In breaching the subject of migration, allow me to regale you with a tale as old as time, one that involves the ceaseless flow of humanity across borders and seas and the forging of new destinies. Millennia before the first scripts were pressed into clay tablets, our distant ancestors moved out from Africa throughout Europe and Asia. Their successful tribal survival embedded a migratory spirit into our endlessly diversifying DNA, which until today is shaping the civilizations that we are part of.
Every era in known history is shaped by the story of migration as a search for a better life. This search itself, in all its forms, is a universal good that produces wellbeing in societies where migrants are able and allowed to adapt, integrate, find belonging, and add value to their destinations through their work and by sharing their cultural capital.
A small but very important chapter in this enthralling epic comes from a seafaring people whose identity is firmly ingrained in a modern state—Lebanon. On account of emigrants venturing out from Lebanon to countries of opportunity, but also on account of welcoming and integrating foreigners, our history is built on the back of migration.
This Lebanese migratory heritage shaped our society deeply, long before we emerged in 1920 as a new nation and found ourselves in an area and period where everyone seemed fated to be a migrant, a refugee, or a host. Until today, with every dollar in remittances and every expatriate summer vacationer arriving at Beirut airport, we are reminded that these historic migration patterns have shaped our national identity as country of trade, hospitality and communication.
Reviewing the experience of regional and national crises starting in 2011, we see the same patterns, only multiplied. For more than 10 years, Lebanon has been hosting the world’s largest number of refugees per capita. But we need to be honest and mindfully reconcile this displacement burden with the paradoxical truth that for the better part of a century, Lebanon’s 14 million-strong diaspora is a multiple of our resident population and spread out across the globe in pursuit of more promising futures than they can find at home.
Today more than ever, there is no denying the value of our diaspora. This irony points to the very crux of our problem. Whatever we feel about the displaced communities within our borders, they have been sold the same lies that we Lebanese have been sold: the deception of a state that acts responsibly and has the will to take care of its wards. In reality, we live in a failed state.
The disposition of our government towards the refugee community should have been first, to recognize that these people are human beings and deserve dignified treatment, and second, that they are a force whose productivity benefits them and benefits our economy. What could have been an economic and social opportunity has become a crisis, and refugees have become the scapegoats.
Let’s not follow the failed path and accusatory rhetoric of our incompetent political leaders.
