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The European migrant crisis
Anarchy Rules!
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I thought that it was about time we had a thread to discuss this issue.
Illegal migration into Europe has been ongoing since, well, forever. At various times right-wing and nationalists have sought to make an issue of it, but largely this type of immigration was not a significant issue.
However, with the rise of political instability and warfare in North Africa and the Middle East the level of immigration has escalated. Many migrants attempt to cross the Mediterranean sea, often in ramshackle, overburdened boats. Initially, Italy ran a search and rescue operation, but was forced to stop due to escalating costs. An EU border operation was started, but it had few resources and little funding.
As a result, over 2300 migrants have now thought to have drowned this year attempting to make the crossing.
However, the bulk of migrants (mostly Syrians and Afghans) are moving into Europe through Greece and the Balkans. These countries are poor and in many cases still recovering from their own wars, putting strain on their services and resulting in scenes like this on their borders. People smuggling across these borders has resulted in tragedies such as that seen today, in which the bodies of up 50 migrants were found in an abandoned lorry in Austria.
Most of the migrants are headed to the richest state in Europe - Germany. It is estimated that 800,000 people will make asylum applications this year. By contrast, all the EU states combined took in a total of 626,000 migrants last year. This has put a strain on the local infrastructure and there has been a rise in the attacks against migrants.
Other countries, such as the UK are essentially sealing the borders to migrants, with David Cameron accused of demonising migrants by referring to them as 'swarms'.
It all just seems like such a mess, with no clear way to resolve the crisis. That said, I am ashamed by the actions of the UK, as we take in very few migrants compared to the rest of Europe, but our media and government spout such vitriol against immigrants.
Illegal migration into Europe has been ongoing since, well, forever. At various times right-wing and nationalists have sought to make an issue of it, but largely this type of immigration was not a significant issue.
However, with the rise of political instability and warfare in North Africa and the Middle East the level of immigration has escalated. Many migrants attempt to cross the Mediterranean sea, often in ramshackle, overburdened boats. Initially, Italy ran a search and rescue operation, but was forced to stop due to escalating costs. An EU border operation was started, but it had few resources and little funding.
As a result, over 2300 migrants have now thought to have drowned this year attempting to make the crossing.
However, the bulk of migrants (mostly Syrians and Afghans) are moving into Europe through Greece and the Balkans. These countries are poor and in many cases still recovering from their own wars, putting strain on their services and resulting in scenes like this on their borders. People smuggling across these borders has resulted in tragedies such as that seen today, in which the bodies of up 50 migrants were found in an abandoned lorry in Austria.
Most of the migrants are headed to the richest state in Europe - Germany. It is estimated that 800,000 people will make asylum applications this year. By contrast, all the EU states combined took in a total of 626,000 migrants last year. This has put a strain on the local infrastructure and there has been a rise in the attacks against migrants.
Other countries, such as the UK are essentially sealing the borders to migrants, with David Cameron accused of demonising migrants by referring to them as 'swarms'.
It all just seems like such a mess, with no clear way to resolve the crisis. That said, I am ashamed by the actions of the UK, as we take in very few migrants compared to the rest of Europe, but our media and government spout such vitriol against immigrants.
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Hundreds of people are feared dead after two boats carrying up to 500 migrants capsized off the Libyan city of Zuwara, residents and officials say.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34082304
and a truck full of dead people on the other side of the continent.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/27/us-europe-grants-eu-austria-idUSKCN0QW19H20150827
Does the EU have a centralized refugee policy? It's notable that most of the refugees aren't stopping when they reach the EU, they're going for specific countries. Where they expect to have the best luck I'd guess.
To get an inkling of the situation you need to realize a few basic things:
All of the EU keeps to the Dublin Treaty. The Dublin Treaty basically says that all EU countries recognize the decision of another EU country about asylum seekers and refugees. The most important aspect of this is that in principle, the first country you enter is the country you have to ask asylum in in, but in practice this has devolved to "Get into the Schengen area, avoid police and get smuggled to the country you want to be in." A person that is denied asylum in one "Dublin country" cannot request it in another.
There are several major groups of refugees happening at the same time. The media is struggling to portray this, and that
Syrians are the biggest group. They are relatively rich, and relatively western. They tend to have held jobs, have decent education, speak some English. The people fleeing seem to tend on the wealthy side mostly. They have a very high chance of getting asylum as almost all EU nations see Syria as a warzone. They tend to illegally enter Turkey (Not a Dublin signatory) and boat to Greece.
Eritreans are the biggest group from Africa. Nobody talks about Eritrea, but it is a hellhole. It's the North Korea of Africa, no foreign press has entered the country in years. It has indefinite military draft and uses murder and torture to empower the regime. It is especially cruel against people not from the 2 biggest cultural groups. Its border with Sudan/South-Sudan (not fun places themselves) is completely open, and people go from there to Libya (which is in civil war, and does nothing to stop this), and boat to Italy. Eritrean refugees tend to be mid 20s, poorly educated, speak no language other than Tigryna. Eritreans also get nearly automatic refugee status.
Economic migrants from countries that border the EU, especially south eastern Europe. This is what is greatly plaguing Germany in particular. They have no chance as asylum seekers, but some floodgate has been opened to trigger a mass migration this year. I am not particularly well versed in the grey/black economy of Germany but I usually hear bad stories from people that attempt this.
Other Middle EasternThese are judged on individual basis. Iranians have a decent shot on persecution based on religion or sexuality, Afghani are seldomly let in, though non muslim minorities might. You see some Kurds get through, though many get sent back. Overall their odds of status are The news reports that a lot of Afghans are boating over together with the Syrians, and I'd like to know more about how this is happening.
Other AfricansIn general these are very low odds for any official papers. Tend to arrive with little to no documentation, and because they are judged individually too, that really hurts their case, as they have no evidence for their stories. These are the people at Calais, or storming the Spanish enclaves around Morroco. They have a very twisted view of Europe and the UK in particular. Many are from poor countries even by Africas standards, but few are from warzones (There are some exceptions, from the Al-Shabaab region of Somalia, nasty parts of Congo etcet.)
The major problems are legion and all solutions cost money and political capital, as all of them are unpopular with large parts of the population.
Sinking boatsSmugglers are now actively betting that most people on boats will be rescued, they steer boats towards patrolling marine vessels and get away. This doesn't always work, and people die. The optics are terrible. Some EU countries have been petition Libya for the right to gun down smugglers before they launch these boats. That insanity is due to the fact that countries will rescue anyone they find at sea, and if they ask for asylum they will get into the process.
Italy and Greece are overrun. They are taking in insane numbers and the system is failing. Greece especially is in such poor economic shape that it cannot treat these people humanely. The most likely solution for this is a EU quota system, and now that both Germany and France are on board it has a chance to get created. But the UK is a large hurdle, as are Denmark and Finland.
The Asylum seeker camps are overflowing, no one was prepared for this situation and it takes time and effort to give these people a decent play to stay. The government agencies that judge these stories are overworked and understaffed. New camps create large local opposition, and Germanies case it is creation Extreme Right Wing terror attacks.
Housing the people that do get status is becoming increasingly problematic, as there are so many it is starting to crowd out natives in social housing. That is a political timebomb, as people will get furious if social housing becomes increasingly available only to refugees, and 'regular' people can't get a house through the system anymore. In Austria this has also gotten really ugly, as municipalities have collectively decided to all refuse any refugees, meaning people are in the camps indefinitely.
Near conflict camps are critically underfunded, and the UN has had to slash food budgets to $9 per month per refugee in the summer because they would run out of food otherwise. People are spending years in these camps, and the prospects of swift resolution are ever dimmer. No work, no education for their children, no food. This is deteriorating the situation around Syria and in Sudan/South-Sudan and increases the amount of people that flee into Europe.
Distance to Western Society Europe is absorbing a lot of people that are quite frankly not in any way ready to participate in European society. With no computer skills, no diplomas, no language, no aptitude for schooling (if you have not been to school as a teenager, learning in your 20s or 30s is much harder) and EU unemployment already high they cannot compete for any jobs. A similar situation happened in the late '90s, when there were a lot of Somali refugees. 15 years later over half of them have never worked and are still on welfare (compared to approx 5% of the Dutch natives). This is an economic drag and a political mess, as it makes it easy for the rightwing to portray them as lazy profit seekers.
Return policyAbout half the people that apply for refugee status are denied, but getting them to return is an eternal and dirty fight. They are denied any benefits of the welfare state, but often still choose to live undocumented in Europe over returning to their native countries. EU countries are starting to tie developmental aid to being cooperative in returning refugees
Reading more about just how bad the situation is in other parts of the EU makes me so embarrassed at the degree to which people here in Denmark are going nuts over the comparatively small number of refugees we receive. Massive gains for the right wing populist party at the recent election was the main reason that the government changed, but both the two traditional governing parties, the Social Democrats and Venstre, have adopted a lot of racist views and rhetoric too. Actually only 2 maybe 3 out of the nine parties in parliament can really claim to be innocent of this.
Oh also, there's been a series of vandalizations (threats and nazi graffiti mostly) against a refugee centre, attempted arson against a mosque etc. It's not close to the levels of the things going on in Germany yet, but it is super ugly.
What's this view, exactly?
It basically revolves about the availability of welfare, jobs and prosperity. They think (and reinforce among themselves ) that the streets are paved with gold and that all you need to do to get rich is to get in. They have no sense of the life long social contract that goes along with it, the dangers of breaking the rules, and the lifes poor people in western Europe live. The fact that they enter the system essentially 10-20 years behind on 98% of the population and there are few chances to catch up.
Part of my work is readjusting these expectations and it can be heartbreaking. When I tell that a single person has to live off €300/month after costs for the first two years if they do everything right I get a lot of frustration. And my clients are the lucky ones, the people supported by the system. People that end up on the streets get a rough deal and much rougher if they are women.
I cannot imagine how difficult your job is.
Personally I think it's a bit off when you have people in the UK point to the Dublin Treaty and say "well these people traveled through other countries, why didn't they apply for asylum there?", because then the UK would pretty much never take any refugees.
As a slight tangent, does the US take in any of these people?
I do remember some stats saying Sweden was #2 behind Germany.
You must remember that the US has its own refugee and immigration crisis on hand.
It amazes me how similar our situations are really.
I hope the EU doesn't force people into even more dangerous ways of getting in.
We could take in every single migrant in Calais and neither notice nor match the contribution of other European nations. It's maddening, I hate our media almost as much as I hate our government. Pure scum the lot of them.
The UK media has mainly focused on Calais I think, which is where Cameron's swarm comment probably originates from.
I think this is the rankings with regards to applications for asylum.
The only really harsh situations I encounter are around family reunion rules and bureaucracy and delays due to the overwhelmed system. And them there's the nag that many of these people have so little prospect in the system. To pull them up would require so many resources, but not doing anything is expensive in the long run.
From a humanitarian view I'd do the former, but politically that is not popular.
I also have the luxury of being a personal advisor, I always get to choose the person over the system. I don't have to do a lot of moral weighing.
It is getting increasingly ugly in Germany in recent weeks. As we take on more and more refugees, the shitbirds come out of hiding and start making noise. Nearly every night some building designated to be a refugee shelter is set on fire. Its particularly bad in East Germany, where neo-nazi influences are ever increasing. Two days ago, the head of our nation, Chancellor Merkel, went to a refugee camp very near the place I grew up. She was greated with chants of "Traitor" and "Cunt" and stuff like that. Its a fucking disgrace.
Gah....
At least you're doing your part as a nation though, that's more than the UK can say.
It's a real worry. You can see it in action in the U.S. and Europe. As the people who remember the Nazis as more than comic book villains die away, politicians and the public are becoming increasingly comfortable supporting fascist policies and ideas.
I'm afraid that Robert Paxton is right, and fascism is not really a set of defined policies and ideas. Instead, fascism is best seen as the way modern states go insane when faced with issues their leaders cannot solve.
more walls
walls everywhere
bring roger waters in to help us with this one
I know you're joking, but the whole point of Pink Floyd's The Wall was the highlight how walls (in many senses of the word) are bad, and how we should tear them down. The Wall Live remains, to this day, the best concert I have ever seen, and anticipate ever seeing.
Job seekers are important and welcome, but many people are apprehensive about groups that might form their own communes and more or less stay on welfare forever. These immigrants would place an additional drain on the public welfare system instead of easing its load, as job seekers would. Many people coming in are also woefully under educated, while simultaneously unwilling to work the shit jobs. They could do this while making use of the heavily subsidized / free educational system to improve their chances in the job market.
Really, it's a pretty complex issue, where immigration is needed and welcomed, if it contributes towards the upkeep of the Nordic welfare state. Immigration that might only result in a further drain on that system seems simultaneously like an incredibly bad idea.
Another issue is that many immigrants want to stay near the capital area, where there is currently a shortage of affordable housing. Combine this with a large number of young people and students with low income, and you can see how there is potential for viewing any preferential treatment as shitting on the natives, who might have to commute in from far away as a result.
Luckily there hasn't been much real grumbling, and for the most part I think most immigrants integrate pretty well. The only issues tend to happen with the religious types that seem to have decided that all Nordic values are from Satan, and their own values need to be imposed on the natives, but people tend to ignore those few idiots anyhow.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with all of this. Hopefully the government handles things okay, but that requires more faith in politicians than I'm capable of. They need to be considerate and inclusive, but having a little bit of spine wouldn't hurt. They'll likely do the historically traditional thing and copy what the Swedes have done and fucked up, put their own spin on it and fuck it up the Finnish way instead.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Personally, simple mind that I am, I'm all for conquest and colonization of all the places that most apparently don't work out anymore, and obviously won't for decades to come, if ever. Just take the United Nations to its logical extreme. Invade countries like Syria and Eritrea with lethal force, take over the entire bureaucracy and security apparatus, with the intention of staying forever, forging a new identiy for the place with utmost on-going dedication. Fairly distribute the personal and financial cost of said invasion and occupation amongst all member states, as well as split up the revenue and opportunities for the efforts, and of course invest heavily in the social and economical developement of this new world territory.
In all, a global political effort needs to be made to transform the concepts of conquest and colonization into politically feasible acts again, making it both lucrative and desirable for the local population, as well as for the global community and economy. In the end, conquest and colonization is the more humanitarian thing to do, rather than to blindly respect dysfunctional backwoods cultures. Yup, sounds like a hairbrain impossibilty of an idea, with horrendous unintended consequence to follow, but as far as I can tell, as far as hope goes, this is the one pro-active step I believe the world at large can take. It's the only way to take charge and curb the inhumanity in these lawless cruel god forsaken places relatively expeditiously, and more importantly lastingly.
We're seeing some pretty close parallels. What made it possible for Hitler to get all that support?
The severe austerity Germany was going through after WW1 made for an excellent brewing ground for a strong sense of nationalism, "we're one German people and they're doing this to us" kind of thing. (And then blame jews where appropriate.)
Greece is going through the same general kind of forced austerity measures, and they had actual goddamn Nazis in their parliament, thanks to all the sudden nationalism and general hatred of the austerity measures Germany and France are forcing upon them. (I think Golden Dawn got 6-ish percent in the election last week.)
...but that's moving into a different subject.
Free question. Didn't the Bush years proved that "nation building" doesn't work? I mean, European countries only got Western-aligned dictators to keep order at best, but the Iraq war at worst...well.
I'm not sure that creating conflict and strife is a good way to stop the flow of refugees who are fleeing conflict and strife.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
it'd be more cost effective and way less violent to just let people from shitty places move to nice places; Syria and Afghanistan are awful? let the people who want to leave leave
it's way easier to import people than to export infrastructure and norms
"Nation building" doesn't work the way that the Bush administration tried to do it, certainly.
The trouble - and often the violence - starts when you import people who are very unadapted to the culture they find themselves amidst. And, as noted above, they are frequently also completely lacking in the skills they require to be economically independent. Since they're economically dependent and linguistically isolated, they have little incentive to adapt culturally, and you end up with economically burdensome 'ghetto' enclaves of unhappy, deprived, isolated people who at best are resentful when they see their children growing up with different cultural norms, and at worst do shit like start watching ISIS vids on youtube and beheading people in the street. This is not an ideal solution.
So no "lol syria is a shithole, let's just let everyone move instead of trying to help fix it" isn't all that cost effective or less violence-inducing.
It is compared to 'let's just colonize Africa and forcefully turn all developing countries into educated, industrialized nations' which was what Loren Michael was arguing against as I read it.
It's not a realistic expectation though.
Disowning the perpetrators of such insanity, taking away their reasons to fight one another, and instead have them face the might of the entire world, that makes much more sense to me. The world is not defenseless, unlike these migrants. The world is literally legion. And these petty squabbles cannot stand against our combined might. Not for long.
I think it's the humanitarian thing to do, to disown the perpetrators, and end their petty squabbles and the senseless violence, and instead own these conflicts ourselves. Make it bigger, and about what it means to us. Give the violence proper meaning. We believe in a world without petty squabbles turning murderously violent, where people can live productive lives in peace, and follow their dreams, and we will fight you to the death to make it so.
You surely don't believe idiocy as seen in Syria will lead to anything worthwhile ever, without a firm forceful hand intervening? Whatever order is achieved by such intervention, unless the intent is to stay indefinitely, it will not last. So really, the only thing to do is to conquer, dominate, and colonize and civilize these places for good, rather than to stand idly by and let the violence go on indefinitely and senselessly. Fight the fight now, and fight it good, for all our sakes. For a better tomorrow.
And sure, I know how idiotic that sounds. But as far as pro-active acts go, conquest, domination, colonization and civilization sounds like the only way to go. Half-steps never work, and doing nothing is hardly the humanitarian thing to do, and I do believe in a forceful solution to these kinds of problems, but not in a peaceful pacifistic one. There needs to be a fight, there needs to be bloodshed, or order cannot be established out of chaos. It never has in the past, and it won't be possible in the near future. So I say, let us fight for what we know is right!
Of course this is a longterm course of action. Short term, the humanitarian thing to do is to help. The actual realities of the matter are beyond me though, I can't offer any practical advice or opinions whatsoever. I'm just a simple minded guy, who'd like what ails the world to be much simpler than it actually is. Something I can smash to smithereens with my fist, and then put it back together better than it was before. The optimist in me thinks it just might be that simple. Of course, no matter what we do, the humanitarian thing to do will never be easy, and it will always be more costly than doing nothing at all.