[Introduction to the pamphlet Asylum! A Socialist View of the Refugee Crisis (2022).]
Our world is in chaos. Within countries and between countries, tens of millions of people in the Third World are on the move — they are fleeing war, oppression, gang violence, grinding poverty and escalating climate change. They are desperately looking for a way out.
And now the Russian invasion of Ukraine has produced a fresh crop of refugees. Being forced to leave your home and seek safety in another country will always be traumatic but for various reasons the Ukrainian refugees are generally being treated differently to those from the Third World.
As climate change bites deeper and deeper, the refugee crisis is only going to get radically worse. Whole regions of the world are on the cusp of becoming uninhabitable. This will result in very large-scale population displacement.