Treating migrants like natural disasters 'dehumanizing'

The more the world talks about migrants as numbers, the more it dehumanizes and stigmatizes them, according to Professor Ayhan Kaya. ?With such problems, we are all responsible for the loss of lives of these human beings,? he adds Society tends to associate migrants with words such as ?influx,? ?occupation,? ?invasion? and ?flood,? all of which echo the discourse used in natural disasters, according to a scholar. ?By doing that we forget the fact they are human beings escaping tragedies, or trying to find a safer future for themselves and for their families,? said Professor Ayhan Kaya, who recently edited a book on Turkey?s history of migration from the 14th to the 21st centuries.

There seems to be an increase in the number of refugees going to Europe through Turkey. To what should we attribute this increase and the case of Aylan [Kurdi], which seems to have finally attracted the attention of the world to the tragedies of the migrants?

2014-15 are years in which the number of refugees in the entire world has become the largest since World War II. 60 million refugees have had to leave their homelands for one reason or another, either because of political turmoil, internal wars, or environmental disasters.

I don?t like talking with figures and statistics. This is recently one of my concerns. For instance, we talk about 2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 1.6 million asylum seekers in the West. We only talk about numbers.

This is very risky. The more we talk about the refugees and migrants in numbers, the more we statisticize, securitize and stigmatize migrants and refugees, the more we dehumanize them. Here lies the main problem.

Almost everyone, including ordinary citizens, politicians, journalists,...