THURSDAY 18th June 2009
When I was a teenager in the 1980s, we thought of asylum seekers as heroes. The hundreds who died while trying to cross the Berlin Wall, for example, were mourned. Those who made it into the West were greeted with joyful cheers and assistance, and often became celebrities. Likewise the pilots, performers and scientists who defected from the Soviet Union.
We also had heroes from previous generations – Sigmund Freud, who fled to London to escape the Nazis, or Anne Frank, who could not flee far enough. Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Joseph Conrad – all of them refugees ? I could go on and on. When horror and darkness descend, asylum seekers are the ones who get away. They are typically above average in terms of intellectual gifts, far-sightedness, motivation and resilience. These are the people you want to have on your side. It will be a monument to our hubris if we allow ourselves to start thinking of them as a burden.
And yet, there seems to have been a reversal in the public perception of refugees, since I was a teenager. So this is my fourth question for Refugee Week: why do you think that refugees have gone from being heroes to being villains in the public mind?
Tags: asylum seekers, Berlin Wall, Chris Cleave, refugees
Posted by Sara Ayech