Reflecting upon our past class discussion and this week’s readings, I have gained newfound insight on the power of vulnerability and how this can influence one’s destination both physically and mentally.

Reading about Alphonse and his journey as a migrant really shed light on the mental impact of the asylum seeking process. What particularly resonated with me was that asylum seekers have to boil their experiences into a thirty minute interview to convince a privileged UNHCR representative who may not have the background to handle psychological trauma or truly understand these events due to barriers of knowledge and communication.

Curious to understand how mental health is impacted by asylum interviews, I found a study published on NCBI which discussed this situation in more detail. The study looked at asylum seekers with atleast 5-17 traumatic events (either experienced personally or through stories/others) and found that post-interview there is both a significant increase in post-traumatic intrusions (reliving the trauma)  and avoidance, suggesting that “ the already vulnerable group of traumatized refugees needs to be treated with empathy during their asylum interview” (Schock 2015). While those who pass the interview and are granted asylum experience a decrease in post-traumatic avoidance, they still relive the traumatic experiences mentally.

The critical balances that asylum seekers must strike during these interviews led me to realize how important it is to be empathetic towards them —how vulnerable should they appear? How professional should they act? How personal should they get? How could they strike this balance when their entire voyage has just been a limbo of travelling and trauma?

Building empathy is crucial to building a better and more efficient asylum seeking process; from these readings I think that empathy through economic inclusion could potentially facilitate some change the migrant experience. According to Didier Fassin, the hotspots found little utility in accepting migrants once World War II reconstruction and the Cold War had ended. According to another article in Forbes magazine, immigration has led to a 30% increase in new businesses. While there is much controversy on the immigrants “taking our jobs” and biases attached to this approach (i.e. quotas allowing for people of certain education levels to take refuge), there is no denying that most societies value those who have economic utility and there will always be some sort of demand for some task or political reason (as there was for World War II reconstruction and the Cold War); integrating more migrants through such means could have great potential.

Links:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4558273/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2014/07/10/welcoming-immigrants-why-empathy-is-smart-economics-for-cities/#1c8426f37753