Samiul Bashar Samin

A little boy lay belly-down in the sand. Gentle waves lapped his face. The beach was dour and overcast, whereas the boy was a patchwork of color – his shirt bright red, his long shorts deep blue, his skin perfect vanilla. With arms by his side and palms facing the sky, it looked as if he had fallen and could not get up. If one kept looking, they soon noticed that his shoes seemed unusually small, and his head unusually big – too big for his body. The truth is, he looked more like a mislaid doll than a young boy, drowned at sea and washed up on a Turkish beach.
Of course, Alan Kurdi was not the first Syrian asylum seeker to drown while attempting to cross the Aegean Sea. Thousands of deaths preceded his, and there would be hundreds more in the subsequent months. But there was something about the image of Alan that left people shocked, disgusted and moved to compassion. What was it, then, about that one boy and that one picture that made people finally give a damn?
The easy answer is that Alan looked like one of their own children. The hard answer is our genes, which code for inexorable biological routines triggered by self-interest. The truth is somewhere in-between: the interplay between culture and genes that saddles humans with a psychology fixated on in-groups (people we consider to be like us or part of our community) and out-groups (people we consider to be different to us or not part of our community).
It takes deceptively little to engage the modules of our brains that are concerned with group membership, and thus deceptively little to trigger behaviours of empathy as opposed to apathy or antipathy. The first thing to note about Alan is that people tend to react with compassion when they encounter children, especially young children who depend on adults for their safety.
To Western eyes, for lack of a better description, Alan looked normal. The little sneakers; the neat, plain, colorful clothing – bright red shirt, long blue shorts. These seemingly insignificant details were crucial: Alan looked like he could have been one of us. And because he looked so familiar and so innocent, the altruistic modules of our brains that respond to in-group members were engaged, and people felt empathy rather than indifference or antipathy. Yet had Alan been wearing darker, or unclean or tattered clothing, or clothing typical of a specific culture, there is every possibility that the tragic image of his death would have given rise to nothing more than momentary sympathy before he went on to become just another statistic, just another forgotten Tweet.
If it had been a 28-year-old man with a beard who washed up onshore, it wouldn’t have gotten the same reaction. As it turned out, a young Middle Eastern man with a beard was the image the world saw just two months later when a group of terrorists gunned down 130 people in Paris. Among the first pictures of the attackers to be shown in news coverage was an image of AbdelhamidAbaaoud, a young bearded man holding a Quran in one hand and an ISIS flag in the other. At the same time, it was being suggested that one or more of the attackers might have come through the refugee pipeline from Syria.
In an instant, images associated with the Syrian refugee crisis were no longer of drowned babes and desperate families on the march, but of angry young men with beards. Much of the compassion and political goodwill that had built for the Syrians quickly evaporated. Talk turned from helping those fleeing the war to waging war by airstrike.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of pushback against refugees in Germany, Australia, the US and any number of other countries is how many people in the fray see themselves and their society as compassionate, tolerant and hospitable. In fact, it’s not uncommon in the West for first- and second-generation citizens – themselves the children and grandchildren of refugees – to object to further intakes of refugees and immigrants.
So it is that Germans have extraordinary compassion for the plight of asylum seekers – and simultaneously wish they would go elsewhere. The British want to help asylum seekers escape from barbarity, but spit in disgust at their apparently barbaric ways. Americans want theirs to be an open and inclusive society, but want to protect and conserve the society they have. The Italians want to turn back the boats, but want the people on the boats to be safe. And Australians want mother and child to be reunited with the father and husband who bravely came by boat, but don’t want family members of refugees and immigrants to come, lest the country be swamped by undesirables.In our multicultural, international, highly mobile world, fear of the outsider might be one more instinct we will have to overcome