focus only on your borders,” Grandi said after laying out the refugee numbers at the annual U.N. Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) meeting in Geneva.
“We must seek to address the root causes of displacement, and work toward solutions. I beg you all that we continue to work – together and with humility – to seize every opportunity to find solutions for refugees,” he said.
Grandi went so far as suggesting plans to tighten border controls and restrict asylum programs could be violations of international law. While he did not name the countries he was warning, Reuters noted that Grandi has been strongly critical of the United Kingdom’s plan to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Grandi paid particular attention to displaced residents of Gaza and Lebanon and the people left homeless by the savage Sudan civil war. In the latter case, many of the displaced people have tried to cross the Mediterranean to take refuge in Europe, an endeavor Grandi felt should be indulged.
Grandi’s focus on eliminating national borders to allow unlimited migration did not appear to address countries such as China, which strictly limit entry. It would also likely do little to ease the problem. Asylum has its uses, but there is scarce evidence that mass migration benefits either the migrants or the “host” country in the long term.
As the European voters Grandi was so dismissive of have been pointing out, they have a sovereign right to decide who enters their nations and they bear no innate responsibility to handle the fallout from conflicts on the other side of the world. Europe will likely take in over a million asylum-seekers this year, just as it accepted over a million in 2023.
The Sudanese civil war stands as a horrific rebuke to Grandi’s claim that prosperous nations must address the “root causes of displacement” in nations where they have no real influence.
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Huge amounts of humanitarian aid have been sent to Sudan, only to be stolen or blocked by its warring junta factions. Those factions have resisted all entreaties to halt their brutal two-year civil war. Both sides have deliberately targeted civilian populations with enforced famine and violence. Neither side appears to be terribly concerned about Western sanctions.
The tremendous surge of displaced persons over the past decade is worth investigating and the investigators would likely conclude there is no single cause. People have been displaced in Gaza because terrorist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad built bunkers and missile launch sites beneath and around their homes, callously using them as human shields. Displacing them was the only alternative to killing them.
On the other hand, Ukraine’s displaced citizens were driven from their cities by the brutal Russian invasion, and a large number of young Ukrainians were “displaced” by being forcibly kidnapped to Russia – a war crime for which the International Criminal Court (ICC) has sworn out an entirely ineffectual arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Displacement is also surging because the bad actors of the world have learned to use displaced populations as weapons. During the Syrian civil war, dictator Bashar al-Assad repeatedly threatened to drive huge numbers of refugees into Europe. The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan keep large numbers of their own people internally displaced because that makes them easier to control – and the international community picks up much of the tab for feeding, housing, and medicating them. Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s neighbors are forcing people terrified of living under the Taliban to return home.
The Taliban, Assad, Putin, and the Sudanese warlords are unlikely to tolerate lectures from the United Nations, so those lectures are delivered to the only audience UNHRC has, and the only proposed “solution” is allowing more migration.
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