By Nasrat Sayed, Fahim Sadat, and Hamayun Khan

The decision to withdraw U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan and the subsequent abrupt takeover by the Taliban have triggered profound concerns among Afghans, who fear for the future under the Talibans rule. Internationally, one key concern is that a major refugee crisis may be imminent, which could swell the numbers of Afghans previously displaced within and beyond the countrys borders during prior decades of war. Already this year, more than 558,000 Afghans have been displaced internally. Under a worst-case scenario, an estimated 515,000 refugees could be forced out of the country by the end of this year. Future flight would add to the existing 2.8 million Afghan refugees and asylum seekers around the world, who have long been among the planets largest humanitarian populations.

Afghanistans neighborsparticularly Pakistan and Iran, which already host more than 2.2 million registered Afghan refugees and more than 3 million others with varying statuswould be the most affected by any large-scale migration. However, refugees could also seek refuge in Europe, in a possible echo of the more than 1 million asylum seekers and others from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere who reached EU borders in 2015 and 2016. Fearing such a repetition, European policymakers initially pressed for continued returns to Afghanistan of irregular Afghan migrants and failed asylum seekers; however, several countries leading the charge for a stiff returns policy, among them Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, quickly reversed course as the Taliban gained ground.

The likelihood of a new Afghan refugee crisis primarily depends on the formation and structure of a government by the Taliban, its rules (such as regarding rights for women and girls to an education and work), and the countrys economic situation. The inability of the Taliban to form an inclusive government that is acceptable to all Afghans may cause turbulence. This, along with continued drought that has compounded the humanitarian situation, may increase the number of people who are willing to flee, especially to neighboring countries where leaders have worried openly about a new refugee crisis. More broadly, global powers have fretted that a fragmented Afghanistan could again play host to extremist groups as it did ahead of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

However, these outcomes are not inevitable. Taliban leaders have suggested they will behave differently than the last time the group was in power, with more tolerance and respect for women and minority rights. The international communitys ongoing relationship with Afghanistan and Afghan organizations can affect the new governments performance and ability to maintain control. External pressures, particularly from Afghanistans neighbors, may limit civilians ability to flee. Negotiations between the Taliban and opposition forces could lead to an inclusive government. While there remains the prospect that renewed fighting, economic disaster, or reduced freedom will prompt a large-scale refugee crisis, the countries that are most likely to be affected will be those located in Afghanistans immediate neighborhood, many of which have invested diplomatic and other resources to prevent huge displacement.

This article reviews the prospects for a new refugee crisis from Afghanistan following the Talibans takeover. It tracks the history of forced migration from Afghanistan, including in the two decades since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, and examines the factors that could be crucial in seeding a new refugee crisis.

Four Decades of Refugees

After Syrians and Venezuelans, Afghans already account for the third largest population of forced migrants worldwide. A portion of this migration has been going on for more than four decades, as the country has been engulfed by a series of wars and invasions including by the Soviet Union and, more recently, a U.S.-led coalition.

Historically, Pakistan and Iran have hosted most of these refugees; as of December 2020, Pakistan hosted 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees and Iran hosted 780,000. Many more Afghans live in those countries without registration; estimates suggest that 1 million unregistered Afghans live in Pakistan and more than 2 million Afghans live in Iran in irregular status.

The years between the Soviet Unions invasion in 1979 and the end of the Talibans previous regime in 2001 saw intense refugee movements to Pakistan, Iran, and the West. Initially, both Iran and Pakistan welcomed influxes of Afghan refugees, with financial support from the international community. However, in the 1990s both countries changed their policies and in 1997 stopped registering new Afghan refugees.

These two countries have had different policies in terms of refugees access to education, right to work, and freedom of movement. For example, Pakistan permits freedom of movement for registered Afghans, whereas Iran imposes restrictions. In Pakistan, approximately one-third of refugees lived in refugee villages as of 2018, while the vast majority of Afghan refugees in Iran lived in urban areas. However, both countries have been host to many cases of mistreatment and alleged violations of Afghan refugees human rights, including forced deportation, detention, and physical abuse.

Europe also has been a significant destination for Afghans, dating to the 1980s. Within Europe, Germany hosts the largest number of Afghan nationals (nearly 272,000 as of 2020, according to the German Federal Statistical Office). Turkey has been a typical host and transit country for irregular migration of Afghans to Europe. But since 2002, due to the engagement of the international community in Afghanistan and the 2015-16 refugee crisis, Afghans seeking protection in Europe have seen lower rates of approval for their asylum claimsat times significantly lower than rates for asylum seekers from Syria and other conflict zones.

Uneven Returns

Between 2002 and 2014, during which time Afghanistan saw large numbers of international forces on its soil, refugee movements not only slowed but millions of Afghans returned. Since 2002, nearly 5.3 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan under a program facilitated by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). However, this programs pace has slowed dramatically. More than 1.8 million refugees returned to the country through this program in 2002, but fewer than 2,150 returned in 2020 (see Figure 1 in the PDF).

Unregistered Afghans in Iran have been returning at a much greater rate. In 2020, more than 859,000 Afghans with irregular status in Iran returned to Afghanistan, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM)more than ever before. Many of these migrants were deported or forcibly returned by Iranian authorities. In May 2020, the harsh conditions for Iran-bound Afghans attracted international news when 45 migrant workers reportedly drowned in the Harirud River after being forced into the water at gunpoint by Iranian border guards.

Some Afghans have also been forcibly returned from Pakistan, their treatment usually depending on Pakistans political relations with Afghanistan at the time. For example, due to the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan, nearly 365,000 refugees and more than 200,000 irregular migrants were forced to return to Afghanistan in just the second half of 2016, in what Human Rights Watch called the worlds largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent times.

Outside the region, the European Union and Afghanistan signed a Joint Way Forward (JWF) agreement in 2016, with the aim to return failed Afghan asylum seekers. This April, the JWF was replaced with Joint Declaration on Migration Cooperation (JDMC). Nearly 30,000 Afghan citizens were returned from the 27 EU Member States between 2016 and 2020, according to EU statistics. Elsewhere, Turkey has also deported irregular Afghans, including some 6,000 people deported to Afghanistan in 2020.

Returned Afghans often face unemployment and precarious socioeconomic conditions in their native country. This situation has become more extreme in recent weeks, with the economy slowing down drastically following the Talibans resurgence. COVID-19 also remains a perilous issue, having a negative impact on the livelihoods of all Afghans, especially returnees. The pandemic significantly limited returnees access to work, and they have also faced barriers accessing health-care facilities, financial sources, and information on where to obtain basic services.

A New Crisis?

Fears of a new refugee crisis have mounted since February 2020, when the United States signed a peace agreement with the Taliban and pledged to withdraw troops in 2021. President Joe Biden confirmed the U.S. commitment to withdraw troops by September, and the final U.S. forces left the country at the end of August. Ahead of their departure, the Taliban laid claim to large swaths of Afghanistan and, on August 15, took over the capital of Kabul, likely presaging new limitations on civil liberties and a rollback of the countrys embryonic democracy.

In coming months, a few key factors may determine the countrys future and whether many civilians will flee their homes. One will be the nature of the Talibans leadership, and whether it respects human rights or follows a strict interpretation of Sharia law. New leaders also face the task of bringing political and economic stability to their country and preventing the growth of the Islamic State.

A second issue is whether the withdrawal of international troops leads the international community to abandon Afghanistan as a whole and for the long term. Financial aid and other humanitarian assistance could be more crucial than ever in coming months and years. The United States and NATO had previously pledged continuing support to Afghanistan post-withdrawal, but Western powers and multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have frozen the countrys access to money in recent weeks. The Talibans lip service to rights for women and girls and slow formation of a new government may indicate leaders hopes to gain international recognition and avoid diplomatic and financial isolation. Doing so might make possible the flow of international assistance. The European Union, for instance, has said that the billions of dollars it has pledged in development aid depend on conditions such as the Talibans respect for human rights.

Another outstanding question is whether there will be a resumption of full-scale civil war, which would be unlikely to benefit any single group or the country as a whole. The emergence of a group of resistance fighters based in Panjshir province, called the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, is sure to add a new chapter to the situation, as will tensions with a regional affiliate of the Islamic State that was behind the August attack outside Hamid Karzai International Airport, which killed more than 180 people. Renewed war would imperil the formation of a new Taliban government and could make further remote the opportunity for international organizations to implement developmental projects and provide support for good governance.

If large-scale refugee flows do occur, they would be most likely to affect Pakistan and Iran in the short term, followed by central Asian countries, some of which have previously bristled at hosting Afghan refugees. Under a worst-case scenario, UNHCR estimated that up to 515,000 refugees could cross into these neighboring countries by the end of the year, although the agency had not observed large numbers of border crossings as of late August, perhaps partly due to frequent border closures. In many of these neighboring countries, anxieties about Afghanistans uncertain situation have been exacerbated by the economic fallout due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, for Iran, from ongoing crippling U.S. economic sanctions. Iran and Pakistan also are dealing with significant water scarcity, which may affect their attitudes towards regional stability.

High Obstacles to Reach Europe

At present, the prospects appear slim that a major refugee crisis will spread significantly beyond the region and ultimately to Europe, at least in the near term. One barrier is the high cost that smugglers charge asylum seekers, which averaged U.S. $7,500 in 2015, Afghanistans Ministry of Refugees and Repatriations said at the time. Given the abysmal poverty in Afghanistan, where more than one-third of the population lives below the international poverty line of U.S. $1.90 per day, this cost is far beyond the capacity of most Afghans. Individuals financial situations have been even more constrained since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Additionally, many Afghans are already aware of the dangers of irregular migration and strict border-control measures that have been imposed by several European countries since the 2015-16 period. In 2016, the European Union and Turkey agreed on a deal to prevent irregular migration from Turkey to Greece, involving the return of irregular migrants reaching the Greek islands. The EU-Turkey deal contributed to decreasing numbers of irregular migrants arriving in Europe: there were nearly 862,000 irregular arrivals in Greece in 2015, but fewer than 16,000 in 2020.

Some of these border measures have been bolstered in recent weeks: Turkey, which is already hosting more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees and is a main transit hub for Europe-bound Afghan asylum seekers and other migrants, has started to reinforce its border with Iran with a three-meter high wall, ditches, and barbed wire. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan has said his country will not be "Europe's refugee warehouse. Greece, meanwhile, has completed a 25-mile (40-kilometer) fence barrier along its border with Turkey. These border measures show that the path to Europe will be difficult for Afghans.

Tough Choices Ahead

Serious talks for a political settlement between the Taliban and resistance forces could avoid a situation in which large numbers of civilians feel the need to flee the country for their own safety. Partners such as the European Union and the United States could contribute to this end by providing economic and humanitarian support to Afghan organizations operating on the ground. The U.S. Treasury Department recently took a step in this direction by allowing humanitarian organizations to provide aid in the country, despite antiterrorism sanctions against the Taliban.

The Talibans ability to gain recognition as a government could hinge on a political settlement with resistance fighters, which might grant it a degree of trust and legitimacy both within and outside the country. Decades of war have shown that peace is not easily won. Both the Taliban and resistance leaders have called for negotiations and an inclusive government; if achieved, this might prove the surest way of bringing peace to the country and allow Afghans to feel safe in their communities.

Finally, Taliban leaders have a crucial role to play in carrying out the duties of governing. Tolerance for human rights, including rights for women and girls, will win it respect internationally and from the Afghan people. Furthermore, corruption has been a serious issue which eroded the previous governments legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Good governance and effective delivery of basic services could therefore instil trust in the new government and reinforce its mandate. This includes the governments attention to former refugees and other returned migrants, whose reintegration will be critical for Afghanistans future. Diplomatic and other efforts that support reforms along these lines would pay dividends.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect their affiliated institutions.

CONTACTSource@MigrationPolicy.org

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Original post:

Will the Taliban's takeover lead to a new refugee crisis from Afghanistan? - Afghanistan - ReliefWeb

SUNLAND PARK, NM The plastic rosary was already falling apart, its white beads spilling onto the wet ground when the young woman was picked up by Border Patrol agents in predawn darkness.

The migrant from Guatemala, who had just run across patches of scrubland between Mexico and the US, refused to give her name. She was handed a plastic bag to stow her few belongings hoop earrings, a creased card with an image of the Virgin Mary. She was told to remove the laces from her mud-caked sneakers. Laces and belts can be used as weapons, or to commit suicide, and Border Patrol agents demand they be removed as soon as people are caught.

Asked if she had traveled by herself to the border, the slight young woman who appeared to be in her 20s replied boldly: I am not alone. God is with me.

But she was actually among dozens of migrants apprehended that morning as The Post accompanied a group of Border Patrol agents during a raid Wednesday along the New Mexico and Texas lines near El Paso. The area is one of the busiest crossing points for migrants along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border with Mexico. Migrants in the area cross a mountain range, desert and scrubland to reach the US.

Since the Biden administration eased restrictions at the border earlier this year, federal agents have seen a surge of illegal immigrants attempting to cross, with dramatic increases in single adults, unaccompanied children and members of transnational criminal organizations.

Shortly after President Biden took office in 2021, he rolled back strict immigration policies instituted by his predecessor, including a remain in Mexico mandate which resulted in thousands of non-Mexican migrants waiting in Mexico for immigration hearings in the US. Thousands of migrants poured across the border in the early days of the Biden administration, spurred by promises made by smugglers that they would be more welcome under the new regime, immigration experts said.

In March Biden put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the border crisis, and delivered the belated message: Dont come over. After a brief visit to Guatemala to discuss root causes and an even shorter stop at the borderin June, Harris has barely talked about it and nothing has changed. Crossings are still as high as ever.

Its the crisis that Biden is either ignoring or doesnt care that its happening.Agents working in the El Paso Sector have so far detained 155,892 people in fiscal year 2021, which ends on Sept. 30 almost triple the 54,396 in all of FY 2020.

Nearly 80 percent of those making the crossing are single adults, a significant change in the demographics over the last few years that saw more families crossing the border and giving themselves up to Border Patrol agents. In the past, many claimed they were fleeing gang violence in Central America and seeking asylum protection in the US.

Now most migrants are coming to flee COVID and dire economic conditions in their own country, authorities said. They try to evade capture, sometimes attacking the agents who try to apprehend them, Border Patrol agents told The Post. In the past year, attacks against agents have nearly doubled from 23 last fiscal year to to 40 so far this year in the El Paso Sector alone.

Because it is mostly single adults, we are dealing with more criminal activity, said Gloria Chavez, chief patrol agent of the El Paso Sector, which encompasses 125,000 square miles and employs 2,400 agents. We have a mixture of bad actors with the regular migrants.

In the past year, Chavezs agents have seen an increase in stash houses where smugglers and drug traffickers hold kidnapped migrants and often try to extort their families in the US for cash to release them. Agents have busted 270 stash houses this year and also seized 5,936 pounds of marijuana, 683 pounds of methamphetamine, and 336 pounds of cocaine, she said. Forty-four pounds of deadly fentanyl and 37 pounds of heroin were also seized, she said.

Among the scores of migrants entering the country are terrorists who are linked to Mexican drug cartels, agents said. A group of Republican lawmakers who visited the El Paso Sector in March told reporters that some people caught crossing the border were on a US terrorism watch list. Earlier this year, the Customs and Border Protection Agency confirmed to Congress that four people were detained whose names matched those on the FBIs Terrorist Screening database, according to a report. The suspected terrorists three Yemenis and a Serbian national were caught in the El Paso region. Names were not released.

The surge in crossings also includes a spike in unaccompanied children. So far this fiscal year, there have been 18,765 unaccompanied minors compared to 4,832 last year in the El Paso Sector. If the children are Mexican, they are immediately handed over to the Mexican authorities. Minors 17 and under from other countries cannot be immediately deported and are placed in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services Refugee Resettlement and housed in temporary federal shelters until case workers can determine if they have family in the US. About 2,000 children are being temporarily housed at Fort Bliss in El Paso.

HHS conducts an investigation and reaches out to family members or finds a foster family, as in the case of the toddler sisters from Ecuador who were caught on video being dropped over a stretch of border fence in the El Paso Sector in March. The children, aged 3 and 5, were reunited with their parents in New York City in April.

El Paso agents say they are still haunted by the images on an infrared video of the little girls being dropped over the wall in the dark by human traffickers.

There are railroad tracks, rattlesnakes, coyotes and even mountain lions around here, said Joel Freeland, a Border Patrol agent and father of two young girls. They just abandoned those two little girls, and didnt care if they survived.

Ecuadorians who must travel a month by foot and bus over 3,000 miles to reach the US border for the first time in memory now outnumber Mexicans as the most prolific illegalmigrants at the southern frontier, agents said.

Increasingly, agents find themselves involved in rescue work as human smugglers abandon their charges at the border, often lying to them about the distance they have to travel to cross into America. They tell them that they are at the border and have a few paces to walk, meanwhile its like 100 degrees and the border is a lot farther than they have been told, Freeland told The Post.

There have been 31 deaths in fiscal 2021 compared to 10 in 2020 in the El Paso Sector, and Border Patrol agents have been involved in 615 rescues of migrants in distress from extreme heat in the summer and drownings as increased rainfall has swelled the levels of the Rio Grande and nearby canals. Some have also suffered broken bones from hoisting themselves over a border fence that rises between 14 and 30 feet in places, agents said.

You are in danger of dying if you do not summon help, reads a rescue beacon in Spanish and English, one of several in the El Paso sector where migrants can press a button to summon help from agents on patrol.

Migrants caught on the border are returned to Mexico often on the same day they are caught under Title 42, a provision that allows authorities to expel them if they are suspected of carrying a communicable disease. The program began in March 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic, and has been extended under the current administration.

Many of the migrants interviewed by The Post knew that they would be expelled from the country as soon as the Border Patrol recorded their information. The Post witnessed dozens of migrants walking through metal cages on their way to the Paso del Norte International Bridge that connects El Paso to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.

Leonardo Velasquez Centeno, 25, had already tried to cross the border several times and knew what fate awaited him.

Under a light drizzle just before dawn on a rubbish-strewn stretch of road, he told The Post he was escaping poverty in Honduras. Even though he had been robbed of most of his $800 cash by Mexican authorities in the southern state of Chiapas, he was determined not to return to a grim future in Honduras.

Whatever they do, I will come back, and I wont stop trying until I get in, he said.

See more here:

The Post goes on patrol with feds to witness Biden's border crisis first hand - New York Post

Children running to take cover as the heavy dust and the wind pierce through the Nawabad Farabi-ha IDP camp. UNHCR/Edris Lutfi

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration ofThe European Stingwith theWorld Economic Forum.

Author: Khalid Koser, Executive Director, Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF) & Keire Murphy, Junior Associate, Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF)

The evacuation of foreign citizens and Afghan allies from Kabul has been done under a tight deadline and the risk of terrorist attacks. Since August 14, 2021, about 120,000 people have been evacuated by countries around the world.

But thousands remain, mostly local Afghan staff, journalists, and human right activists.

The situation still poses serious challenges. The foreign nationals returning to their countries will have to deal with the trauma that surrounded the evacuations, those who could not get out in time need alternative exit plans, and Afghans who are being hosted in countries like Qatar will have to be permanently resettled.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to allow the relative success of the evacuation to distract attention from the far greater demands of displaced and mobile Afghans.

One group is internally displaced persons (IDPs). These are people displaced within their own country. It is estimated that about 250,000 Afghans have fled their homes since the beginning of May, bringing the total number of IDPs in the country to about 3.5 million the third-highest worldwide.

In addition to seeking commitments that the new Afghan leaders will not provide haven to international terrorists, the international community will need to work with the Taliban to manage the IDP crisis.

IDPs represent the most pressing humanitarian emergency in Afghanistan today and meaningful solutions to address the situation should be high on the agenda. This is important because large numbers of IDPs can undermine security, economic growth, and social cohesion.

If the initial promises of the Taliban to respect womens rights and allow political pluralism and dissent are to be believed, we are unlikely to witness a mass exodus of Afghan refugees.

This may also be the case because many Afghans who would be at particular risk of persecution by the Taliban especially the Hazara minority had already fled in the 1990s, during the Talibans previous regime.

This doesnt mean that the Hazara who are still in Afghanistan are not at risk. In fact, Amnesty International recently released a report detailing the Talibans brutal massacre of Hazara men in July 2021.

More prosaically, when it comes to displaced Afghans, Afghanistans neighbours may not allow them in.

But at the same time, many of Afghanistans borders are difficult to police. This means that movement of refugees is possible. Indeed, millions of those who fled the Taliban in the 1990s returned to Afghanistan during the years that US troops were on the ground. In 2020, more than 800,000 returned from Iran alone. These populations are now at risk of being displaced again, in particular considering recent reports of renewed persecution, including executions, of Hazara in areas controlled by the Taliban.

Preparations for a new wave of refugees have already begun. The US has set aside $500 million for urgent refugee needs, and nearly 100 countries have pledged to accept refugees.

These are positive developments, but does not mean that the wave of anti-migrant sentiment has reversed.

For example, Turkey has stepped up construction of a border wall with Iran to keep Afghans out; and the European Union (EU) and many of its member states want to avoid a repeat of the 2015 migrant crisis where more than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe, leaving countries struggling to cope with the influx, and creating division in the EU over how best to deal with resettling people.

It becomes clear, therefore, that greater political pressure needs to be brought to bear on the Taliban to allow refugees to cross borders, on neighbouring countries to admit them, and on other countries to host them. The solutions to the current crisis must be of a more permanent nature if the dignity and rights of fleeing Afghans are to be protected.

Neighbouring Iran and Pakistan have adopted a hard line against hosting Afghan refugees because they already host 3.5 million and 1.5 million Afghans respectively. Many of the refugees were fleeing the Soviet invasion of 1979 and then the first Taliban regime in the 1990s.

Because durable solutions like integration, resettlement, and repatriation have not been deployed effectively, some of them have been hosted as refugees in both Iran and Pakistan for over 40 years. With new refugees arriving, there is need to rethink approaches to displaced populations.

The favoured solution for refugees is repatriation. Before the current crisis, Iran, Pakistan, and the EU wanted Afghan refugees to be repatriated to Afghanistan. But considering the situation at hand, it is now important to secure a guarantee that Afghan refugees will not be forcibly returned to their country. The international community must also accept that voluntary repatriation is unlikely to occur at any scale for the foreseeable future.

With more than 132 million people worldwide requiring humanitarian assistance, humanitarian responses must become more efficient and effective at delivering aid to those who need it most.

Cash assistance has been recognized as a faster and more effective form of humanitarian aid compared to in-kind assistance such as food, clothing or education. Cash transfers give more control to their beneficiaries, allowing them to prioritize their own needs. They also have a proven track record of fostering entrepreneurialism and boosting local economies.

When the UN Secretary-General issued a call for innovative ways to improve cash-based humanitarian assistance, the World Economic Forum responded by bringing together 18 organizations to create guidelines for public-private cooperation on humanitarian cash transfers.

The guidelines are outlined in the Principles on Public-Private Cooperation in Humanitarian Payments and show how the public and private sectors can work together to deliver digital cash payments quickly and securely to crisis-affected populations. Since its publication in 2016, the report has served as a valuable resource for organizations, humanitarian agencies and government leaders seeking to increase the effectiveness of humanitarian aid and advance financial inclusion.

Learn more about this project and find out how you can join the Forum to get involved in initiatives that are helping millions of lives every day.

An alternative is to resettle refugees permanently in richer countries. Canada has pledged to resettle 20,000 new Afghan refugees, while Australia will resettle 3,000. But these are spots in their existing resettlement quotas meaning that Afghans will take the place of refugees from other countries. The UK plans to resettle up to 20,000 Afghans in the long term, including those it has already evacuated. While all this is laudable, resettlement numbers are likely to remain low.

Another solution is integration, that is, providing a pathway to citizenship for refugees. Iran and Pakistan have historically resisted this option and are likely to continue to do so. But they should be urged, at the very least, to grant specific rights to refugees, including the right to work. This would reduce the impact of displacement on host communities and governments.

The Afghans who are in the most precarious position are asylum seekers who have not yet been granted refugee status, rejected asylum seekers who have been denied refugee status, and undocumented migrants who are not just in neighbouring countries, but also in Turkey and Europe.

As recently as August 2021, six European countries signed a letter encouraging fleeing Afghans to return home, despite the Taliban gaining ground and pleas from the Afghan government to halt returns because of growing insecurity.

Some of the countries have since backed down, but there is still political pressure for the return of Afghan asylum seekers to their country. This is partly due to the fact that Afghanistan is one of the top three countries of origin for asylum seekers in Europe and has been for the past few years.

There are an estimated 150,000 Afghan Americans, 85,000 Afghan Canadians, and 50,000 Afghan Australians who need to exert pressure on their governments to protect IDPs and refugees, respect international law, and unlock durable solutions.

If the international community is as serious about the wider consequences of recent developments in Afghanistan as it has been about evacuating citizens and allies, then the hard work really begins now.

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What the world can do to solve the Afghan refugee crisis - The European Sting

The situation in Afghanistan is a growing asylum and refugee crisis that is testing not only the international refugee resettlement system but each Americans humanity and ability to take action in the face of injustice and a divided nation. A system of pillage and proxy wars that we partly created was behind horrific scenes of thousands of panicked Afghans gathered at the Kabul airport, handing out their babies or clinging to U.S. Air Force planes. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than a half-million Afghans have been internally displaced since the beginning of 2021. The United Nations is urging states to respect the core principle of the 1951 Refugee Convention non-refoulment where refugees should not be returned to places where they would be at risk.

We all can and must refuse the dehumanization of the Afghan refugees and internally displaced persons we left behind and ask for tangible, immediate actions by our government and citizens. The ask is not to humanize Afghan refugees when they arrive at our clinics and neighborhoods since we can only humanize those who are not fully human. Moreover, the reduction of Afghan people to victims and refugees to be saved by white saviors is dangerous and fundamentally unfair. The ask is to pause during these trying times and ask ourselves how it is that some of us have failed to see the already present full humanity of those seeking refuge and to realize our responsibility towards them.

In terms of immediate action, there is a shortage of medical care in Afghanistan which, according to the World Health Organization, includes reproductive and child health. We must advocate for aid entry into the country while the situation unfolds. Also, more direct aid is needed for organizations working in Afghanistan. Women for Afghan Women is providing safe shelter, resources, and aid to the thousands of women, children, families, and staff and the International Medical Corps is working to secure emergency relief funds. The Afghan American Foundation has compiled a list of verified organizations that are directly working with Afghans.

Most importantly, although Americas military presence ended on Aug. 31, the U.S. has processed only 8,000 Special Immigrant Visas this past week from Afghanistan, whose population size is almost 39 million. It is our duty to contact our local government officials and advocate for the expansion of the SIV program. As we increase the number of Afghan refugees allowed and remove quotas, we must also advocate for the reinstatement of the Temporary Protected Status, a governmental status for select countries in crisis that allows incomers to live and work in the U.S. As American cities receive SIV refugees and many more initiate resettlement mechanisms, local resettlement agencies will be in dire need of volunteer support.

At Harvard, we must collaborate with local partners to welcome and assist refugees throughout their transition. In the long term, there is an urgent need to produce more research focusing on understanding and bettering the health of refugees. Recent evidence is showing that the health of refugees and their offspring deteriorates over time after they are resettled in the U.S. This is contrary to what is seen in other immigrants who have lower mortality and morbidity rates compared to those in the hosting country, a phenomenon known as the healthy migrant effect. We still do not understand well why this happens and how to reduce health disparities among refugees. We must leverage our research partnerships and scholarship with communities directly impacted by this crisis and demand that philanthropists, foundations, and donors in the U.S. support refugee-health research, which we normally struggle to fund. We, at Harvard, are well-positioned to lead such research and partner with other research institutions in regions where refugees are resettled.

As healthcare professionals of Middle Eastern heritage, we understand the intergenerational trauma related to being a refugee. We understand that achieving health equity for refugees requires solidarity and multi-sectoral action. As healthcare and public health providers, we must expand our interpreter capacities, work with local resettlement agencies on health screenings and vaccinations for new incoming refugees, and refresh our trauma-informed care approaches. The dialogue about forced migration and its impact on the mental and physical health of future generations of refugees is extremely timely and important and should take place at our clinics, institutions, and homes.

At this time, it is easy to blame politicians for the Afghan disaster and let this pass by as another political failure. But we challenge what we can do, as Americans, and academics more precisely, to aid Afghans and welcome refugees. From donating to advocacy to research, there is much we can do. Our collective consciousness depends on it.

Sara A. Al-Zubi is a third year student at Harvard Medical School and Tala Al-Rousan is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at the University of California San Diego and a Bernard Lown Fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Excerpt from:

Sympathy is Not Enough When it Comes to the Afghanistan Disaster, Change and Action are Needed | Opinion - Harvard Crimson

Clive Owen in Alfonso Cuarn's 2006 film, Children of Men.

You can't read about Alfonso Cuarn's 2006 dystopian film Children of Men now without encountering the word prescient. Most people would also call it bleak.

But when I first saw it in a movie theater in 2006, I spent the entirety of the film maintaining an excruciating awareness of my future husband's knee in relation to mine. It was our first date, and the electric charge between our knees, our hands, our elbows, distracted me almost entirely from the film's unrelenting violence.

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Children of Men follows Theo (Clive Owen), a jaded bureaucrat living in 2027 London after an unexplained event has caused worldwide infertility. The world has descended into chaos: Economies have collapsed, wars have broken out, terrorist bombings are almost unremarkable. The result is an unprecedented migrant crisis, with mass deportations and refugee camps that share a visual language with Holocaust films.

Theo is conscripted by his ex-wife Julian (played by Julianne Moore), a member of a militant immigrant rights group, to help transport a migrant woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), to safety. He soon finds out why: Kee is miraculously pregnant.

"Shantih, shantih, shantih," Theo's friend Jasper (Michael Caine) says at the discovery of Kee's pregnancy. This is also famously the last line of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," a mantra of peace amid unfathomable despair.

I had remembered Children of Men as a gritty, speculative blockbuster with better-than-strictly necessary cinematography (including the infamous blood-spattered camera lens at the film's climactic battle scene), in the same vein as The Day After Tomorrow or Deep Impact. I remembered the shaky-cam, documentary-style shots. I remembered the whimsical, John Lennon-inspired performance by Caine, and the dissonant lullaby of classical music in the soundtrack. I remembered that the revelation of Kee's pregnancy happened in a barn, a nod to there being no room at the inn.

I didn't remember how many of the main characters would be killed, or how early in the film. I didn't remember the woman carrying her own severed arm out of a bombed-out building, or the graffiti that read "Last one to die, please turn out the light," or the piles of refugees' bodies arranged in tidy rows. I didn't remember "the flu pandemic of 2008," which killed Theo and Julian's baby two decades before the events of the film.

I finished my 2021 rewatch with the speechless slow-blink of a person who has just been utterly destroyed by a work of art. My reaction 15 years later was neither articulate nor insightful: That was bleak! (And prescient.)

The final scene, imbued with unsettling ambiguity, is a bit of a litmus test for the viewer's level of pessimism. And it seems the pH level of my mental outlook has shifted quite a bit in 15 years.

In Children of Men's climactic scene, blood spatters on the camera lens to lend the film a cinma vrit feel.

Perhaps pessimists will see bleakness. And maybe optimists will only remember that their date's soft drink was abandoned half-full, because he eventually reached over and took your hand in his. Or, maybe 2006 saw escapist sci-fi, while 2021 sees the very things we're trying to escape. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, or prescience compounds bleakness, or I was just an apolitical, privileged, lovesick teenager back then.

Or maybe a modern-day Nativity story resonates differently after your own experience of motherhood.

It's been 15 years since that first date, nine years since our wedding, six years since the European migrant crisis, five years since the Brexit referendum, three years since "kids in cages." It's been a year and a half since I gave birth to my first child. He got his name the same day the novel coronavirus disease became COVID-19. He is a pandemic baby, a member of Generation C, a child of quarantine, a miracle.

In the real world, the geopolitical boogeyman is not infertility, but rather the lack of governmental incentives for families, and having a baby is both quotidian and miraculous, natural and preternatural. Cultures all over the world prescribe a period of postpartum confinement for new mothers -- sometimes certain foods or hygiene activities are forbidden while the body heals -- and these postpartum traditions have an air of mysticism, like they're rooted in medicine but steeped in a spiritual reverence for human life. In Latin America, for instance, this period is called la cuarentena, the quarantine.

The quarantine of COVID-19 and that of postpartum confinement share an etymological root, a biblically inspired 40-day period of isolation. My maternity leave lasted nine weeks, not 40 days, and in my son's first few weeks of life, when we could still count the number of US deaths on one hand, I guiltily counted down to the end of my isolation, to my return to work, a return to normalcy. My time off wasn't a culturally dictated confinement period, but nevertheless I felt confined.

Your sense of time warps in maternity leave, but as in quarantine, your sense of space warps even more. The swift spread of COVID-19 around the globe has served as a stark visual of our connectedness, the meaninglessness of borders and physical distance. It strikes me that people cling tightest to borders when their insignificance is most apparent. As far as the United States' COVID-19 response, then-President Donald Trump seemed most proud of his January 2020 travel restrictions on China, but still the virus proliferated.

My own world contracted in tandem with the lockdown, as I shut out society to make room for my son's boundless needs. He became a way for me to turn inward when the doomscrolling took its toll.

The shock of parenthood was like slamming into a brick wall and waking days later with no feeling in your legs, and simultaneous disbelief you ever required legs in the first place. That, plus inexplicable joy at your newfound immobility. If this analogy doesn't make sense, it's because I'm still catching up on my sleep.

Clare-Hope Ashitey as Kee in Children of Men.

I was told repeatedly in those days that I would soon settle into a "new normal," both by fellow parents who'd traversed the path ahead of me and by the pandemic think pieces that seemed to delight in jettisoning the old normal.

Babies are born, and viruses are borne, I thought, half asleep. Surely there's a metaphor there.

As I pushed my stroller through an empty park just a few weeks after giving birth, it was the empty, caution-taped playgrounds that made the pandemic real. I didn't know then why it was this specific lockdown-era visual that did it for me. Rewatching Children of Men this year, in all its prescience and bleakness, I finally understood.

"As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in," says Kee's midwife Miriam (Pam Ferris) from an abandoned school, watching Kee swing lazily on a rickety swingset out the window. "Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices."

In the film's final frame, the screen fades to black and the soundtrack gives way to the delighted playground squeals of children: The proverbial pitter-patter of little feet, the universal shorthand for purity of joy, hope, renewal.

Does that ending insinuate Kee's baby is some sort of messianic harbinger of relief, or is it the auditory equivalent of the white light we're supposed to see just before taking our last breath? A reinstatement of normalcy, or shadows of a world that once was? Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Michael Caine as Theo's friend Jasper in Children of Men.

Choosing to reproduce is a hopeful endeavor. A statement of belief in the future, an offering of the world to a new generation, and a new generation to the world. But amid increasingly bleak climate change reports, and especially during lockdown, I've questioned the decision. It can look more like burying your head in the sand than true hope.

I found it comforting, early in the pandemic, to read about the many plagues of antiquity, because history provides proof the human race will go on. And I found it comforting during the other real-life antecedents to Theo's dystopian future -- the election of Donald Trump, the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, the spike in gun violence -- to know mine wasn't the first generation to fear that maybe this was actually the beginning of the end. And nothing brings me relief like a veteran mom laughing about how horrible things used to be.

Prescience does compound bleakness. But if Children of Men offers an alternative reading of bleakness for optimists, there's also an alternative reading of prescience.

"This thing was not imagination," Cuarn told Vulture on the film's 10-year anniversary. He insists Children of Men is rooted in reality, a logical continuation of our current trajectory. In other words, the film does not have one foot in speculative fiction and the other in cautionary tale; it is reality through the lens of a metaphor. A parable.

The pandemic baby boom didn't pan out, and in fact there are now reports of a baby bust, with birth rates falling to a record low during our quarantine year. Every time I've heard pessimistic birth rate reports and predictions like these in the past 15 years, I've thought of Children of Men. And a small, almost absentminded seed of anxiety germinated in me ever since.

The problem with population decline is economic -- a dwindling labor force, diminished innovation. And the solution offered by economists is not always rooted in simple pronatalism. The solution is immigration.

In The Children of Men, the P.D. James novel on which the film's screenplay is based, the miracle baby is Julian's, not Kee's, and that discrepancy is an important one if we're trying to reframe the film's prescience. Kee is a young African refugee, not an English citizen, and her mere existence is both illegal and utterly crucial.

Clive Owen and Julianne Moore as Theo and Julian in Children of Men.

"Poor fugees -- after escaping the worst atrocities and finally making it to England, our government hunts them down like cockroaches," says Jasper, in one of the film's most prescient lines.

The decision to recast the Virgin Mary character as an immigrant seems important now because it makes me see the film less as a warning and more as a proposed solution -- a solution floated on a rising tide that lifts all boats. It is only when packaged with hope that prescience attempts to problem-solve.

When people find out about my and my husband's first date now, 15 years later, they are often surprised to hear we began under the auspices of one of the bleakest dystopian films in recent memory. But I remember leaving the theater with the giddy anticipation of things to come.

The most exciting part of a new relationship is not knowing what the future will bring, the delicious, heart-leaping uncertainty that hasn't yet been paved over with intimacy. Intimacy is boring; it kills the butterflies in your stomach. But intimacy has its own magic that's hard to describe: It is knowing what your partner is going to say, trusting he'll stay with you, not bothering to close the bathroom door while you floss your teeth.

In the same way, dispatches from parenthood fail to convey the transcendent joy of hearing your child's laughter or watching his face light up at the novelty of everyday life. And so, maybe hope is not an ignorance of warnings, but a faith in solutions -- capitulating to a future whose promises are there, just not quite legible.

It's been 9 years since the London Olympics on Theo's threadbare sweatshirt, 12 years since the youngest child in his world was born, 13 years since the fictional flu pandemic that took his son, 15 years since the film's theatrical release, 20 years since the trauma of 9/11 kindled Cuarn's creative inspiration for the project, 99 years since the "new normal" following the utter decimation of World War I that inspired T.S. Eliot's Shantih, shantih, shantih. There are 6 years until the events of the film unfold.

Why the preoccupation with time? Children of Men exists strangely in the past, present and future all at once, a relic of the mid-aughts with alarming 2021 prescience and a 2027 setting. Maybe we can all breathe a sigh of relief when we reach 2028 and babies still exist. But Cuarn is no fortune teller, and James'novel is set in, of all years, 2021.

Continue reading here:

Children of Men turns 15, and it destroys me in a whole new way today - CNET

WASHINGTON, D.C. Today, Senator Rick Scott released the below statement followingreportsthat theBidenadministration has lost contact with over one-third of migrant children released from its custody, leaving thousands of migrant children unaccounted for in the United States. For months, Senator Scott has called for President Biden and Vice President Harris to do their jobs, secure our border and address the national security and humanitarian crisis caused by their failed policies of amnesty and open borders.

In 2018, then-Senator Kamala Harris called reports of 1,500 migrant children not reporting to the administration extremely troubling. Now, with nearly 4,500 migrant children missing, its clear thatunder her tenure as Border Czar theBiden-Harris administrationis responsible for losing contact with triple the amount she criticized just a few years prior.

Senator Rick Scott said, Joe Biden continues to show that he is woefully incapable of leading our nation and making decisions in the best interests of American families. In 2018, Bidens Border Czar Kamala Harris repeatedly criticized President Trumps handling of the southern border. Now, under her leadership, the number of migrant children the administration has lost contact with has TRIPLED. The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress dont care about the border or protecting Americanstheyre playing games with the safety of our families. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris failure to uphold the law and insistence on implementing failed policies of amnesty and open borders arent workingits created the biggest border crisis weve seen in two decades. This administration is letting savage drug cartels control our border, carelessly allowing millions of illegal immigrants into our country and a flood of drugs that are killing Americans every day. And now, their dangerous policies are putting thousands of migrant children at risk. We must secure our border NOW and account for every missing child handled by this administration. We cant allow our country to continue heading down this path of destruction.

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Sen. Rick Scott: Biden's Border Crisis Shows the Administration is Incapable of... - Senator Rick Scott