In Refugee Week we are reminded of the high number of refugees around the world. The theme of the 2026 Week is A Million Stories. It highlights something more important than numbers. It says that each refugee has a face, a family, and a story to which we should listen.
Refugee statistics tell us that last year over 117 million people had been forced from their homes. Of these, over thirty million were refugees. Those who were driven out generally fled to similarly poor nations. During this year their numbers will almost certainly have increased as ever more destructive weapons make life unlivable in nations destroyed by war. The economic pressures accompanying war will also affect the lives of people in the least developed nations, too, leading more people to flee from and to starvation.
As we know so well at Jesuit Social Services, numbers can be used to support an impersonal picture in which human beings are no longer seen as people but as objects with which policies should deal. That is true of statistics about homelessness, youth crime, imprisonment and mental illnesses associated with people whom we accompany. If you see only the numbers, you punish the people
That is true also of refugees in a world in which human beings are seen as dispensable. Their value is seen to depend on their usefulness and such qualities as wealth, place of birth, citizenship, political views or virtue.
The consequences for refugees are catastrophic. They cannot hope for life, sustenance, shelter or safety from their own nations. Neither can they claim the right to security, support and a future from any other nation. In this world we are encouraged to see people who flee from persecution and hunger as threats to our prosperity and security. Any sins they may have committed are never to be forgiven. The heroism and generosity they may have shown count for nothing. They are expendable and dispatchable.
Such inhumanity eventually poisons the nations that nurture it. It finds expression in dissociation, prejudice, hostility and casual violence. It also corrupts the language we use. After the Holocaust and the Second World War War ‘protection’ was a sacred word describing how nations should respond to those whose lives and dignity were threatened. In Australia, the rhetoric of Governments and political parties has made ‘protection’ a mean and self-serving word. It no longer refers to the protection of refugees from the threats they face to living a human life. It denotes rather the protection of Australians against the threat posed by people seeking shelter. This attitude breeds fear.
In this world, we should resist fear by encouraging truthful conversations, meeting the people who are the object of fear and exclusion, by joining like-minded people, and by bothering politicians. That is what Refugee Week is all about – listening to a million stories, looking into a thousand faces, and supporting the people who cry out to us.
