Antisemitism and Discrimination
The speaker's plight has been caused by the antisemitic policies of Nazi Germany. Whereas the speaker was once were proud of the country they called home, these policies have barred them from Germany, and robbed them of their personhood elsewhere. Now, they grapple with the traumas of Nazism, even hearing Hitler's words echoing around them like thunder, but they also face discrimination in the country where they have sought safety and acceptance. Their passport is considered meaningless, and the people they encounter have no interest in helping them. Some advocate against letting refugees into the country, while others simply ignore them, treating their pets with more generosity than they do the speaker. Though Auden critiques the antisemitic policies that caused the speaker to flee Germany, perhaps his harshest critiques are saved for those who do not help or sympathize with the refugees in their midst.
Bureaucracy
Social exclusion is only one of the forces causing problems for the speaker. Government policies and bureaucratic structures keep refugees from settling in their new countries, asking them to conform to systems that they cannot possibly conform to. A great deal of trouble is caused by the fact that the speaker lacks a valid passport, making them technically dead. The bureaucratic forces portrayed in the poem care less about the flesh-and-blood presence of refugees than they do the fulfillment of arbitrary rules. Even more frustratingly, these cruel and harmful policies are cloaked in politeness, so that when a committee denies the speaker desperately needed help, they civilly extend the offer of a chair to sit in, and ask the speaker to return in a year—refusing to acknowledge that the refugees in their country do not have the resources to wait for help.
Nature and Humanity
The speaker of "Refugee Blues" does not express jealousy or even anger towards the people who exclude, belittle, and ignore refugees. They do, however, envy animals—both the domesticated pets who are treated with reverence by humans, and the wild animals who live without human intervention. When describing the latter, Auden suggests that animals don't have to deal with any of the problems that refugees face. They're free from hatred and discrimination, and they're also unconstrained by arbitrary constructs like borders, passports, and money. In other words, the refugees' plight is completely unnatural, and therefore isn't inevitable: it's the product of systems that people have consciously created.
