Refugee Week 2025: ‘We Cannot Leave This Global Problem Up to Our Idiotic Policymakers’

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This article will not be about how closed borders don’t work. The verdict for that was in long ago, and (while suicidal policymakers keep pinning their political fates on ‘taking back control’) the annual displacement report confirms it.

I will go into the data (briefly), but I will not waste time arguing a historical truth so incontestable it should be step 0 in our response to the ‘refugee crisis’. Closed borders don’t work, cool. This piece will be about what does.

To jump forward a few steps: the answer lies with us, the people, exacting the power that we are entitled to beyond marking x in a box every four years.

It lies in the small day-to-day community-building that all of us do far more than we engage in party politics. And you could easily miss it, judging by stories in our media, which do more to divide society than reflect it.

First up, I want to flag some key points from the latest data on the global displacement crisis. I prefer ‘displacement crisis’ to ‘refugee crisis’ because displacement happens to refugees not because of them.

Displacement is a sad but constant reality of a planet, and species, that erupt and shake and get too hot and too cold. It affects over 120 million people and that number is growing. Governments have two choices: develop an infrastructure to deal with it, or stick their heads in the sand – and get their asses kicked.

The annual report, by UNHCR, makes one thing clear: governments are burying their heads in the sand. The first number I looked for when I opened the report was the number of people ‘resettled’. This is the number of refugees who, rather than taking “illegal” and dangerous  journeys to safe countries, are given lawful passage.

In 2024, 188,800 people were resettled, meaning if you’re in need of asylum, your odds of getting it legally are 0.1%.

Not every displaced person can be resettled, of course, and war-torn countries need repopulating. These are common rebuttals, but they go without saying because the vast majority of displaced people already stay in their home countries.

In 2024, 26 million people were forcibly displaced and 10 million others returned home, meaning some 16 million people became in need of international community protection (about half the population of Tokyo); 80% of them stayed in their home countries, while 3 million sought asylum abroad (about a third of the population of London).

This is not an overwhelming number. It is also unavoidable: some people must go abroad because they will die if they do not, and because if they don’t go, others cannot stay and live.

While foreign governments stick their heads in the sand, most refugees work their asses off to send money home, so that relatives squandering in displacement camps can survive.

Evidently, we cannot leave this global problem up to our idiotic policymakers. Nor do we have to.

This year’s Refugee Week theme is ‘Community as a Superpower’, and as protesters in Los Angeles put themselves between immigration officers and undocumented migrants, it feels poignant.

“Undocumented migrants are part of our community,” LA streamer Hasan Piker told me, “they’re part of the social fabric here, they’re what makes Los Angeles awesome”.

Community is powerful, and it need not always be a countermovement. “We cannot wait until something has gone wrong, until a law is passed that criminalises a certain group, to build a community of assimilation, tolerance, respectability and harmony,” said Amanda Kamada, a Ugandan refugee who appeared on Media Storm this week. “Solidarity should be there before, it has to be ingrained for it to work”.

Kamanda was the first ever transgender Miss Uganda, which ultimately forced her to flee. It was also what helped her thrive beyond borders. “The LGBT community in London helped me have belonging,” she said. “It’s the nightlife! In Soho, you see all these things that tell you ‘LGBT people are welcome here’, like rainbow crosswalks where you can walk and say, ‘yes’.”

Dorsa Yavarivafa, who also joined us, was 14 when she had to flee Iran, and with it, her national badminton team. As she sought sanctuary in Turkey (no luck), Germany (no luck), France (no luck), Belgium (no luck), and finally the UK, she faced police brutality, was handcuffed, thrown in jail, and held at gunpoint while still a child.

But one thing kept her going. “Sport was always what I was thinking about on the way. I was looking at my dream to go to the Olympics, and I never gave up.” Yavarivafa competed in Paris 2024 for the Refugee Olympic Team.

Community made her thrive.

If community is power, our power is boundless. Contrary to common belief, a strong community is an outward-looking one. An ‘Us’ identity that only survives in contrast to a ‘Them’ will inevitably fragment because humans are all so goddam similar.

The aggressive dying gasp of nationalism we’re now living through seeks to reverse the decline of an identity broken because it falsely insists ‘we’ are different to ‘foreigners’. Unlike during the nation-building era, most of us have now met foreigners and gathered they are not that different. Globalisation cannot be undone; a nationalist will never again be able to persuade people like me to care less about some fellow humans than others.

Inward-looking communities refuse to learn from the world around them. They are more inclined to bury their heads in the sand (however ingenious their means of digging) than to face problems head-on.

When it comes to displacement, nationalists (polite ones, anyway) will often tell you we should fix the “root cause of the problem over there” rather than “taking everyone in here”. Ignoring their tendency to speak in absolutes, this is not strictly untrue.

But you cannot address root problems if you do not understand them. And whether your solution is backing international aid, or far more consequentially, not backing war, the delivery of both aid and regime-change must be led by those who will live with its consequences.

The second delusion of the nationalist ‘root cause’ argument is that these causes are confined to over there. Do not delude yourself that Iran, Yemen, Palestine and Israel are experiencing ‘Middle Eastern wars’ when they are fuelled by proxy interests.

If you purchased gold in the last couple of years, there is a decent chance you have helped to fund the war in Sudan that is sending so many refugees to the UK—if you then turn around and say “we are not the world’s lifeboat,” you are quite frankly a f**king idiot.

Stick your heads in the sand by attempting to close borders in the face of growing displacement, and you will only see more chaos on the border. You will also see more chaos at home: immigration can be wildly successful or wildly unsuccessful, and shutting people in hotels and banning them from workplaces will undoubtedly achieve the latter.

Community-build at home so that refugees who arrive can thrive. Community-build across borders, languages and cultures so we can come up with solutions that pool wisdom and resources. The good news is, the solution lies with us.

Media Storm’s episode for Refugee Week 2025: Community as a Superpower, is out now.