Mmigrant workers and undocumented faces particular difficulties during the war in Lebanon. People from these groups have been rejected from shelters that i first hand receives Lebanese citizens and registered refugees, according to migration researcher Jasmin Lilian Diab. Simultaneously, large pharmaceutical companies – including J&J, Roche, AstraZeneca, and BMS – are have many of them difficult to leave the country.
Over a million people are displaced in Lebanon after Israel's offensive, according to Lebanese authoritiesIn an opinion piece in The New Humanitarian directs the Lebanese migration researcher Jasmin Lilian Diab sheds light on how migrants in Lebanon do not always have the opportunity to seek protection after fleeing their homes.
Many Lebanese may seek protection from family and relatives. andra refugees live in state-run shelters. On March 19, UNHCR that such shelters help about 128,000 people. At the same time, thousands of people live on the streets, in tents and cars in Lebanon, according to International Rescue Committee.
One of the refugee groups that is often left without shelter is migrant workers.
– Everyone is traumatized and hungry, says the Ethiopian activist Banchi Yimer for BBC podcast Focus on Africa.
Yimer is the founder of the organization Own Lega Possessed, which now offers various necessities to migrants in Lebanon. She says that many are forced to live on the streets because they do not have access to shelters.
- The crisis has hit them [the migrants] hard. It has left many with nowhere to go and dependent on community organizations, churches, their embassies and NGOs for safety,” said Mathieu Luciano, country director for the UN migration agency. IOM in Lebanon i on video on the UN's television channel UN Media.
There are no updated figures on the number of migrants in Lebanon, but in August last year it was estimated that IOM that the country is hosting approximately 165,000 migrants, of which around 4,500 are children.
Migrant networks have themselves organized emergency housing in churches and shared apartments, writes Jasmin Lilian Diab in The New Humanitarian. In addition, a small number of civil society groups and some formal humanitarian actors have offered accommodation for migrants. For example, migrants are being welcomed into a Jesuit church in Beirut, where 200 people his protected as the American news agency PBS visited.
- They don't accept me because I'm a foreigner. The school dormitories are only open to Lebanese and Syrians, says Almas Asaminum for PBS. She is an Ethiopian migrant worker who has sought protection from the Jesuit Church.
While it is difficult for many migrant workers to seek protection within Lebanon, many also lack the documentation required to flee the country.
- In many situations, employers take workers' travel documents and passports. So they can't just go to the airport and flee the country, says Adam Coogle from Human Rights Watch for BBC's "Focus on Africa".
“Even if they have their documents, the employer can file a lawsuit against them, making it impossible for them to leave the country until the case is resolved,” Coogle continues.
In addition, children of migrants may have particular difficulty obtaining the documentation they need to leave Lebanon, writes UN Women and other organizations in a reportIn some cases, a travel permit is required from the children's fathers, which creates problems for children with unknown fathers, for example. In addition, children may be denied citizenship of some countries if their parents are not married.
Recently, news broke that Sweden and the EU are sending SEK 65 million respectively 100 million EUR in humanitarian aid to Lebanon. The money will be used for emergency housing, among other things. But migrant workers risk ending up outside the aid systems to which the money goes. In his text, the researcher highlights Jasmine Lilian Diab the problem when aid systems, in order to create order, distribute aid based on legal status:
– As more and more people flee the bombs in search of safety in Lebanon, it reminds us that wars rarely create new inequalities. More often, they expose the inequalities that were already there – and force humanitarian systems to decide whether they are willing to see them.
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