Human Cargo
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A new edition of this seminal book, now with a new introduction by the author on the current crisis
How can society cope with the diaspora of the twenty-first century?
Is there a difference between ‘good’ asylum seekers and ‘bad’ economic migrants?
What happens to those whose applications are turned down?
Caroline Moorehead has visited war zones, camps and prisons from Guinea and Afghanistan to Australia and Italy. She has interviewed emigration officials and members of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees while investigating the fates of the millions of people currently displaced from their homes. Human Cargo is both a remarkable exploration into the current crisis and a celebration of the courage of ordinary people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The intractable, multifaceted problem of people driven from their homes by poverty, violence or persecution is given a human face in this moving survey of the refugee experience. Moorehead, a human rights journalist, refugee aid worker and biographer of Martha Gellhorn, tours a number of refugee milieus, visiting, among others, Liberian refugees in Cairo, Mexican migrants waiting to cross into the United States, Mideastern refugees detained in Australian internment camps and Palestinian refugees still nursing hopes of returning to a homeland they have never seen. She finds that refugees who remain in the Third World the majority are preoccupied with the struggle for survival. Those who make it to Western countries face an equally daunting task, caught in a legal limbo between asylum and deportation, forbidden to work, grappling with a strange language, loneliness and a society that views them as alien interlopers. Moorehead draws sympathetic portraits of individual refugees, replete with horror stories of the travails they fled and their precarious but hopeful efforts to build new lives, but also pulls back to examine what she says are the sometimes counterproductive policies of aid organizations and the indifference and callousness of Western governments.
