The Aliens As Refugee In District 9
In Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, a mysterious alien spacecraft is parked over Johannesburg, South Africa. The local government cuts their way into the ship and end up finding an alien race that is frightened and weak. The aliens are retrieved from the shop and they recieve aid from relief organizations. The government designates an area of the city that they call ‘’ District 9 ‘’ as a refugee camp of shorts for the aliens. Riots and mass hysteria from the public disapproving of the alien’s residency in the refugee camps raise tension between the aliens and humans, turning District 9 into a slum and a place filled with crime and terror. Blomkamp’s idea of the aliens and their predicament in the refugee camps in the first act of the movie resembles many real life refugee camps that are still prominent today.
One of these refugee crises that has caused international outrage is the US border refugee crisis. Although District 9 was made in 2009, it depicts many of the situations that have been encountered (and are still being encountered) by Mexican refugees fleeing to the US looking for a new life. For example, at one point in the movie, I have seen that the main character, Wikus, threaten to remove a child from his mother’s custody claiming bogus child’s rights violation charges in order to relocate him to the ‘’new and improved’’ camp that we later find out to be a concentration camp. This strongly resembles news stories that surfaced in early 2016 in regard to conditions of asylum-seeking families and their kids. Reports claimed that the children of asylum seekers in the US-Mexico border, were being separated from their parents and being held in cages, which to me is the worst thing you could ever experience. Furthermore, a certain segment of the US population also has the same attitudes towards the people who reside in these refugee camps as people in the movie, did towards the aliens.
For instance, on many different occasions, the soldiers of the MNU and Wikius encounter alien writing or artifacts and they immediately associate them with gangs due to their prejudice towards the aliens, and not due to their knowledge of what the writing says or what the artifact is. This is well portrayed in the scene found in an alien home, even though he acknowledged that it did not look like one. This type of prejudice is not only in the US, but all around the world. Where refugees are looked at as criminals and lowlifes simply due to the situations they found themselves in. Refugees are people who are wanting to start a new life. They aren’t coming here to destroy our country, they want to make themselves happier and start something fresh.
