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Deported to a place they never called home

Eight years ago, Buck Billy arrived in Cambodia, a country he had never seen before. Even though it’s where his parents were born, considering the Southeast Asian nation as home hadn’t crossed his mind for a single moment. For him, home was Philadelphia in the United States (US), at least for the first 26 years of his life.
 







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Asia helps push world refugee numbers to record high

Luke Hunt
 
 
The annual United Nations report on the state of refugees around the globe reads more like an end-of-year corporate finance sheet. It’s just numbers and like a profit-and-loss account, the figures can be interpreted in many ways.
 







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The best resources poor people have are other poor people

Father Michael Kelly SJ
 
Email is a wonderful means of communication. Though not as good as meeting someone face to face, it still allows immediate and at times quite intimate contact between people living on opposite sides of the planet. It can also connect you to someone you don’t know who just lives around the corner.
 







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Don’t link dignified return of refugees to political solutions

BEIRUT (CNS): “We appeal to the international community to shoulder its responsibility and strive to put an end to the ongoing conflicts and wars and to ensure the dignified return of the Palestinian refugees and displaced Syrians, Iraqis and others to their country,” Bechara Cardinal Rai, patriarch of Antoich and head of the Maronite Church said, as Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim religious leaders, met with the president of Switzerland, Alain Berset.
 
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Rescue shines harsh light on Italy’s migrant policy

ROME (CNS): Tweeting with hashtags that translate as “Closed ports” and “Open hearts,” Matteo Salvini, the interior minister of Italy, disputed claims that the Italian government was complicit in leaving a migrant to die in the Mediterranean Sea as she clung to a board from a destroyed fishing boat.
 
Salvini strongly supported Italy’s policy of having the Libyan coast guard patrol its own shores, pushing back refugee boats or taking the migrants and refugees back to camps in Libya.
 
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Blaming the victims

HONG KONG (SE): The knee-jerk reaction of the president of the United States of America (US), Donald Trump, to the attack in the streets of New York on October 31 to put in place what he termed extreme vetting on all migrants coming into the country appears to be a choice to demonise an unseen enemy rather than face the reality of what has happened.
 
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Police blamed over stoush with refugees

ROME (CNS): Violence erupted in Rome when police attempted to clear around 100 mostly Eritreans and Ethiopians with official refugee status from a square near the main Roma Termini railway station on August 24.
 
Police claim they were forced to use water cannons after people started throwing things at them and hitting them with sticks.
 
On August 19, some 800 refugees had been evicted from an abandoned building nearby, where they had be sheltering since 2013.
 
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Call to stop demonising selected groups in society

HONG KONG (SE): A study carried out by the Department of Cultural Studies at the Lingnan University in Fu Tei shows that some reporting on refugees or asylum seekers in Hong Kong is highly biased.
 
A forum organised by the university and the Justice and Peace Commission held at the Living Faith Society Limited in Talentum Bookshop in Yau Ma Tei on August 6 urged people to view reports on refugees or asylum seekers with caution.
 
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Japanese warrior for refugees mourned

TOKYO (UCAN): Michiko Inukai, a nationally-known Catholic author who supported refugees in Japan and abroad, died on July 24 due to advanced age. She was 96.
 
Inukai was a granddaughter of the prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, whose assassination by young naval officers in 1932 marked the end of effective civilian control of the Japanese government until after World War II.
 
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Priest asks China for mercy on North Korean refugees

SEOUL (SE): Father Philippe Blot, who has spent many years working with North Korean refugees in China, said that conditions have worsened for surviving Christians under the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un and he is urging Beijing to give shelter to fugitives crossing into China from the hermit kingdom.

The National Catholic Reporter said on April 4 that Father Blot, a volunteer with the Paris Foreign Mission Society, describes the situation facing North Korean refugees as becoming ever more dramatic as they flee to China to avoid dying of hunger.
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