Unrest in the Middle East and Africa has forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee their homelands in search of a peaceful existence. As the migration correspondent for The Guardian, Patrick Kingsley has traced their paths and documented their stories of survival. He joins us to talk about why the rest of the world can’t afford to ignore this humanitarian emergency, which he writes about in “The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First-Century Refugee Crisis” (Liveright).
Patrick Kingsley on …
… how the lack of resettlement programs contribute to the crisis:
“I think that the failure of countries in Europe, countries in North America to provide legal roots to a significant number of, for example, Syrians, has contributed to the very high level of people trying to move to the West via irregular means. If we want to bring down the amount of irregular migration that has to be achieved by increasing the number of regular routes, the number of legal routes to safety. It’s not just a choice between migration and no migration. The choice is between irregular migration and regular migration, between managed migration and unmanaged migration.”
