Rahimullah waits. In order to get picked for a day’s work, it’s best to get started early. He’s said his morning prayers. Had breakfast. Eggs, bread, and tea. He’s walked for 40 minutes to find a good spot on one of the busiest roads in the city. Rahimullah will likely be picked for a day’s work to fix plants on the sidewalk of a suburban housing area. Peshawar, a city of 4 million people in the northwest of Pakistan, seems sleepy right now, but that will soon change.

Cities, they say, have souls. They emit a mythology from their buildings and infrastructure, from their layers of history and anonymous crowds. But it is also the people who make its soul. Pakistan’s daily wage laborers, including Afghan nationals such as Rahimullah, are makers of Peshawar and other cities across Pakistan.

Rahimullah has, literally, transformed Peshawar with his own hands. Roads, sewage lines, buildings, planting flowers, planting crops—you name them, he’s worked them all. Within his neighborhood, a small informal housing area—or slums, as they’re often called—he’s built homes, made footpaths, bridges, and more.

Then you have women like Qayinat, also Afghan. Her hands are hardened from detergent and water and covered in calluses. Every day she walks from her informal house on the outskirts of the city to get to upper-middle-class homes where she washes clothes and cleans for a day’s pay of around 550 Pakistani rupees (around 2.50 U.S. dollars).

You won’t hear much about Rahimullah or Qayinat though. Daily wage laborers are not venerated in the official and, increasingly, even popular, imagination. Refugees and undocumented migrants are often reduced to tropes and discussed only through the prism of geopolitics, situated outside of the discourse on cities or mentioned only in passing, assumed simply to be waiting to return home.

The Afghans in urban Pakistan that I spoke to for my book project claimed the city as their own, not because they saw themselves as “contributors to the economy,” but because they knew their labor underpinned its very functioning.

Pakistan has the fastest rate of urbanization in South Asia. For years, policymakers have boasted they are building “world-class” cities. Much of their inspiration (and funding) comes from their modernization crush, the Gulf Arab states (read: gated communities, securitized high-rises, shopping malls, and Sunni mosques).

Yet, as the late, great Mike Davis told us, urbanization in the Global South is riddled with inequalities, driven by colonial legacies of spatial segregation, the rampant restructuring of postcolonial economies by international financial institutions, and the middle-class domination over the state.

The same is true in Pakistan. There’s no oil-rich economy as in the Gulf Arab countries, industrialization is non-existent, the country’s main exports are textiles and agricultural produce, and the dependency on IMF loans and World Bank projects are debilitating.

Urbanization in Pakistan is driven by forced migration from internal and regional wars, climate disaster, and botched development projects. Alongside Afghans, you also have Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, Sri Lankans, Yemenis, and more. Yet Pakistan’s Afghans are the labor that allows capitalist development projects and aspirations to middle-class urbanism.

Millions of Afghans have lived in Pakistan over the past 40 years—at least 8 million persons at its peak and around 3 million today. The Pakistani establishment, and international actors—states, NGOs, and liberal commentators—like to celebrate the country’s “hospitality” toward Afghan refugees.

This is disingenuous.

Most of Pakistan’s Afghans have come from low-income backgrounds. The majority have been unable to become citizens. While constitutionally anyone born in the country is eligible for citizenship, successive governments have blocked this.

In recent years millions of Afghans have been coerced to leave Pakistan, often with the complicity of the international humanitarian regime. Since the mid-2000s, millions of Afghans have left Pakistan. Some returned to Afghanistan, but since war never stopped in the country, many moved elsewhere—Europe, Iran, Turkey—lived transnational lives, or, simply, stayed in Pakistan.

When, in 2021 the Taliban recaptured power in Afghanistan and Afghan nationals sought refuge, medical treatment, transit, or reunification with family already in Pakistan, they found land borders difficult to cross, beatings and extortion rampant, and visas nearly impossible to get. Pakistan’s hostile borders have been emboldened by the violent, racist, and exclusionary border regimes of richer nations that have consistently been hostile to Afghans.

The Pakistani state also shoulders sizeable responsibility for the protracted conflicts in Afghanistan, especially from the 1990s onward, when it has contributed to elongating conflict in Afghanistan, most notably through its support of the Taliban. It also supported the disastrous U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan, marked by massive civilian casualties.

The nation is jingoistic and exclusionary. Anti-poor urban planning, the shuttering of refugee camps, and displaced persons being told to “move on” from relief camps means many can’t get access to the basics (housing, electricity, sanitation), so they find other ways to do so. Despite the increasingly hostile attitudes of those in power at the national level, the city accommodates different ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, and classes within a single space—albeit subject to hierarchical, uneven divisions. Afghans and Pakistanis live and work side by side with each other in shared daily struggles, forming community and companionship as they do so.

They literally expand the city—not through the skyline of malls, mosques, and high-rises policymakers would have you believe, but, through the katchi abadi, the informal housing area, which is the true and more complex face of urbanity in the country.

In sympathetic policy circles or polite middle-class living room conversation, when it comes to Pakistan’s low-income Afghans, you might hear how they are economically useful, They’ve contributed a lot to our economy. At other times its, Afghans know how to manage hardship, or, They’re so resilient.

But should one’s humanity be contingent on economic productivity? “Love us… when we’re wretched, suicidal, naked, contributing nothing,” British Muslim poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan teaches us.

Tropes of resilience distract from the more insidious reasons as to why people need to be resilient in the first place—and not everyone can be.

Most of the people I interviewed were unequivocal: Their lives are hard because of failings of the state, elites, international humanitarian agencies, and repeated military interventions in Afghanistan—including Pakistan’s own repeated interference in its neighboring country and those of imperialist persuasions (Soviet, American, European). Perhaps, then, as anthropologist Anila Daulatzai, urges us, we should be thinking about the reparations Pakistan owes Afghan people, which must include Pakistan’s own Afghan population.

So, if we choose to reflect, as you pass through Pakistan’s cities, Bertolt Brecht’s compassionate recognition of workers across civilizations will echo in your ears. So too will the region’s own Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ode to those who live in the broken roads of slum dwellings. Stop in Hayatabad, a township celebrated as Peshawar’s architectural jewel-in-the-crown, and ask any local, Afghan or Pakistani, and they’ll tell you: It was Afghan laborers who built it.

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Nayapara refugee camp is one of two government-run refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, a coastal district in Bangladesh. The camp is inhabited by Rohingya people who fled from ethnic and religious persecution in neighboring Myanmar. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

A large number of Rohingya refugees came to Bangladesh by boat. Many were stopped by Bangladesh’s border guards and pushed back to sea. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

In some camps, rains cause walkways to flood. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

A boy reads the Quran at a religious school inside a camp. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

A group of people play cards inside a camp. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

In 2015, the image of a Syrian child, drowned and washed ashore near the Turkish town of Bodram, went viral. This singular, visceral image of the hapless refugee victim spoke to what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt—herself a refugee who survived the Holocaust—called the “politics of emotions”: our unstable, image-driven will to humanitarianism. But even as images like this spurred donations and the opening of borders, countless simultaneous narratives portrayed Syrian men seeking refuge as rapists and violent aggressors. Both stories showed the refugee as either victim or perpetrator, closing off any deeper examination of who these people were, their motivations for moving across borders, and what their lives were like after leaving home.

Resettlement is much more complicated than either of these narratives—as are refugees themselves, who possess a wide variety of social and political identities, even in closed humanitarian spaces like refugee camps. Refugees carry the heavy memories of distinct and violent histories as they move across borders and face the multiple, layered histories of the places they resettle. One way to begin to grapple with mass displacement caused by human transgressions is to try and understand their condition.

I work in refugee camp settlements in southeastern Bangladesh, which house close to one million Rohingya, an ethnic group of predominantly Muslim people from neighboring Myanmar. Despite the collective vulnerability and the apparent uniformity of life inside the camps, political and social class manifests itself in subtle, yet observable ways.

The Indian subcontinent as a whole is no stranger to the chaos of mass displacement, with the partition of India and Pakistan (of which Bangladesh was then part) in 1947 which spawned what is considered to be one of the largest episodes of forced migration, with around 15 million displaced. And Bangladesh’s war for independence from Pakistan in 1971 produced around ten million refugees, some of which remained stateless until 2000. Bangladesh’s present-day will to humanitarianism is ensconced in its collective memories of the upheaval of displacement in the scale of millions and the memory of the terror of those times.

The latest influx of the Rohingya into Bangladesh took place in 2017 as a result of a systematic ethno-nationalist campaign of violence by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military. The Biden administration recently made a formal declaration that the Tatmadaw’s mass killings, rape, arson, and the razing of villages constituted genocide against the Rohingya minority. Stripped bare of any citizenship rights and forced to flee, the Rohingya entered the borders of Bangladesh.

Despite the goodwill engendered by Bangladesh’s open border policy with regard to the Rohingya, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has told the UN that the Rohingya refugees must return to Myanmar. Refugees face the hardships of resettlement and statelessness inside the settlements scattered across the country’s southern border. During the summer of 2017 I visited Balukhali (which later became part of the Kutupalong-Balukhali Expansion Camp or “mega camp”- the world’s largest by population) amidst the chaos of thousands of new arrivals each day. At a glance, the camp appears to be a great equalizer: Everyone lives in makeshift bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, and everyone is vulnerable to monsoon rains and landslides thanks to the hilly terrain.

But while females constitute over half of Bangladesh’s Rohingya population, and over half are also children under the age of 18, the majority of the settlements’ appointed leaders are men who either held property or owned businesses back in Myanmar. These leaders oversee smaller administrative units within the settlements with the task of reporting on problems with relief disbursal and any conflicts within their jurisdiction. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other agencies operating inside the camps are seeking ways to make these governance structures more inclusive and transparent. But the adoption of gender quotas and elections varies across the different settlements.

There is also financial stratification within the camps. Rohingya-owned businesses inside the settlements include pharmacies, tailoring shops, restaurants, and shops that sell packaged food and durable items like batteries and electronics. Business owners rely on inventory loans from nearby Bengali enterprises. Often these Rohingya business owners were involved in commerce back in Myanmar, and many have formed relationships with Bengali business owners also operating inside the camps. At the other end are the Rohingya who take up ad hoc day labor jobs inside the settlements, primarily in construction. And some refugees work for the NGOs and UN agencies and receive more stable incomes.

Camp settlements like Kutupalong, which I last visited in the summer of 2021, reproduce the conflicts of the local communities back in Myanmar. Complex, organized networks involved in human trafficking and drug smuggling coexist alongside the proliferation of U.N.-based agencies and other NGOs, both international and local, that operate inside the settlements. The government of Bangladesh has made progress in increasing prosecutions and convictions of trafficking-related crimes and kidnappings. But trafficking to India, Thailand, and Malaysia remains a major problem.

Politics divide the Rohingya in Bangladesh as well. Two major groups have clashed over repatriation. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) represents a militant insurgency group known to operate inside Myanmar. According to my interviews with local Rohingya leaders, they hold covert military trainings in forest areas around Kutupalong. Bangladeshi law enforcement agencies also reportedly periodically seize ARSA arms and ammunition from inside the settlements. The ARSA seeks the self-determination of the Rohingya but have not readily supported recent repatriation initiatives.

On the other hand, the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH) has made clear demands for repatriation, including via a “Go home” campaign that includes a Twitter presence. The leader of this movement was recently murdered, with some speculation that the ARSA may have been involved. These sharp tensions point to the lack of a unified political voice amongst the Rohingya, and that the path forward to political sovereignty and rights is by no means clear.

In fact, the very legal identity of the Rohingya in Bangladesh is also split: between those who arrived in the early 1990s (when a previous genocidal campaign was launched against them in Myanmar) and have formal refugee status, and the post-2017 arrivals. This more recent group, declared as forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals, have not been accorded refugee status nor are they even recognized as stateless. As a result, they are ineligible to apply for asylum- and in fact do not have claims to rights under any rights-affirming state or body. These differences in legal status accorded by the Bangladesh government signify how the instrument of memory and the shared remembrance of the country’s own violent past have cleaved to both include and exclude the same group of people with the same history of persecution.

Arendt pointed out that the anachronistic rightlessness of the refugee, which came from a lack of membership within any political community, was tantamount to an expulsion from humanity. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote, “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness … Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.”

The case of the Rohingya, nevertheless, demonstrates that there are degrees of expulsion and inhumanity in refugee societies. Refugees don’t all play either the victim or the perpetrator. Rather, they live complex, hierarchical social and political lives. We need to listen to their stories and understand their conditions in order to confront the histories of mass displacement, and maybe even address them.

The post What We Miss When We See the Plight of the Refugee appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.