Movement of the people

Current Affairs: A wide-ranging, humane study sheds valuable light on a modern-day exodus.

Nothing defines Ireland's entry into the global economy more clearly than the recent arrival of large numbers of migrants to our shores.

Since the mid-1990s, tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, students, migrant workers and other immigrants have come here in search of sanctuary or employment, provoking fierce debate, legislative changes and even a constitutional amendment.

Yet, for all the rhetoric, we know surprisingly little about those who come seeking refuge. What makes people leave home, travel for thousands of miles across unfriendly countries, then risk their lives inside an airless freight container or on a rickety boat in order to reach the west? What kind of backgrounds do they come from? What circumstances are they fleeing? What attracts them to an uncertain future in our country? This kind of contextual detail, the missing ingredient in all our febrile debates positing "huddled masses" against "bogus asylum-seekers", is supplied in Human Cargo, Caroline Moorehead's wide-ranging, generous and humane examination of refugees and migration.

"Somehow, people have forgotten a very simple truth: no-one wants to be a refugee," Moorehead writes. "Exile is a terrifying, lonely, confusing experience." Her book sheds valuable light on this modern-day exodus, and even if its author doesn't quite accompany migrants on their long, furtive journeys across seas, skies and legal boundaries, she does the next-best thing, by interviewing them in their homes, camps, hostels, villages and detention centres at both ends of the refugee trail.

This is a teeming "road movie" of a book, opening with the story of the "lost boys of Cairo" - impoverished refugees from Liberia's butchery living on the margins of Egypt's capital while hoping to be resettled in the west - and ending with an affecting portrait of the Dinkas of Oulu, Sudanese refugees who have reached the west only to find their "promised land" is a snowbound Finnish town lying inside the Arctic Circle with no work and no daylight for several months a year.

In between, refugees in Sicily, Australia, Guinea, Lebanon, Mexico and Afghanistan relate their stories in their own words. Mira, forced to flee from the Taliban, tells how she escaped with her four children until she could no longer carry the two youngest. After wrapping her baby up in all the clothes she could spare and leaving her by the edge of the road, she led the other children to safety.

The next day, she returned to look for the baby: "I found her quickly, still propped against the rock. But she was dead".

There are more harrowing stories from Sicily's southern coastline, where thousands of extracomunitari land in small boats each year - provided they don't sink first. Storm-tossed survivors refuse to remove their shoes even when they fall in the water because this is where their savings are hidden.

"I described only what I saw and heard," Moorehead writes at the start of her account, and therein lies a central problem with the book.

Where a modicum of scepticism might be appropriate in the retelling of the refugees' stories, the author seems happy to accept their accounts at face value.

Yet even she admits, somewhat coyly, that "untruths surround refugees" and that "it is not easy for people who have fled violence or persecution, or even just poverty, to handle truth". While acknowledging that the buying and selling of "good" stories is "common practice" in refugee circles, and one encouraged by traffickers, she goes on to argue unconvincingly that "the tragedy comes when the real story, the true story, is stronger than the made-up one and would guarantee refugee status".

The modern age is an "age of exile," she claims, but then points out that most people today, as in the past, are not mobile.

The book casts little light on the business of human trafficking, a $10 billion a year industry that rivals drugs and sex for its global reach.

What does emerge is the mess that is the regulation of refugee flows.

Western governments spend a fortune on a system that pins down most asylum-seekers in a legal limbo - the $10 billion spent in recent years is 12 times what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees gets for looking after 17 million refugees. Canada, which takes in 13,000 refugees a year, spends $300 million on controlling its borders, 10 times what it gives to UNHCR.

Yet the mess keeps growing, the people keep coming and the barriers keep growing higher. Some 3,000 desperate migrants have died trying to enter Europe illegally, and another 1,700 trying to cross the border between Mexico and the US.

According to Moorehead, the gap between reality and western rhetoric has never been wider and the need for coherent and harmonised global asylum policies never greater. "No European country has proved able to establish fair, fast and efficient systems to determine refugee status, and their inability to return failed asylum-seekers has undermined their credibility."

Ultimately, I read this book with the hope of finding a solution to this enormous waste of human potential. On this score, the book fails to inspire. Movement, we are told, is "the defining experience of the age" and home just "something to carry in one's head" rather than a fixed and safe place. Places of birth are "arbitrary" and borders and boundaries "accidents of history" that stand as barriers to a more equal world.

Moorehead's conclusion is that there is "no magic panacea" beyond making some sensible improvements to the asylum system and a nebulous imprecation to tackle the root causes of inequality.

Paul Cullen is Development Correspondent of The Irish Times and has written extensively about refugee issues for the paper.

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, by Caroline Moorehead, Chatto & Windus, 324 pp. £12.99