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very time Dr Nooralhaq Nasimi and his family approached a border on their long journey fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan to the UK, the smugglers gave his children a spoonful of liquid from a glass bottle. It sent them to sleep so they didnt make a sound, he says. The smugglers didnt ask us for permission, they just did it. Nasimi, 54, his wife and three children encountered many smugglers on their way here; as they hid in fridges in the back of various lorries (a common way that people come into this country; when it happened to Nasimi the fridge was on and he passed out), walked through corn fields for hours in the night with no food or water when the smugglers didnt drop them off where they said they would; and took their lives into their own hands on small inflatable boats, overflowing with other refugees.

Nasimi came over to the UK in 1999 and founded the Afghanistan and Central Asian association to support people as they come to live in the UK. He is watching the news now with concern. The number of displaced people is increasing dramatically and human rights organisations have expressed worries about the way the UK is approaching the people seeking asylum, he says.

The number of migrants who have come to the UK so far this year is 8,452 already more than 2020s total of 8,410, and they are from all over the world. On July 19, 50 refugees landed in Dungeness on one boat this amount of people on a tiny dinghy is not unusual, as smugglers try to make as much money as possible from desperate people. It costs around 6,000 for a place on these boats, with reports that some smugglers advertise places for up to 20,000 on TikTok. This has raised concerns that only wealthy migrants are able to come seek asylum. It is the number of people on boats, not the number of boats which is increasing. Covid is a factor restrictions mean that traditional routes on lorries or planes are not possible and reductions in ferry crossings mean gangs are relying on small boats. There is a lesson here for policy-makers closing down some routes shows that if people are desperate enough, they will find other means.

Set in a global and historical context, however, the numbers are less alarming. In 2019, 45,000 people sought asylum here a third of the number that went to France. While arrivals by boat area up on last year, they are down overall and seven times lower than the records set when Tony Blair was prime minister. But for a government that has set an ambitious target to take back control of people coming here, the boats are a strikingly visible form of immigration.

These numbers are powerfully divisive and are set to mark political debate for the next few months as calmer weather means that more people will attempt the dangerous journey. One cabinet minister predicts that over the summer, records for the most people coming over in a day will be broken repeatedly and Nigel Farage has set up camp in Kent to report on the boats for GB News.

We were put in the back of a lorry, inside a fridge, with no idea where we were or what was going on. The smugglers gave my children a liquid that sent them to sleep so they didnt make a sound. They didnt ask us for permission.

Number 10 is taking a hard line on this. The Prime Minister is working more closely with the Home Office than previously, while the Home Secretary Priti Patel is furious. She has called the surge in refugees coming over an unacceptable problem. Insiders say that she is furious at the rising numbers. She has told Dan OMahoney, the clandestine threat commander who is responsible for stopping small boat crossings, that they must come down as a matter of urgency. Boris Johnson is trying to collaborate with French President Emmanuel Macron, paying more than 54 million to France in a deal whereby French police patrol beaches to stem the number of migrants crossing the Channel.

There is also a new piece of proposed legislation, the Nationality and Borders Bill, which passed its second reading last week, which makes it a criminal offence to arrive in the UK without permission, introduces longer maximum sentences for those coming over here without a legal reason and sends asylum seekers overseas for processing (even if no country has agreed to accept them).

Dr Nasimi on an Afghan and Central Asian Association visit to Afghanistan, distributing stationary at the local mosque

In her speech announcing the bill, Patel said she wants to stop people from drowning on journeys directed by organised gangs (at least seven people are known to have died last year these boats) and to stop people who have come here illegally getting ahead of those who play by the rules and have organised safe resettlement schemes.

The problem is that there has never been a legal way to claim asylum, says Jonathan Portes, senior fellow for the UK in a Changing Europe initiative. The right to come here through irregular means and claim asylum was established after the Second World War and was thought up by politicians and lawyers. It is in the 1951 Refugee Convention, [which has its 70th anniversary this week], so the idea promulgated by ministers that people who come to claim asylum are jumping the queue is false. Whether or not they are legitimate, they have a right to have their claims investigated. Under the new bill, Nicholas Winton, who arranged for thousands of Jewish children to come to safety here on the Kindertransport would have been a criminal.

Hanan Alshami, 32, who came here five years ago from Syria on a government scheme and now volunteers helping refugees highlights how vulnerable these people are. They have risked their lives on these journeys, they dont know their rights, they come from places where the governments are [corrupt] so anyone can ask for money and they will not know that is not normal. While they wait for settled status they are so worried. Many do not speak English; when I got here I didnt understand anything and cried for a week. No one has a plan or choice. I left Syria because I was scared but I didnt know where to go. I only had two blankets and some clothes; I thought wed go home eventually. Instead we were living in a makeshift place in Lebanon with 25 other people. My mother-in-law asked why? We had a good life in Syria but it was too dangerous. Then my husband was asked by the UN if he wanted to come to London. My family are still in Syria and people are eating from the rubbish, they cant get food any other way. And my sister is in Lebanon being told to go back to Sy

The UN has described the proposals in the Bill as an almost neo-colonial approach designed to shift the responsibility for protecting refugees away from Britain. Labour Leader Keir Starmer said: The Conservatives just voted to make it harder to give a safe haven to children fleeing violence and war. They should be ashamed.

Priti Patel is furious at the rising numbers.

But this latest crackdown is not unprecedented, says Portes. It is a particularly nasty set of proposals but this is not something Patel thought up. It is the reheating of a bad idea. Processing migrants offshore rather than in the UK was floated under the Blair government and was rejected for legal, moral, political and practical reasons and hopefully will be again.

Insiders also say that the Home Office is chaotic. It is in many ways a dysfunctional department, says Portes. Judith Dennis, policy manager at the Refugee Council, says that rather than focus on people coming, the Government should look at how it is processing applications for asylum, in a system that is slow and overly bureaucratic. The total number of asylum seekers waiting to see if they have the right to remain has doubled since 2014, and many of them are kept in detention centres where Covid is spreading.

The longer it takes to settle refugees, the harder it is for them to integrate, say Amreen Qureshi and Lucy Mort, who have studied this as part of their work at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Not knowing whether they will be allowed to stay in the UK in the long term, being unable to apply for their family to join them, and not having access to the safety net of a number of welfare benefits, makes is unlikely that asylum seekers and refugees will feel integrated into their new home, which is one of the aspirations.

Many arrive traumatised. On the boats, people, mostly men, fill the decks or spill over the sides of inflatable dinghies and sometimes you can hear a child crying or the boats motor running out of steam. Some men wear masks to protect themselves from Covid, hardly anyone has luggage and they know this is a risk at least seven people are known to have died last year crossing the Channel on these boats. Few know where they are going; the smugglers who give them little information and sometimes dont allow phones on board for fear that officials will be able to track them. They have not heard of Dover or Dungeness and for many of them this is not their first time attempting the crossing.

When Nasimi eventually made it to the UK after multiple failed attempts, it was in a freezer full of sausages and cheese that was switched on just after they left Calais. He can no longer eat those foods. The smugglers shouted in Kosovan and I didnt know what they were saying but luckily there were some Kosovan people in the freezer with us who understood; we had to bang loudly so the UK Border Agency would hear and come take us out. When they opened the freezer we had all passed out.

The UK Border Agency were kind. They gave me chocolate and tea. I didnt speak English but they handed me a piece of paper directing me to the Refugee Councils office. His family have made a home here, in West London. His eldest daughter Shabnam, now 30, founded the Conservative Friends of Afghanistan, which provides a political, business, and diplomatic forum aimed at building a more meaningful and stronger relationship between the UK and Afghanistan. Rabia, 27, works at the department of Health and Social Care, Darius, 24, has a philosophy degree from Kings. Sheekeba, who was born here, is studying law. He is sharing his story to mark the anniversary of the Refugee Convention.

As debate rages on, Dennis says we cant forget the nuance. Some refugees are skilled, some will contribute to society, some are not. But they are just people in extraordinary circumstances who deserve to be treated fairly.

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Smuggling gangs, boats and political point scoring - the migrant crisis - Evening Standard

When it comes to political campaigns, one of the many faults of which I am guilty is that I tend to be too far ahead of the pack. In the late spring and early summer of 2020, I spent a considerable amount of time investigating illegal Channel crossings. I soon concluded that the sheer volume of people arriving on British soil was so great that a crisis was inevitable. A year on, and it seems the mainstream media has caught up with me.

The coverage I generated last year did achieve a certain amount of traction but, I must admit, its impact was more limited than I had hoped. The media, Tory backbenchers and large sections of the population were repeatedly assured by the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, that solutions were close at hand and they chose to believe her. This was unfortunate, because illegal immigration is a practical problem which has serious consequences for our nations security, its infrastructure and its finances. It is quite simply untenable for Britain to continue to allow tens of thousands of people to turn up uninvited having left the safety of France.

Since taking up her post in July 2019, Patel's rhetoric has been ramped up every time she has addressed this issue publicly. ("Patel vows to turn back all migrants boats from France" is perhaps the most effective tabloid headline that she has gained, in August 2020). However, I think her luck is running out. Millions of Brexit voters who expected British borders to be secure after leaving the EU can see that the opposite is the case. Our borders are being breached daily with such ease that is it hard to accept the idea that the government has anything approaching a firm grip on the situation. Whatever the liberal elite claims, the electorate really cares about this. It matters a lot.

Some months ago, I predicted that the number of those illegally crossing the Channel in 2021 would hit 20,000. I am pleased to see that this figure now has mainstream media acceptance. Regrettably, though, I now feel duty bound to go further. My research suggests that 30,000 people will arrive on our shores this year unless something fundamental changes immediately.

I say this because the boats transporting the immigrants are getting bigger, with 35-foot vessels capable of carrying 70-plus people now being unexceptional. I have even heard on the grapevine that new boats up to 50-foot long may soon be deployed by the people smugglers who run these operations. At this rate, the Channel will soon resemble the scenes witnessed in 2015, when vast numbers crossed the Mediterranean in response to Angela Merkel's call for Germany to accept those seeking asylum with the words We can do this!

Last week, as a reaction to the worsening predicament, Ms Patel agreed to give a further 54m of British taxpayers cash to the French government in order to prevent more crossings. Talk about throwing good money after bad. It may be true that the French will use some of these funds to recruit more gendarmes to patrol the Dover Straits, but the gangmasters will simply move further westwards. We should expect to hear of landings at Eastbourne as often as we hear of them at Dover in the near future.

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Boris and Priti seem unable to get a grip on the migrant crisis. Time to bring in Tony Abbott - Telegraph.co.uk

At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, 10 athletes, united not by nation but by refugee status, competed together as the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team. They inspired the world with their resilience and raised awareness about the plight of refugees after the height of the European migrant crisis, which saw thousands tragically lose their lives at sea. As the team returns to compete in Tokyo, the team brings a renewed sense of hope with aspirations for not only gold but to send an empowering message on a global scale.

Six of the original teams athletes swimmer Yusra Mardini, judoka Popole Misenga and runners Anjelina Nadai Lohalith, James Nyang Chiengjiek, Paulo Amotun Lokoro and Rose Nathike Likonyen will return for the Tokyo Games alongside 23 new athletes representing the Refugee Olympic Team. The athletes will now compete across 12 sports.

The team of 29 was selected from a pool of 56 athletes participating in the Olympic Scholarships for Refugee Athletes program, which was established by the International Olympic Committee to provide funding following the success of the 2016 team. A statement issued by the IOC revealed sporting performance, refugee status and personal background were prioritized in the selection process to ensure balanced representativity in terms of sport, gender and regions.

Although no athletes from the 2016 team were able to make it onto the Olympic podium, this years team brings new medal aspirations. The teams most promising chance comes from 23-year-old Kimia Alizadeh Zenozi, who in 2016 became the first woman to win an Olympic medal for Iran when she took home the bronze in the taekwondo 57 kg weight class.

Though this historic feat was celebrated, Alizadeh Zenozi fled her native Iran in January 2020 and was granted refugee status in Germany. In Tokyo, she will aim high and look to improve on her third-place finish to bring home a gold medal for the Refugee Olympic Team.

However, the success of the Refugee Olympic Team is measured by something far greater than medal count. Coming from 11 different countries of origin and 13 different host countries, the athletes serve as a symbol of peace and togetherness, defying national borders. The team serves as a beacon of hope and symbol of solidarity for the 82.4 million people including 35 million children who have been forcibly displaced from their homes around the world.

In a statement congratulating the athletes on their selection to the team, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi highlighted the athletes strength of character and emphasized that they serve as an example of what refugees around the world are capable of when given the chance to succeed.

Surviving war, persecution and the anxiety of exile already makes them extraordinary people, but the fact that they now also excel as athletes on the world stage fills me with immense pride, Grandi wrote. It shows what is possible when refugees are given the opportunity to make the most of their potential.

Regardless of the final standings and medal count, the athletes on the Refugee Olympic Team are the strongest embodiment of the three values of Olympism: excellence, friendship and respect. Each athlete has shown an extraordinary and inspiring amount of determination, grit and resilience to compete at such a high level in spite of the unimaginable disruption to their life. In doing so, they raise awareness about the unique challenges displaced people face and advocate for inclusion, acceptance and tolerance both in sports and in society as a whole.

Carrie McDonald is a rising sophomore in the College. Tokyo Talks appears online every other week.

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MCDONALD | Refugee Olympic Team Sends Powerful Message of Inclusion in Return to Tokyo - Georgetown University The Hoya

Hand-wringing about the plight of migrants crossing the Channel and Mediterranean by boat -and angry words about their treatment - will only go so far. What would liberal progressives actually like to see done?

Much of the world is on fire: Syria remains in the throes of a years-long civil war, Ethiopia is close to embarking on one, just months after its prime minister was awarded a Nobel prize, Afghanistan faces a new Taliban era, and famine, persecution and civil strife force millions of people across the globe to seek sanctuary elsewhere.

Many of those people entirely understandably look to the relative peace and stability of Europe and the UK for refuge. And despite the huge obstacles in their way the safe routes here have all been blocked are prepared to make the dangerous journey to our shores.

In both the UK and Europe, a fixation with the daily arrival of boats, across the Channel and the Med, excites the anger of many and the compassion of others. Neither response seems to be proving particularly helpful in finding a solution.

The reaction of many European countries has been to turn to populists and to try to further close their borders. That is the response of home secretary Priti Patel and the Conservative government of which she is part, too.

Despite us being on the western fringe of the European continent and getting just a trickle of asylum seekers relative to other countries, our government has been keen to use some of the worlds most vulnerable as an easy source of political credit, vowing to make it even harder to seek respite in the UK, despite asylum being a fundamental right recognised in international law.

Patel might be offering nothing in the way of insight or in compassion but all too often the liberal response to the issue of refugees is no better, warmer words aside.

It is easy to say we dont want asylum seekers drowning off our shores, or living in squalid and unsafe conditions in detention centres, and certainly that people should not be shipped to Australian-style prison islands.

But when it comes to saying what we actually want to happen, those of us of a socially democratic persuasion often have less to say and thats because the issue itself is often quite a difficult one. What is it we actually think we should do for the worlds refugees?

One thing we should stop doing is pretending that every refugee crisis in the world is the direct fault of the UK it is neither a true argument nor a politically winning one.

The UK clearly holds some responsibility for the rise of ISIS across Iraq and Syria, and should recognise that. Similarly, we have a broader colonial legacy that has done a lot of harm across much of the world. But equating that with the UK being the cause of the worlds miseries itself removes the agency from the people of the affected countries: when Bashar al-Assad murders his own civilians, he is the person who should be held accountable for that. We should not act as if those of us in liberal democracies are the only people on the planet with agency.

Leaving that point aside, we are left to the practicalities: in a world where millions of people are displaced by persecution, war, natural disasters or famines, what do we do? One step is to make sure we join up our thinking on different border crossings the UK does not exist in isolation versus the rest of the world.

Countries on the eastern and southern borders of the EU have closed many of the relatively safe (land-based) border crossings used by those who would seek asylum. The result is desperate people trying to cross the Mediterranean landing them in the same countries battling to keep them out.

Part of those border countries antagonism to refugees is the unwillingness of the EU to fully commit to fairly sharing the burden of hosting refugees. In theory. people accepted as legitimate asylum seekers should be distributed across EU nations, and there is financial support available to arrival countries from those further away.

In practice, such measures always come a day late and a dollar short, meaning that anti-asylum politicians all too often are propelled to political power in the affected countries. The result is a vicious cycle: the inflow of refugees becomes visible because people have to highlight the death and danger it involves.That keeps the issue high up the news agenda, which leads to calls for political action, and so on and so forth. Even if the current tactics cut the number of asylum seekers by 80%, their increased visibility produces a toxic political mix.

This Mediterranean crisis fuels, in turn, the crossings of the Channel with few options in Europe and hostile political environments in so many countries, the UK becomes an incredibly attractive option for those with the resources to reach it, not least because many more people speak English than other European languages, and want that head start towards integration.

As we, like the EU, have closed off most safe and legitimate routes to claiming asylum, boats become the option of last resort. And once again, the harsh approach fails on its own terms keeping the crossings in the headlines, with all the divisiveness that entails, while helping almost no-one.

The current approach fails on its own terms. Going harsher would do the same it would simply incentivise media coverage of the issue, both from right wing papers highlighting that even these new draconian measures got missed and people slipped through, and from activists trying to expose what would, from experience, surely be grim and dangerous conditions, if asylum seekers were kept offshore somewhere, for instance.

Some of us might think the right thing to do is to just drop restrictions or quotas altogether, and say that anyone found to be a genuine refugee always a tricky thing to define, but lets park that for today would be welcome to seek asylum in the UK. This would certainly feel morally admirable, but it may not prove either politically or practically sustainable.

The main problem is that the world is so chaotic and dangerous now that there are huge number of people seeking asylum almost all of them living in poorer countries. UN statistics suggest there are more than 25 million refugees around the world, alongside a further 50 million people displaced within their own country.

More than 80% of those people are in developing world countries richer nations do far, far less than their fair share here. Turkey alone, for example, has more than 3.6 million refugees despite having a population only slightly higher than the UKs.

A wave of several hundred thousand skilled immigrants from eastern Europe in the 2000s prompted a political backlash that created the Brexit movement. An influx of millions of refugees would risk political consequences even more dire assuming it ever got approved as a proposal in the first place. And that's not even to consider the damage it could do to countries suddenly denuded of much of their populations.

A sincere effort to do more as a good global citizen while also making asylum a smaller political issue would have to be a compromise. People do not spend thousands of pounds often all the money they have in the world and risk the lives of their children for fun or out of spite. They do it because they have no other choices. Giving people safer and better choices is the way to end the Mediterranean and Channel boat crises.

The government repeatedly says it wants people to take legitimate routes to seek asylum in the UK essentially asking people in camps in Turkey or elsewhere to apply for UK entry from there. This would be a safer and fairer option, if only it were a real one: an unfairness of entry by boat is that it is an option only open to relatively rich, middle-class asylum seekers. Poorer families cant even afford it.

The issue with the legitimate channels is people know their odds of success are astronomically low, because we take so few people from them. Instead of a trickle of a few thousand people, we should take hundreds of thousands. If we manage to make the terms fair, and let people work as they come, that could be increased over time if there was a lack of political backlash.

We pride ourselves often undeservedly on being a nation that believes in fair play, and yet as it stands we have set up a game for refugees where it is impossible to win without cheating, and then we condemn the cheaters who actually get here. Un-rigging the rules of the game might just be able to please everyone.

Finally, we have to remember to stand for what we believe, and to have and try to win the argument. If we have politicians that believe in the moral and ethical case for asylum, they should make that case, rather than dodging the issue or trying to deflect it.

Part of why we have ended up with a hostile environment is that almost no politicians challenged it. If we want to be a global Britain, and a good global citizen, we should help our neighbours when they are in need. We can hope otherwise, but one day we might need that help in turn, too we dont want to be forced to hope that other people are kinder than we managed to be.

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What is the liberal response to the migrant crisis? - The New European

Omar El Akkads new book, What Strange Paradise, is informed by his work as a journalist.

Nathan Howard/The Globe and Mail

Fiction has enormous power to impart truth. You can read fact after fact about current events, but a made-up story might be the thing that carries those events under your skin and into your soul. Omar El Akkads new novel, What Strange Paradise, does this kind of work.

Anyone who has read news articles about the migrant crisis will have absorbed many facts. They will know about the terrible conditions on the boats, the huge risks of a clandestine crossing in such a vessel, the deep desperation that leads people to take that life-and-death gamble. The many, many deaths.

El Akkads novel, like his first, American War, offers a different kind of perspective to even a well-informed reader. At the same time, it is very much informed by his work as a journalist at this newspaper, for the most part.

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I think probably for the rest of my life the residual experiences and memories from my decade in journalism are going to worm their way into my fiction, says El Akkad, 39, from Portland, Ore., where he now lives.

Those 10 years at The Globe and Mail were my education. I had a front row seat to so much of history. Which is not to say that I got it right or that I have any right to continue writing fiction based on the things that I used to write non-fiction about, he says. But those experiences constituted a kind of writing education that otherwise I dont think I would have ever gotten. And Ill take that over any MFA in the world any day.

The novel tells of the shipwreck of a rickety boat, its passengers from Africa and the Middle East on a desperate, dangerous trip to the Greek Island of Kos and it tells of freedom.

The story is presented in alternating chapters marked Before and After. Before describes nine-year-old Amirs life as a Syrian refugee the family settles in Alexandria, Egypt and what happens on the doomed boat. After is set on the Greek island where the bodies of those on the boat wash up. Amir, apparently the only survivor, is helped by a local 15-year-old girl whose own grandparents, presumably Scandinavian, performed a different sort of migration to the island buying a property there in their retirement.

The opening paragraphs will bring something else to mind for many readers: the photograph of the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose Syrian refugee family had also been heading for Kos, ultimately hoping for a better life in Canada.

The child lies on the shore, the novel begins. He is facedown, with his arms outstretched. From a distance it looks like he could be playing at flight.

The photo of Kurdi was seared in El Akkads mind as he wrote this book, he says, along with another photograph, of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his not-quite-two-year-old daughter, Valeria, who drowned together in the Rio Grande trying to cross from Mexico into the United States in 2019.

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It wasnt simply the images that motivated El Akkad, but what happened or didnt afterward.

They provoked immense outrage for what felt like a very short amount of time. And eventually people moved on to whatever it is they were going to be outraged about next. And more than almost anything, that sense and that privilege of temporary outrage and instantaneous forgetting is the thing that I was writing against, El Akkad says over the phone this week.

But that sense of how much of a privilege it is to be temporarily outraged by injustice and then immediately move on is the thing that drove the writing of this book.

El Akkad began writing the book in the early days of Donald Trumps presidency, and it is inspired as much by the refugee crisis at the southern U.S. border as it is about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

It is also, as El Akkad describes it, a repurposed fable: Peter Pan reinterpreted as a contemporary child refugee.

Born in Cairo, El Akkad grew up in Qatar and moved to Canada with his family when he was 16, settling in Montreal. Ive been a guest on someone elses land since I was five years old, he says. And Ive always found that fiction, where you can alter the contours of your invented world to fit whatever reality is like, always felt more like home to me than any real place.

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Theres something else about fiction. While El Akkad is aware of the power of journalism you change the world for the better simply by telling the truth; thats an incredible mission statement he believes that fiction also has the power to effect change.

Its one of the few things that I carried with me from my journalistic career into my fiction-writing career: this iron-clad belief that there must be a chance that the work youre doing is going to cause some kind of positive change in the world. I dont think its possible to do the work we do otherwise. You have to believe a fundamentally irrational thing: a kind of alchemy where by stepping away from reality and by altering reality you can somehow cause a change in that reality. At its core, its a fundamentally irrational thing to believe. But at times its the only load-bearing beam holding up a very flimsy house.

El Akkad, 39, says joining The Globe was the second-best decision he ever made. The best decision, he says, was knowing it was time to leave, to focus on being a novelist.

His first published novel, American War written on weekends and in the middle of the night while he was still a full-time journalist is a terrifying work of speculative fiction. Amid the brutal effects of climate change, a second American civil war breaks out in 2074. American War won awards, was an international bestseller and has been translated into 13 languages.

The manuscript was acquired by legendary Alfred A. Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta, to whom What Strange Paradise is dedicated. In an appreciation El Akkad wrote for The Globe after Mehtas death in late 2019, the novelist recalled his first conversation with Mehta about American War; within five minutes on the phone, El Akkad knew that Mehta understood exactly what he was trying to do. You think youre reading one thing, but youre really reading another, Mehta told El Akkad.

This sentence also applies to What Strange Paradise in a number of ways. It is so gripping a page-turner that its brutal message feels organic and never lecture-ish. Through wisdom imparted by various characters, the reader receives new perspectives; the privileged Western reader in particular is confronted with him- or herself in an uncomfortable way.

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The hotel guests on the Greek Island who grumble that they cant use the beach because of the shipwreck. The disdain with which tourists in Alexandria treat a young boy hocking t-shirts. The canister of powdered milk in Amirs home: he could tell how high-quality the product was by how Western the people on the packaging looked. The explanation Amirs father gives him for the hellish situation in Syria: it did not start with bombs or bullets or revolutionary graffiti. It started with a drought. Dont call this a conflict, he tells his son. Theres no such thing as conflict. Theres only scarcity, theres only need.

The novel, published this week, is already receiving raves. The New York Times said it deserves to be an instant classic. The reviewer said she hadnt loved a book this much in a long time.

El Akkad jokes that its unclear what else the reviewer has been reading; perhaps a string of bad books. Theres more to this than El Akkads genuine-seeming humility. He feels uncomfortable celebrating anything to do with this book its launch, the rave.

I am by disposition drawn to writing about the things that make me angry in this world. And whether thats a good or bad thing or whether I have any right to write about the topics that I choose, I find the entire process difficult and it makes it difficult to talk about the resulting work in any kind of celebratory way, he says, before modestly referencing what he called a fairly decent New York Times review.

I cant celebrate these books. Its not how I think about them. I want to exist in a world where I didnt feel compelled to write about what I write about. So its a difficult place to inhabit as a writer and I dont know how long I can keep doing it, or if me doing it is valuable enough or is doing anything to change the things Im concerned about. Those are all open questions for me.

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Omar El Akkads new novel What Strange Paradise is driven by outrage over the refugee crisis - The Globe and Mail