Refugee — migrant — what’s in a word?

2.500 people have drowned in the Mediterranean this year while trying to enter Europe. More have died on roads – not least the 71 people found dead in a truck that had just crossed from Serbia to Austria. Altogether around 300,000 people so far this year have attempted these dangerous crossings. It is now a nightly feature on our national news.

As relatively wealthy people living in prosperous nations in the west – how do we respond to this? It is genuinely overwhelming and seems to have come out of nowhere.

Perhaps we should be providing more aid? Perhaps we should be doing more to break the people-smuggling gangs that profit from this misery? Or, perhaps we should be investing more into the places these folks come from to make it more amenable to stay there in the first place? Perhaps we are just afraid that “there wont be enough left for us” — that seems to be a reaction we see on the news.

So far our response has been that we (the UK) seem to be mainly talking about building more fences in Calais.

Matt Dominey a 17 year old recently visited Calais and spent a day distributing supplies and listening to stories – here is his account. His view is that at least one thing we can do for those fleeing conflict is take our fair share of refugees. So he started this petition.

Maybe it’s not much but it sounds like a good starting point.