Smartphone use on the refugee trail

                                                                                                        Ars looks at the importance of tech to a modern refugee.

Nathan Flitch

What role do smartphones play in the refugee crisis that has left almost 60 million people displaced from their homes because of violence and war in places like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq? Tech has made this crisis “very different than any other refugee crisis before," Brian Reich told us. Reich is the managing director of The Hive, a special US-based project of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "They have access to the Internet. They are using Facebook and Whatsapp to communicate with each other, to share information about the safest route.”
However, Reich noted, “Technology is also creating, in many ways, some of these situations—or making some of these situations more challenging. The same people that those in the Middle East and in Latin America are fleeing from—the terrorists, the gangs—are also on Facebook and are texting and use those social networks to continue to terrorize.”
We spoke to Reich—and to some Iraqi refugees now in California—about just how crucial a smartphone is when one is a refugee. Check out the video above.