Professor James Cavallaro weighs in on the inherent weaknesses of systems designed to accommodate international refugees for Zocalo Public Square.   

Last month, an image circulated online of a small, lifeless boy in shorts and a t-shirt, face down in the surf at a beach in Turkey. He was the 3-year-old son of Abdullah Kurdi, a Syrian barber who was attempting to flee his war-torn country with his family to Europe, and then to Canada. The rubber raft they were taking across the Aegean flipped, and Kurdi’s wife and two children drowned.

After their deaths, Kurdi’s sister, Tima Kurdi, who lives outside of Vancouver and helped finance the dangerous boat trip, spoke out about the need for safe, legal routes for refugees like her brother to escape oppression. “I think the whole world has to step in and help those Syrian people,” she told the New York Times. “They are human beings.”

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James Cavallaro

Existing frameworks don’t work

The intensity of this crisis is matched by the breadth of lessons it offers. First, we should understand this as the Syrian (and not European) refugee crisis: Nearly 4.2 million people have fled the violence in Syria, but “only” 10 percent have fled to Europe. The majority has sought refuge in neighboring countries. As with most crises involving migration, mass exodus within the developing world generally fails to prompt the same response from the West as crises that affect Europe directly. We can’t consider this crisis only to the extent that it affects Western Europe.

On a broader scale, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are 59.5 million people fleeing violence and persecution worldwide. Even if European states develop and implement robust and coordinated responses to the Syrian crisis (a big “if”), tens of millions of people fleeing violence and conflict will remain largely abandoned. The Syrian crisis has forced some attention on global refugee issues, but much more is needed.

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