The other day I took Miriam to school and we were a little early, so I did that nerdy mom thing where I made conversation with some of her classmates. There was one boy who said his name was Ali. I pounced on that and asked him where he was from. (Asking where people are from is a national pastime in the UAE, and apparently it's hard to shake.)
He looked at me weird and said he was from Finland. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said that his parents were Iraqi.
Then he told me that his oldest few siblings were born in Iraq. His next-oldest sister was born in Syria. He himself, a 10-year-old, was born in Finland, along with his younger brothers and sisters.
There on the playground, I did not ask him the reasons his parents left Iraq for Syria, then Syria for Finland. It's entirely possible that his father or mother is an engineer with long-time work ties to Finland and ten years ago, they decided to make the move here for career reasons. But the dates match up to a period of time when Iraqi refugees were streaming into Syria (the birthplace of his sister), and a possible asylum/refugee migration to Finland.
There certainly seem to be many refugees here. The guy at the bank who helped me open an account is from Kosovo. He came here as a boy in the 90s with his parents to get away from the war. When Jeremy and I were filling out all of our immigration paperwork, there were mentions left and right of special procedures for refugees, and timelines for refugees, and how to fill out the paperwork if you were a refugee without a passport, etc.
I haven't been here long enough to know what public opinion on the refugee issue is, but as you have probably noticed, it's a high-profile issue throughout Europe these days. In Germany, there was a heartwarming "refugees welcome" rally; meanwhile in Budapest, they shut down any trains heading west.
Then there is that picture, of that boy, on that beach. It's been popping up all day and I can't bear to look at it. Someone else has written beautifully about it here. I hate to even think of that happening, ten and a hundred times over every day.
If you were in one of these well-off, fairly homogeneous European countries, how would you feel about this refugee crisis? How do you feel about it even if you're not here?
