The current refugee crisis is witnessing the emergence of a new phenomenon: the iRefugee, the iAsylum seeker, the iMigrant.
Like water, food and shelter, information has become an essential resource for many refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. Specifically, information communication technologies and services – such as smartphones, tablets, digital maps, global positioning services, social media, instant messaging, and various apps – are crucial tools in modern migration. The availability, affordability and utility of information offered by these technologies and services has become a major resource of action and decision-making for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants and the international organisations and efforts dealing with and responding to them.
These technologies and services, for instance, are helping individuals to escape war, conflict, and persecution; navigate treacherous migration routes; communicate with aid and humanitarian organisations; contact family and friends; and gather and share information. Many refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants, for instance, depend upon them to post real-time data about routes, locations, arrests, detentions, border control, human and natural threats, weather conditions, transportation options, prices, aid, and potential places to stay. These technologies and services are further used to help update family and friends about their whereabouts, health, and other information about their circumstances.
Information communication technologies are transforming how refugees, asylum seekers and migrants interact with, and are assisted by, aid and humanitarian agencies. These technologies and services help increase their exposure and visibility by opening channels of communication with these agencies. They also help facilitate negotiation with the authorities regarding border crossings, routes and mobility.
These technologies and services further enable these displaced individuals remain connected with their families and friends in their countries of origin. Refugees, asylum seekers and migrants can contact loved ones and thereby maintain familial, social, and emotional ties. They can remotely participate in the daily lives of their loved ones through Skype, FaceTime, instant messaging, and e-mails. Additionally, they can monitor circumstances back home in order to determine if it might be safe to return or alternatively provide information to loved ones on how they too could migrate.
These technologies and services are consequently helping these individuals to develop a kind of co-presence between their present location and home, providing some level of comfort and contact, however intermittent, remote and digital, between families and friends. This co-presence is arguably necessary for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who, because of their displacement and isolation from home, could otherwise lose all ties with home for indefinite periods.
These powerless individuals are being empowered through their use of information communication technologies. These technologies and services have provided these people with opportunities to forge, or at least contribute to, their representation in the media and within the discourses of various official governmental, security, and aid and humanitarian agencies. Indeed, refugees, asylum seekers and migrants have been given their own voice with and through these technologies and services. They are no longer totally voiceless. They are now able to directly assert their claims and needs themselves.
Aid and humanitarian agencies are also able to better respond to and deal with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants through the use of information communication technologies. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Syria, smartphones enable refugees to exchange information and interact with international agencies rather than just receive information passively. Through information communication techno- logies and services, these agencies can have direct contact with these desperate people and ostensibly be better able to more rapidly, efficiently and effectively provide assistance when and where needed. Some agencies have begun offering some information communication technologies and services such as SIM cards, electric cords and plugs, and charging stations.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for instance, acknowledges a shift in understanding of what contemporary assistance provision includes. Basic needs have evolved to no longer only include shelter, water and food, but also mobiles, SIM cards and charging stations. The UNCHR has distributed 33,000 SIM cards to Syrian refugees in Jordan and 85,704 solar lanterns to charge devices.
Basic needs have evolved to no longer only include shelter, water and food, but also mobiles, SIM cards and charging stations
But information communication technologies and services are also helping the criminal underworld of human trafficking. Traffickers advertise their smuggling operations, options and prices on websites and various social media groups as if they were legitimate travel agencies. Some trafficking websites and groups feature glossy photographs of destination cities and itineraries, as though they are offering luxury tour packages.
There are various Facebook groups, for instance, that are dedicated to human trafficking, such as “Smuggling into the EU” (nearly 24,000 members) and “How to Emigrate to Europe” (nearly 40,000 members). The group “Trafficking to Europe” offers a smuggling option between Turkey and Greece for €1,700. One trafficker using this group offers a 50 per cent discount for children under the age of five. These groups feature discussions in both public forums and private messages and, like more legitimate or mainstream Facebook groups or profiles, permit both traffickers and migrants to share status updates, comments, pictures, and videos of their journeys taken on their smartphones, tablets or other devices.
Interestingly, information communication technologies and services are simultaneously undermining this illicit business. Although these technologies and services are providing traffickers with online business platforms, they are also providing refugees, asylum seekers and migrants with the information they need to create and implement their own roadmaps to safety. Refugees, asylum seekers and migrants using these technologies and services are sharing personal experiences and information on social media, including precise GPS coordinates of their entire routes (sometimes recorded automatically by their smartphones), to guide others. There are also social media groups, like the Facebook group ‘Smuggle Yourself to Europe Without a Trafficker’, providing advice and guidance on how to migrate without traffickers.
Some migrants are now able to make their journeys, or at least parts of their journeys, on their own without paying traffickers. Meanwhile, some traffickers have lowered prices by nearly half since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in order to compete with their former customers’ newfound independence. The powerless are thus even further empowered by and through these technologies and services by decreasing their reliance on criminals.
Information communication technologies and services are creating new possibilities and ways of being for powerless people attempting escapes from horror. They are helping make up a new kind of person: the iRefugee, the iAsylum seeker, the iMigrant. These technologically and digitally connected individuals are using these tools to share information about routes, navigation, conditions, and other pressing matters; directly communicate with aid and humanitarian agencies; and contacting and maintaining links with their loved ones.
Information communication technologies and services are, in turn, shifting responses to dealing with these individuals. Some aid and humanitarian agencies are providing certain technologies and services to approach and assist these individuals. Human traffickers are also using them to conduct their criminal activities.
Finally, the wider world can use these technologies and services to identify actions and assistance to further support refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, such as raising greater awareness, fundraising and pressuring countries to help shoulder the burden. For instance, digital campaigns and coverage can and should be mounted to illuminate the disgracefully inadequate responses by the wealthy Gulf countries of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and wealthier and geographically larger countries including Russia, Iran, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, China, South Korea, Japan, and the US, pressuring them to provide more meaningful help to their fellow humans in need.
Marc Kosciejew is head of department and lecturer in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta. He also volunteered with Integra, teaching English to refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants.