Here come the refugees

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Less than a year ago Nigel Farage, said: “I’m not going to get dragged down the road of mass deportations or anything like that ... It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people. We simply can’t do it. It’s pointless even going there.”

Last week, however, Farage promised to deport 600,000 people during the first five years of a Reform government – and his party now comes first in the UK opinion polls, like Marine Le Pen’s equally hard-right, anti-immigrant National Rally does in France.

In the United States, ICE, the semi-private, masked-up army that will do the mass deportations, is already on the streets.

Iran announced early this year that it will expel all of the four million undocumented Afghans who live in the country, and 750,000 have already been sent back to Afghanistan. Iran now says that the rest must be gone by September 6, but that is impossible.

Meanwhile, another 1.4 million Afghans living in Pakistan are now being pushed back across that border into Afghanistan against their will.

A quarter of Sudan’s population has been displaced by the civil war, although the distances are so great that most of them are still somewhere in the country. The entire 2.2 million population of the Gaza Strip is being forcibly displaced every few months even within the tiny territory left to them.

None of this is entirely new: the periodic destruction or eviction of whole populations has been a recurrent feature of human history. What has changed is the sheer scale of the wars that drove the process – and the great post-1945 experiment was freezing all the borders in the hope of avoiding such apocalyptic wars in the future.

The numbers of refugees are definitely going up. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees says there are now 36.8 million refugees but there are another hundred million ‘displaced persons’ who have fled war or famine in their original homes and found shelter elsewhere.

It will only get worse. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees in a few months, and we are nearing the threshold where climate refugees also start moving.

In five or ten years it will be unsafe to work outdoors in these areas in the middle of the day in summer, and at the same time food production there will be falling fast. More than a billion people live in this area, and about half of them are farmers with no other way of earning a living.

No radical cutting of emissions in the next ten years can pre-empt this catastrophe. There may well be an unprecedented flow of refugees, followed by an unprecedented closure of borders.

GWYNNE DYER