“My country is precious, even when it turns against me. My people are noble, even when they deny me.”
– an Arab poet
It’s always the same. When the streets around us fill with smoke and sirens, when the headlines scream, when our cities make global news, someone from abroad reaches out.
“Where would you go if things get worse?”
“You should get out while you still can.”
And if you work for a Global Minority organization, the questions can get even more pointed.
“Do you need a way out?”
“Let’s start working on your visa application.”
All of this really happened to me in a far less dramatic situation, when my life was not in immediate danger but I was under surveillance. The only reason I’m writing about it now is because I’m finally starting to understand how I feel about it.
They mean well. They always do. But under those questions sits a quiet assumption, especially in the mouths and minds of people from the Global Minority: that of course we’d want to leave. That when things fall apart, the right and rational thing is to pack up and go. Start over somewhere “safe.” Preferably West. Always West.
What I’ve noticed, not just in my own experience but in those of so many others, is a persistent condescension: that staying is “irrational.” That countries in the Global Majority are sinking ships, and the rational person escapes. That the “lucky ones” are those who get out and never look back.
But that logic, so confidently expressed and so casually dropped into conversation, misses something huge: many of us do not want to go anywhere. Not because we’re in denial, naïve, or reckless, and not because we lack options. Some of us have backup plans, visas, and even mental checklists of what to pack if things turn dangerous. What we do not have, or want, is the instinct to run at the first sign of trouble. Home, for us, is not a hotel room to check out of when the service gets bad. It’s something deeper. We’re deeply and irrevocably rooted.
For us, home is where our histories live, stitched into the air we breathe and the ground we walk on. It’s where our parents built their lives. It’s where the laughter of our family can shatter the heaviness of even the saddest days. It’s where the language tastes so fiery yet so sweet. We belong to this place even when it doesn’t always protect us, and that belonging is powerful. Sometimes it is the only thing holding us together.
So why do Global Minority people assume we’d rather be anywhere but here?
It’s not only ignorance. It’s a worldview that doesn’t understand what it means to belong to a place, to a people, to a shared history.
It’s Western individualism at work, the belief that the self comes first, that survival is personal, that mobility equals freedom. It’s baked into every story they tell about “opportunity” and “starting over.” For many of them, cutting ties is easy. For us, it can feel like cutting off a limb.
It’s the colonial mindset, still alive and well, where the West is cast as the natural “refuge,” a place to be saved, seen, and civilized. They may not say it out loud, but it is there in every offer of “refuge” wrapped in a tone of rescue.
It’s humanitarian paternalism too, the instinct to feel for us … but from above. “Poor you,” they say. “You should come here.” As if leaving is the fix. As if being closer to them is the goal.
What they don’t understand is this: we stay because we love this place. Even when it breaks our heart. Even when it threatens us. Even when it doesn’t love us back.
That does not mean we’re blind to danger. It means we see value in holding on. In resisting collapse. In witnessing. In refusing to hand our stories over to someone else’s narrative about failed countries and grateful refugees or even expats.
We’re not objects of sympathy. We’re not puzzles to solve. And we’re not silently waiting for a visa or a miracle to “get out.”
We know what’s happening. We know what it costs to stay. And still, we do.
So maybe the better question is not “Why don’t you leave?”
It’s “Why do you think staying is so unthinkable?”
We don’t stay because we have no choice. We stay because this is ours. Leaving is not freedom. It’s a loss. It’s an exile. And we don’t all want to run away.
Thank you for sharing your perspective I’m never very good at articulating exactly how much a I appreciate you and the ability to expand my own understanding through being lucky enough to have found you. But alas I will continue trying.
This piece you wrote immediately reminded me of Fadwa Tuqan’s poem “enough for me” (not sure it’s the original title, maybe just how it was translated in English).