A Thin Sheet of Silence
They don’t talk about it at the airport.
There are no headlines. No ceremonies.
Just a quick goodbye at dawn, a hurried embrace, eyes glinting with unshed tears.
The ones who leave—the migrants, the dreamers, the desperate—carry with them not just passports and pay slips, but silence. That heavy, humming silence that replaces the daily clang of disrespect, the corner whispers of caste, the fear in walking home after dark.
They trade their homelands not for fortune—but for the dignity of walking through a park without being watched. For being able to say no without being labelled defiant. For breathing, without constantly bracing.
This is not an article about remittance figures or GDP boosts.
This is about what they gain that can’t be wired home.
This is about why people move abroad for safety—and why homesickness is a small price to pay for dignity.
The Myth of the Gold Rush
We like our migration stories clean.
The prodigal son who sends money home.
The daughter who becomes a nurse and builds her family a house with tiles that gleam like the West.
The boy who went to London and now drives a BMW, never mind the twelve-hour shifts.
We speak often of what is earned—but rarely of what is escaped.
Take India, where caste still curls like smoke through everyday life. Or Nigeria, where the morning commute might involve bribing a checkpoint officer. Or Honduras, where a woman might be killed for turning down a man.
In a landmark 2023 study published by the International Organisation for Migration, over 68% of participants cited “personal safety” as a core reason for leaving, ahead of economic opportunity. This was especially true for women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and those from historically marginalised communities.
Migration, in truth, is not always a search for more.
Sometimes, it’s a search for less: less fear, less judgment, less noise.
Sanity in the Silence
You notice it first in small things.
The bus comes on time.
People don’t ask if you’re married.
Nobody tries to touch you without permission.
A Bangladeshi woman once told me, in a Boston subway station, “It’s not that America is perfect. But for the first time, my mind is quiet.”
Psychologists have long studied what they call ambient stress: the kind of mental noise that comes not from acute trauma, but from chronic indignity. It’s the mother-in-law who mocks your accent, the landlord who refuses your lease because of your surname, the constant emotional math of dressing ‘appropriately’ just to walk your street.
Removing this noise, even if it means adding homesickness, changes the psyche.
Asylum, in the truest sense, is not just a physical sanctuary—it is a neurological reset. It is a place where you don’t have to explain your right to exist.
The Hierarchy of Needs, Rewritten
Maslow’s famous pyramid begins with food and shelter, ascending to belonging and self-actualisation. But for many migrants, the base layer is cracked.
What if your “shelter” is raided by police?
What if your “food” is denied at a restaurant because of your skin colour?
Safety is not just the absence of bombs or guns—it is the absence of humiliation.
For Dalit students in Indian engineering colleges, for queer teens in rural Poland, for journalists in the Philippines, the first true taste of safety sometimes comes only abroad.
And when it comes, it brings something more intoxicating than wealth: self-respect.
A Syrian refugee working as a dental assistant in Berlin said it best: “I make less money than I did back home. But I have never been this free.”
The Politics of Dignity
It is fashionable in certain circles to criticise the migrant who “abandoned their homeland” or to wax poetic about the “brain drain.”
But this critique assumes a moral equivalence that reality does not offer.
Countries are not family homes.
They are systems. And when those systems repeatedly punish, demean, or endanger their citizens, the decision to leave is not betrayal—it is refusal.
Refusal to be complicit in your own erasure.
Refusal to hand over your daughter to a fate you quietly fear.
Refusal to keep playing by rules that were written to keep you small.
In 2022, The Lancet published a mental health study comparing South Asian women living in London versus those in Karachi, Lahore, and Dhaka. London-based women reported higher homesickness and alienation—but lower levels of clinical anxiety and depression.
The cost of dignity, it seems, is nostalgia. But the reward is agency.
Home is Not a Place. It’s a Feeling.
Of course they miss home.
They miss the smell of rain on hot concrete.
The neighbour who knew their grandfather’s name.
The unsolicited cups of chai.
But nostalgia, while poetic, can be misleading. It filters out the sting, the slap, the sideways looks. It edits memory like a biased director—lingering on the mango trees, skipping over the molesting uncle at weddings.
The ache for home often coexists with the relief of distance.
This duality—the longing and the liberation—is the true cost of migration.
A Filipino nurse in Toronto once put it like this: “I cry when I cook adobo. But I don’t fear my boss anymore. That’s not just survival. That’s peace.”
The Right to Leave Without Shame
In 1948, the United Nations declared that everyone has the right “to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
But implicit in that right is another: the right to leave without being told you are selfish, greedy, or disloyal.
For decades, migrants have been judged not only for where they go, but for why. Going abroad for education or a job is framed as ambition. But going abroad for peace, for gender safety, or to escape caste—is considered less noble.
This hierarchy of motives is a moral failure.
Every human being deserves dignity—no matter what passport they hold, or why they left.
Choosing yourself is not desertion. It’s reclamation.
Wealth Is Overrated, Safety Is Not
Not everyone who moves abroad becomes wealthy. In fact, most don’t.
They live in studio apartments, share rooms with cousins, save coins for bus fare, work jobs they’d never imagined. But here’s what they do get:
- A woman walks home at 11 p.m. and reaches safely.
- A Black man gets pulled over and the cop is polite.
- A trans teen starts school and no one flinches at their name.
It is easy to condescend to migrants when you live in a place where your dignity is taken for granted.
But for many, these small graces are life-changing.
Safety is not a luxury. It is the very condition for human flourishing.
The New Pilgrims
In a strange way, modern migrants are not unlike ancient pilgrims. They travel long distances, face danger and alienation, not in pursuit of gold—but of grace.
The temples they seek are not made of marble, but of small freedoms:
- The right to say no to a man without fearing acid.
- The right to bring up your child without teaching them to cower.
- The right to be anonymous if you choose to be.
They become citizens of invisible nations—where dignity is not deferred until retirement or afterlife, but claimed right here, in the cold air of new lands.
And Yet…
And yet, it is not easy.
There is the phone call with the mother who asks, “When are you coming back?”
There are the festivals spent alone.
The language missteps. The accents mocked. The loneliness thick as fog.
Migration is not romance. It is sacrifice.
But it is one made, again and again, because the alternative is worse.
When home becomes a wound that never scabs, exile becomes balm.
The Price of Dignity
In the end, homesickness is real. But so is trauma.
And between the ache for home and the need for wholeness, many will choose the latter.
They are not chasing dollars—they are chasing decency.
And that chase is not to be ridiculed, but honoured.
So let us stop asking migrants what they earn.
And start asking what they’ve escaped.
A Question for the Ones Who Stayed
For those of us who stayed, perhaps the question is not “Why did they leave?”
Perhaps it is:
“What did we allow this country to become, that they had to?”