News 07 April 2026 I Beg You to Understand How Migrants Feel

By Mohammedali Abunajela, Spokesperson, Director of DMC

I often return to a simple but difficult question: what does it feel like to leave home?

To answer it, we must look beyond numbers and headlines. We must try to understand the lived reality of millions of migrants and displaced people. People who are not just moving, but searching for safety, for dignity, for a chance to rebuild a life.

Over the years, my work travels have brought me close to migrants, host communities, and policymakers. I have listened carefully. Sometimes to words. Often to what is not said. From these encounters, a clearer picture begins to form.

This is how migrants feel.

It often begins quietly. At dawn, the house feels different - not empty, but slipping from your hands, as if the walls remember your laughter and ordinary days. A suitcase waits by the door, holding fragments of a life too large to carry. In the kitchen lingers the warmth of yesterday's bread, a cup untouched.

Outside, the street breathes as it always has, unaware that for someone inside, this is the last morning they will belong. Home, once ordinary, now reveals its true weight: the quiet certainty of being rooted, known, and never having to explain where you come from.

This is how it begins - not with movement, but with rupture.

To be a migrant is not simply to travel. It is to be uprooted from your roots, separated from the invisible threads that make life feel whole. Home is not only a place on a map. It is the language spoken without effort, the food that does not need explanation, the routine that unfolds without thought. It is knowing which step creaks, which neighbour waves, which season smells like rain before it arrives. These details are small, but together they form a world. Migration unravels that world.

People do not leave these things easily. They do not abandon familiarity without reason.

For many families, the deepest pain is carried in silence through the lives of their children. Some grow up without stable access to education, their learning interrupted by displacement or uncertainty about tomorrow. A parent may stand in a shop holding a simple bottle of milk, calculating whether it can be afforded, while a baby cries without understanding why the answer is not always yes. Basic needs - food, clothing, school materials - become heavy decisions.

Children often cannot yet understand the weight of these limits; they simply trust their parents to provide. In those moments, mothers and fathers may feel a quiet sense of failure, not because they lack love, but because circumstances have temporarily taken away the means to give what feels fundamental. Dignity can feel fragile when the simplest acts of care become uncertain.

Something must press hard enough to make departure feel like the only option. War redraws the meaning of safety, turning ordinary streets into dangerous ground. Climate change works more slowly but no less forcefully, drying fields, raising waters, and shifting the balance between survival and loss. Poverty narrows choices until staying becomes its own risk. Migration, in these moments, is not driven by desire - it is driven by necessity. No one chooses to become uprooted if there is still a way to remain. They leave because staying becomes impossible.

The act of leaving carries quiet grief and fear of the unknown. Some departures happen in haste, under the sound of urgency. Others are planned slowly, painfully, piece by piece. Possessions are reduced to what can be carried. Documents become precious. Goodbyes are often unfinished: "we will see each other again, this is not forever". Yet everyone knows something irreversible has already begun.

The journey itself demands courage. Some cross deserts where the horizon offers no direction. Some step onto fragile boats where the water feels endless. Some endure the fear of not knowing whether tomorrow will come.

Not every story reaches safety. Some lives are lost between borders, between shores, between decisions made too late or too early. For those who survive, survival itself becomes a quiet burden - gratitude mixed with memory, relief mixed with exhaustion.

And then, if they are fortunate, they arrive.

Arrival is often imagined as an ending, but it is only another beginning. Safety does not immediately restore belonging. Even when danger has been escaped, uncertainty remains.

Language must be learned. Systems must be understood. Work must be found. Identity must be renegotiated. A person who once felt known can suddenly feel invisible, reduced to a category, a label, a statistic.

Sometimes, the welcome is warm. Communities open doors. Strangers offer guidance. Kindness appears in small gestures: a translated form, a shared meal, a patient conversation. These moments matter deeply. They remind the newly arrived that humanity can cross borders more easily than politics.

But this is not always the experience.

Some migrants encounter suspicion instead of understanding. Narratives can form quickly, shaping perception before individuals can speak for themselves. Words like burden, threat, or outsider can create distance, making people feel as though their presence requires justification. After surviving danger, rejection can feel like another wound - quieter, less visible, but deeply felt.

To arrive in safety and still feel unwelcome is a difficult contradiction. It creates a sense of standing at the edge of belonging, neither fully inside nor entirely outside. A person may begin to feel like a stranger not only to others, but sometimes to themselves. The confidence once rooted in familiarity is replaced by careful observation, by the need to adapt continuously.

And yet, even here, resilience persists.

Routine slowly begins again. A new street becomes recognizable. A market becomes familiar. Words once difficult begin to flow more easily. A favorite place is discovered. The first moment of laughter without translation appears unexpectedly. Bit by bit, life reassembles itself in new forms.

Migration reshapes identity. Home becomes layered rather than singular. Memory travels alongside the present. The taste of a childhood meal prepared in a new kitchen becomes an act of continuity. Speaking one's language, even quietly, becomes an act of preservation. Cultural roots do not disappear; they adapt, extending into unfamiliar ground.

Migrants carry more than belongings. They carry skills, knowledge, perspectives shaped by having seen more than one way of living. They contribute to the places they arrive in gradual but meaningful ways: through work, creativity, care, and participation in shared society.

Movement has always been part of human history. Civilizations themselves are built upon encounters between people who once came from somewhere else.

To understand migration requires more than analysis. It requires imagination, empathy, and a willingness to see beyond simplified narratives. Most people seek stability, dignity, and the possibility of building a future. Migration begins when these become impossible to secure in one place and must be sought in another.

No one willingly abandons the comfort of familiarity without cause. No one chooses uncertainty if security remains possible.

So I beg you to understand how migrants feel - not to agree on every policy, not to ignore complexity, but to recognize the human experience beneath the headlines. To see the courage it takes to begin again. To acknowledge the loss carried quietly. To remember that behind every movement is a person trying, as all people do, to find a place where life can continue with dignity.

Migration is not only about crossing borders. It is about carrying fragments of one life into another, about rebuilding meaning where it has been disrupted. It is about standing in a new place, unfamiliar yet slowly becoming known, and finding a way-through effort, through patience, through hope - to belong again, to find dignity again, to find a home.

Do you know why I say this with such certainty?

Because I have lived it.

I was once a refugee in my own country. Today, I am a migrant. I have known fear. I have known loss. I have known what it means to be accepted and what it means not to be.

And I know this: behind every migrant story is not a statistic, but a person. A person trying, as we all are, to live with dignity and find home.