“By the grace of ... the right kind of passport”

Amongst the many reasons I support the work of, and volunteer with, GDWG and Refugee Tales, one is very personal and routed in my own family’s history. A history, however, shared with millions of others, not in some so-called dark corner of the world but right across the heart of Europe, and no more than a generation or two ago.

My grandmother was born in the early 1900s in what was then still part of Austria, less than 60 miles from Vienna. 20th century politics and two world wars re-drew the borders, twice, and twice in her lifetime she and her family found themselves stateless, homeless: Refugees.

Why should this matter, still? It matters, more than ever, because once again the official language surrounding migration, immigration, the search for asylum and refuge by so many, is hostile and this hostility permeates the public conscientiousness: too many people speak about refugees and asylum seekers as if they were “dangerous”, a “threat” or “at fault” (in some undefined way). Because “normal people”, those of us living in supposedly stable, civilized countries could never find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong passport – or indeed no passport at all ...

I was recently given a poignant poetry collection by Michael Rosen entitled “On The Move – Poems About Migration”, and one of poems struck a particular chord. It is called “The Migrants in Me” and expresses much of the above; it concludes with

 ... They remind me of relatives,
Who at one moment,
Were as safe as houses,
And the next,
Had no houses to be safe in.

- by Eva T.