Research Log

Research Log #1 - Solutionary Project 2021
Date: 4 February 2021

Name: Ashly Narimatsu
Central Question: Should we help the refugees in Europe that have been affected by wars and violence?
Thesis: Some people would argue that refugees pose danger, the global community should still help the refugees
find homes peacefully.
Essay Sections:
#1 What is the problem? What are the systemic causes? Who is hurt and who benefits? (Use three sources.)
#2: What has been and is being done? (Use two sources.)
#3: What do you think should be done and what do you intend to do? (Use one source.)
In which section will you use this source? #1 What is the problem? What are the systemic causes? Who is hurt and
who benefits?
Excerpts:
Hsiao-Hung Kai states that “Europe has seen hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East and south
Asia, fleeing chronic poverty, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis in countries often laid to ruin by
western-backed institutions.”
Hsiao-Hung Kai reported “Following the suppression of the 2011 Arab Spring and Nato’s intervention in Libya, a
lawless society emerged, with racial hatred against sub-Saharan Africans unleashed.”
Later in the article, Hsiao-Hung Kai talks briefly about her experience when a Chinese builder said to her; “If you
didn’t die in the back of a lorry, you could die working here.”
Commentary and Analysis:

This article provides information about how the European migrant crisis is affecting the people living in
Arabic countries, which is causing them to seek asylum in neighboring countries. The author explains briefly how
refugees are coming from countries that are constantly at war and are full of violence and poverty. Many are seeking
asylum in neighboring countries, Europe being the most common. Although the idea of global immigration and
refugee’s get media coverage from pictures and videos, many are still in need of help.
Arabic countries have been at war for a long time, which caused the European migrant crisis to happen due to
the occurrence of the Arab Spring and Nato’s intervention. These two events caused massive destruction, violence and
chaos in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Because families did not want to live in a war zone, which caused the
refugee crisis to happen. Most refugees tried to leave. Some traveled across the Mediterranean Sea and others to
Europe, where most were not accepted because they were refugees. Although some were not so lucky to leave their
homes and forced into torture, forced labor and possible death.
Even though the refugees who were granted access into countries such as Italy, France, Britain and Germany
finally found a home, they were treated differently. Since the migrants and refugees who traveled there are not citizens,
they have to work extra hard trying to even stay alive. Because of the downfall of government support, hostile
environment, and poor healthcare towards refugees and migrants, they are forced to work harder than they did when
first trying to seek asylum from their origin government.
MLA Work Cited:

Pai, Hsiao-Hung. “The Refugee ‘Crisis’ Showed Europe’s Worst Side to the World.” The Guardian. The Guardian.
1 January 2020. Accessed on 4 February 2021.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/01/refugee-crisis-europe-mediterranean-racism-
incarceration
This is a reputable and reliable article because it was published by a journalist by The Guardian and is reliable
because they use experienced writers.
Thesis: Although the Arabic countries are going through a seemingly constant violence and war, we could still help
the refugees find homes peacefully.
Essay Sections:
In which section will you use this source? #2 What has been and is being done
Excerpts:
In the article, Priynaka Boghni states in her article, “The sudden influx of those escaping violence, persecution and
poverty starting in 2015 triggered a series of reactions from individual governments in Europe.”
Priynaka Boghni writes “Arrivals have fallen by nearly 85 percent, dropping from more than one million in 2015 to
171,300 last year, according to data from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).”
“Among those who have survived the journey, thousands along the migration route have been stranded since nations
began closing their borders.” Says Prinaka Boghni in her article.

This article provides information about what Europe is doing to help the refugees from the crisis. The author
briefly explains about the devastating death toll throughout the article by providing statistical information like graphs
and numbers. Towards the bottom half, she explains the different ways Europe and other third-party countries are
trying to help pitch in to provide aid for the refugees in this crisis.
One way Europe has been trying to help with the crisis is by focusing on specific migration/refugee routs that
are popular by travel like the Mediterranean Sea. Many refugees use the sea to find refuge in a country, but it is one on
the most dangerous ways to travel with the dangerous currents that can flip and crash boats that could make people
drown. One of the reasons that was stated into this article about why the death toll keeps rising every year since the
beginning is because government officials in Europe and third-party countries are mostly focused on the refugees and
migrants that are arriving to their countries instead of using their resources to help them reach the countries.
Although that many countries stated opening their borders to refugees, many countries are starting to close
down their borders and decline their citizenship applications. There are many refugees who found refuge in countries
and found peace, but others are still trying to leave their countries and struggling to pass difficulty terrain like the
Mediterranean Sea. Refugees who are seeking refuge are in danger of being held in detention centers, malitias/gangs,
exposure to torture/forced labor, starvation, harsh climate changes and now recently being exposed to the virus, Covid-
19.
MLA Work Cited:

Boghni, Priynaka. “The “Human Cost” of the EU’s Response to the Refugee Crisis”. PBS. Frontline. 23 January 2018.
Date accessed on 12 February 2021. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-human-cost-of-the-eus-
response-to-the-refugee-crisis/
This is a reputable and reliable article because it was published by a journalist that frequently writes her stories into
PBS Frontline, which is a reliable source for information because they use reliable writers for their stories.
Essay Sections:
In which section will you use this source? #2 What has been and is being done?
Excerpts:
In Melanie Nezer’s TedTalk, she states “I think it’s also important to remember that it’s just a mistake to think about
refugees that way [defined for what they lost] because they’re just people so they also have a lot of things.”
Meline Nezer explains briefly about 3 durable solutions that can happen to a refugee and the first is to go home, the
second is local integration and the third is resettlement.
A statement that Melanie Nezer says to keep in mind in her TedTalk is that “Refugees are more of a hidden crisis or
something that that we didn’t pay a lot of attention to until we saw refugees coming into Europe and all of a sudden
you know everyone said this is a crisis.”

In Melanie Nezer’s TedTalk, she provides information on the current issue of refugees from the European
Migrant crisis. She briefly talks about the number of displaced refugees in statistics, the 3 durable solutions, how
people are taking risks and what we can do as countries to help them. The speaker talks about ways of how
governments and other neighboring countries have been working hard to help the refugees and all of the organizations
that have been helping, but we as a third-party country could help in a lot of ways.
When people are looking from afar about the refugees who have resettled into their new home countries, they
might think of them in a negative way and one way is that “they are useless”. But in fact, many who resettle and find
refuge in another country may have some skills from their previous job’s or life skills such as farming, businesspeople,
professionals in a specific area and even education. Like how refugees bring skills, they also bring hope and a grand
desire to have peace. Saying these things, refugees want to have a better life, a more peaceful one that is not filled with
hate and violence, so they have hope that they will find that wherever they go.
There are a lot of ways of which we can help the refugees in this crisis as individuals, a community, or as
countries. The main thing we can do is to help other countries that are neighboring the issue and help by providing
funds. The countries that are closes to the migrant crisis helped for a long time and provided homes and resources for
the refugees, but the countries need help because they also have their own political and governmental issues and are
struggling to keep up rescuing the refugees. Many organizations are helping this by providing specific funds and
resources to help the refugees near Europe and Africa. Many refugees are causing local integration meaning that they
are seeking asylum in different countries and are staying there, but this is causing countries to struggle in aspects such
as providing education, health care pay, homes and jobs. Many countries are also trying to help the resettlement of
refugees, meaning that they bring the refugees and migrant to third-party countries who can afford it such as the United
States or Canada, but the numbers are low in this case.
MLA Work Cited:

Nezer, Melanie. “The Real Facts of the Refugee Crisis, and What We Can Do.” TEDx Talks. TEDx MidAtlantic
Talks. 8 February 2017. Date accessed on 13 February 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=gQx73ts6KX8
This is a reputable and reliable article because it is a TedTalk and they don’t allow people to speak in front of others
who don’t know what they’re talking about. Melaine is a reliable source because she is the vice president of HIAS’
policy and advocacy leading education on immigration, asylum, and refugee protection issues.

Essay Sections:
who benefits?
Excerpts:
In Anna Carastathis’ academic journal, she states “The latest crisis to arrive on the scene is the global Covid-19
pandemic that has exacerbated the negative effects of the previous declared crisis.”
Greece inhabitants are worried about what the pandemic will do: “When the coronavirus appeared in Greece,
Mitsotakis referred to the “double crisis” that Greece was facing: the border crisis and the pandemic crisis.”
In the middle of the article, Anna speaks briefly upon the differences between the Greeks and refugees, “Citizens are
(relatively) free to move since March 4 and Greece opened its borders to international tourists on June 15 – as the
necropolitical use of quarantine; not to ensure like but to bring about mass death. Asylum seekers are spatially
confined in camps and represented visually as a crowed.”

This academic article provides context of how the recent pandemic of Covid-19 is affecting the country of
Greece and its refugees. Although both the refugee crisis and the pandemic are causing the Greeks to become racist
towards the refugees by causing fear into people’s heads and spreading the thought that refugees are positively
carrying the virus and wants to spread the virus into Europe. The combination of the refugee crisis and the coronavirus
pandemic is also causing false accusations towards refugees who are tested positive and blaming them for causing or
being a part of past crises in the last decade.
The combination between the 5-year European Migrant Crisis and the recent Coronavirus pandemic has been a
challenge upon Greece for a long time. The refugee crisis started in 2016 in Syria with a massive war since the 1960s
when the Assad family ruled which caused antigovernment protests and armed rebellions. The streets were filled with
violence and bombs were falling from the sky. Many of the families there decided to leave the violence and tried to
bring relatives. So a lot of them left and tried to find refuge in Europe and neighboring countries, but many relatives
couldn’t leave so many had to leave without their whole family.
The combination of the refugee crisis and the coronavirus is affecting both the Greeks and the refugees. But
refugees are being affected more severely than most inhabitants of Greece. The difference is that the people who are
living in Greece have a home, food, water, medical aid and only have to worry about the coronavirus. While the
refugees have to worry about being accepted to be in Greece, needing food and water to survive, legal papers to live
permanently and to get a job, medical aid, and also need to worry about getting sick from the coronavirus.
MLA Work Cited:

CARASTATHIS, ANNA, et al. “Crisis Goes Viral: Containment in the Age of Contagion in Greece.” Fennia, vol. 198,
no. 1/2, Jan. 2020, pp. 9–10. EBSCOhost,
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,cpid&custid=s4800244&db=a9h&AN=147541667&site=ehost-live.
This is a reputable and reliable article because this site comes from the Hawaii State Public Library and is found
amongst many other reputable articles that are all written by scholarly writers.

Essay Sections:
In which section will you use this source? #3 what do you think should be done and what do you intend to do?
Excerpts:
In director Hernan Zin’s documentary Born in Syria, Victor Orban (Hungarian’s prime minister) states “Please don’t
come, why do you have to go to Turkey to Europe? Turkey is a safe country, stay there. It is risky to come, we can’t
guarantee that you will be accepted here. We don’t want to falsify the dreams of the people.”
The prime minister of Slovenia states “The situation is very very serious, if we do not deliver some immediate and
concrete on the ground in the next few days and weeks, I do believe the European union and Europe as a whole will
start falling apart.”
Hernan Zin comments briefly about how Slovakia is full: “The Slovenian Government has announced that more than
12,000 immigrants have reached the border in the past few hours and the flow of refugees has exceeded the country
capacity.”

Since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011, about 9 million Syrians decided to leave their homes and more
than half are children. Born in Syria is a 2016 documentary about different stories of what refugees had to go through
but they were mainly focused on the children. This shows the viewers the struggles of 7 kids from when they were
leaving Syria, finding refuge in Europe and then finally after. You might cast away the thought of what it might feel
like to find refuge as a refugee from Syria and travel to Europe might not be difficult, but when watching this, you will
change your mind. At the end of the documentary, it shows a map and how far they had to travel to their final
destination.
After watching this documentary about the children’s perspectives on moving from Syria to Europe, I
personally feel like we can do more to help them. Some things I think that we can help them is to make more camps
for the refugees because there are some but are very overcrowded and difficult to find food and treatment for sickness.
We can also help with the legal process of getting lawyers to help as well by helping to get them papers to find
permanent residence and a job. I think that we can also provide aid to those who are sick and injured. There were
several accounts in the documentary where a family member was sick or injured and either had aid or couldn’t find
help that they need.
I hope that I can help raise enough money to help different organizations that help with the European Migrant
Crisis to help give food and water, permanent shelter and aid for the sick and injured. I also hope that I could inspire
legal representatives to help refugees get the legal representation that they need to find jobs and permanent residency
in their country. This is important because refugees think that the hardest part of moving from Syria to Europe is the
trip, but it is also when they try to find a home in the new country.
MLA Work Cited:
Ortuño , José. Born in Syria. La Claqueta PC, Contramedia Films, 2016.
This is a reputable and reliable article because it is a documentary and Hernan Zin, (director, writer and producer) is
known for directing other films and writing articles all around the world.

Date: 5 March 2021
Essay Sections:
who benefits?
Excerpts:
As Reece Jones says towards the beginning of his book, the difference between the movement of people have changed
substantially: “The billions of dollars spent on mapping, enclosing, and bounding territories have dramatically
transformed, restricted and controlled the movement of people. Whereas 10,000 years ago most humans were
migratory hunter-gathers, today the majority of humans are born in a bounded state and live in a city, and their daily
activities are monitored by agents of the state, including police, judges, and bureaucrats….”
Reece Jones states in his book Violent Boarders he states that there are five ways borders can cause types of violence,
the first two he states, “The overt violence of border guard’s ad border security in fracture is only one aspect of the
violence borders inflict on people and it’s environment. The second form is the use of force or power – threatened of
actual – that increases the chance injury, death, or deprivation.”
In the book Violent Borders, author Reece Jones states “The innocent child lying face down in the sand in red-and-blue
clothing made it impossible to ignore the plight of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. Suddenly the decade-long issue of
deaths at the EU border became global news.”

This book provides readers information about migrant trails in the world, the global migrant crisis, how
borders have changed and how much money is being put into it, different restrictions and other topics relating. Reece
Jones goes back and forth from talking about this information to his stories about traveling to different refugee trails,
camps, and hotspots around the world.
There are many reasons as of why there are borders and many discussions as of why violence occurs when
people are crossing borders. Many governments spend millions upon millions of dollars on border security with fences,
authorizations, cameras and agents just to keep the human migration out of their country. The use of borders can cause
positive outcomes but also a lot of negative outcomes, coming from different perspectives. For example, their good for
different corporation uses, consumer goods and for governmental reasons, but their also bad for workers and people
trying to make a living, and families that are trying to get out of their homes and move to a safer place.
Borders hurt many families trying to find refuge or to be reunites with displaced family members. Although
media coverage of the crisis started when a picture of a little boy was found lying dead on a beach, many people have
started to gain perspective on the current migrant crisis. One example was the #refugeeswelcome campaign which
resulted the EU accepting 160,000 refugees and president Barak Obama announcing that the US will accept another
10,000. Although this sounded like a good idea, one might need to look at the problems this might be causing. This
campaign allows most countries to accept few refugees to almost none because of bigger countries accepting many,
and it also relies on assumption that migrants who don’t fit the description of refugee are not welcome.
MLA Work Cited:

Jones. Reece, “Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move”. Verso. 2016.
This is a reputable and reliable article because the author is a known author for his books and is a professor at UH
Manoa.
Other Citations
Wanrooij, Bram. “How Corporations Benefit from Europe's Refugee Crisis.” Medium. Age of Awareness. 19
June 2019. medium.com/age-of-awareness/how-corporations-benefit-from-europes-refugee-crisis-
a356f567ad15.
Society. “The EU Response to the Migrant Challenge: News: European Parliament.” The EU Response to
the Migrant Challenge | News | European Parliament, 30 Sept. 2020,
www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20170629STO78629/the-eu-response-to-the-
migrant-challenge.

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Research Log #1 - Solutionary Project 2021

Date: 4 February 2021

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