Up to 600 people drown off Pylos, Greece - only days after EU leaders agreed to further erode the right to asylum • Sea-Watch e.V.
sea-watch.org
Open letter by over 180 human rights organizations and initiatives together with Tima Kurdi, aunt of Alan Kurdi.   Today on World Refugee Day, we jointly demand full and independent investigations into the events, clear consequences for those responsible, an end to the systematic pushback practices at the European borders, and justice for the victims.…

We live in a world where 500+ refugees just drowned off the coast of
Greece while the global north took photos from afar and just let it happen.

We live in a world where even a democratic president in the US is shutting the doors to asylum seekers in the U.S. and not receiving any significant political blowback for it.

We aren’t refugees for having to find a new website.

I am NOT saying this to scold people or to talk condescendingly down from some high horse as if I am more righteous than others, I just don’t want this word to catch on because there is so much pain and suffering happening to refugees in this world.

Imagine you were a refugee and you joined the fediverse because you were curious about it and the first thing you saw was people calling themselves refugees for having to… make an account on a new website. Would you feel welcome or like this place was for you?

  • Eggyhead@kbin.social
    4·
    2 years ago

    Hey I teach English to refugees as a volunteer. The reality of being an irl refugee is so far detached from what’s going on here that I just can’t fathom the propensity for a refugee to navigate their way into federated forum instance and then suddenly feel unwelcome because people are using an English term in a way that doesn’t directly apply to them.

    I work with people who are trying to learn how to get a bus ticket, how to write their names on a piece of paper to get a job, wondering if they’ll ever be able to see their family or if there’s any point in trying to succeed in a new country where they’re barely getting fair access to the same rights as the rest of us. If you really want to do something meaningful for refugees, you could do a lot more than try to police how people talk in some random forum on the web.

    Of course it depends on the person, but ensuring that only they are refugees and nobody else is might actually be more harmful than you think. They need community, and seeing the label thrown around in a bit of light hearted fellowship could teach someone to not be disheartened by it.

    Nevertheless, just to humor you, I believe “migrant” would be a better word for most users here because many of us just moved away from reddit in search of a better alternative voluntarily. 3rd party app developers, and the users who were forced off of reddit because they needed those apps to interact with it, could be labeled as “displaced”. Mods & users who actually got proactively threatened or outright banned could appropriately be referred to as “refugees”.