How long have immigrants been labelled 'illegal'? The slogan 'no one is illegal' has been taken up by pro-migrant groups, especially those campaigning on behalf of asylum seekers. It is used to highlight the common humanity of those placed beyond the law with regard to their national status.
The continuing refugee crisis, involving movements of people from countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria and Iran, is global and acute in nature and is once more making headlines and trending on social media, particularly in response to President Trump’s executive action on immigration and refugees that was issued on 27 January 2017 (Holocaust Memorial Day, no less).
In early March 1851, a ship docked at the harbor in Liverpool laden with Polish refugees. These men, for they were mostly men, had been soldiers in the failed Hungarian Revolution. Chased from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they made their way west in search of asylum.
Hannah Arendt was, in her own words, an ‘illegal immigrant’. She had never been under any illusions about the capacities of the Nazi regime, but when she was caught doing clandestine work for a Zionist organisation in 1933, she knew she had no to choice but to leave.
As 2016 drew to a bloody close in Syria and the government took back control over eastern Aleppo, over 4.8m Syrian refugees continued to seek safety and a means of living a dignified life across the Middle East.
Placeless Peoples: A Journal of Genocide Research Workshop at The Wiener Library, 29 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5 DP, 3rd February 2017.
ollowing Peter Gatrell's call to pay attention to the ways refugees present their own history, here forced migration specialist, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh discusses the importance of interconnecting refugee histories in Baddawi camp, Lebanon, home to Palestinian refugees since the 1950s and now also host to Syrian refugees.
In today’s world, 24 people a minute are displaced. One in every 113 people is either an asylum-seeker, internally-displaced or a refugee. There are about 65 million refugees in the world, about the same as the population of the United Kingdom.
