The moral case for helping the world’s refugees, solidly grounded in facts.
A philosophy professor warns that the international system for aiding refugees is broken, and Western democracies have an ethical obligation to help fix it.
In a quietly potent response to not-in-my-backyarders, Parekh, who directs the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program at Northeastern University, sounds an alarm about a global humanitarian crisis. Amid rising anti-immigrant sentiments worldwide, only 2% of refugees are able to settle in a new country or voluntarily return home; the rest often remain for years in squalid, dangerous refugee camps or urban slums. During the Cold War, both capitalist and communist nations could score political points by taking in refugees from other systems of government—witness the American embrace of victims of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Vietnam War in 1975—but the appeal of that tactic has faded, and “resettlement countries are taking in relatively few refugees.” Parekh shows the catastrophic results through statistics, personal stories of refugees, and clear explanations of philosophical lenses through which readers might view the crisis—among them Kantian, utilitarian, and religious frameworks, such as the good Samaritan principle or other traditions of helping strangers in Abrahamic faiths. The author also refutes myths that cast refugees as insufficiently vetted or “terrorists in disguise.” In the U.S., for example, the 2- to 5-year screening process involves eight federal agencies and up to nine interviews that have included questions such as, “Can you remember how many stars were on the jacket of the military officer that raped you?” Parekh ends with worthy ideas on how Western democracies might meet their moral responsibility to ease the nightmare that, partly through flawed policies, they helped to create. If the West fails to act, she suggests, its task will grow more complex with a new group of asylum-seekers on the horizon—the so-called climate refugees fleeing perils such as rising seas and food scarcity.
The moral case for helping the world’s refugees, solidly grounded in facts.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-750799-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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