Senate Your asylum is in another country: Europe, refugees, and xenophobia.

stop doing the arithmetics at us Ender; you know we hate that.

 

I love that you see a lot of Muslims (Turks) in Germany, esp Berlin and a lot of African Muslims - Sudanese etc - in Paris but the framework is all racist and stuff. It makes no sense at all, but ok!

 

I understand the question very well and I am telling you that you do not understand the situation.

Thousands of people -- men, women, children, toddlers, infants, elderly, disabled -- crossed the Mediterranean last night. Thousands more are piled up in the appalling! appalling! appalling! so-called reception centres in Lampedusa, Sicily, Lesvos, Kos, etc, thousands more are sleeping in the streets of Athens, thousands more are crossing Macedonia and Serbia, thousands are trying to enter Hungary, thousands are turning towards Croatia and thousands are floating around in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and other northern European countries.

How does your slick calculation about the ability of the German economy to generate jobs cater for the immediate, urgent and very real protection needs of these people?

How does your "little bit of common sense" tell you that the responsible, ethical, moral thing to do is to close your borders because you don't have a coherent migration policy?

How does "we're keeping you out (therefore preventing you from even applying for asylum) because we might not be able to employ you later" comply with the Refugee Convention?

If Lebanon, or Pakistan, or Kenya closed their borders on the basis of such arguments, there would be an uproar. But because it's Europe, we're talking instead about "sustainable immigration policies" and pointing fingers at every other country that could be participating in a refugee resettlement scheme. And of course -- God forbid! -- we won't discuss how our economic and social structures are not inclusive enough to provide these people with a meaningful life, or that we built, over the past 20 years, an insane legal system that is meant to keep the continent as it is and make sure no more outsiders can come in than we are made to think we can handle.

What little there is of an EU migration & asylum policy is designed, very simply, to keep people out. Since you like figures, here is a little example: in 2013, the EU budget allocation for migration in Greece was €87 million. The amount is ridiculous in and of itself, considering that Greece was already a major point of entry back then, but the real devil is in the details: of the €87m, €3m were for refugees and asylum, €4m were for integration of migrants in local communities and the remaining €80m were for border policing and detention/deportation centres. We had bona fide asylum seekers kept in detention/deportation centres for up to 18 months, all paid for with EU structural funds. Add to that the systematic effort to externalise Europe's borders over the past decade, even when that entailed cooperating closely with the likes of Qaddhafi to keep the migrants out, and the picture is pretty clear.

Another good indicator is the fact that the 2014 European Commission chose to give the immigration portfolio to a Greek, Dimitris Avramopoulos, whose political party, New Democracy, had and is still openly campaigning on the slogan "we will reconquer our cities from illegal immigrants", which they lifted straight from Golden Dawn's manifesto. I can't imagine why they wouldn't give that portfolio to, say, the Swedish candidate.

And just look at the priorities put forward by the Commission in this situation. They propose to resettle 160,000 refugees *who are already in Europe* over the next *two years* -- so we're not even talking about those who haven't arrived yet, or of those who are in camps outside of Europe and can't afford the trip. The number of arrivals by sea for the first 8 months of 2015 is north of 360,000. I'm sure you can do the math yourself.

As for Avramopoulos, his proposals include to establish "hotspots" in Greece, Italy, Turkey etc in order to (in his own words) "weed out" the economic migrants. Hello dehumanisation. Combine that with the proposal for a list of "safe countries", which goes against the spirit of the refugee convention (and which is patently absurd, the USA is not safe when you're Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, Greece is not safe when you're a prominent black activist against Golden Dawn, and Eritrea is not safe at all, period) and you're all set.

And since we're on the economic front, let me also tell you that the people who truly became rich this year thanks to the EU's closed borders policy are the smugglers and vultures of all sorts that prey on refugees. Before Macedonia instituted the 3-day permit to cross its territory, it cost a family of four €40,000 to go from Turkey to Germany. If these people could fly direct to Germany, they'd spend €2,000 on their trip and they'd have €38,000 to settle in Germany or whatever their destination was. Surely it's economically sound to want people who arrive not to be destitute?

By the same yardstick, you see lots of blacks in the US, lots of indigenous people in Australia, etc, so there can't be any institutional discrimination and racism against them, can there? Oh, wait.

 

Well said Chyntuck. You make some very good points.

I'm sure there are still many economic questions to solve regarding the resettlement of so many refugees . I don't know the answers but surely it is possible to work on those issues while at the same time helping the thousands who need help right now. And at the same time like Chyntuck has mentioned Europe (and the US) need to start planning for the next few years as well. Obama has announced that 10,000 Syrians will be accepted, while its still a low number it's a step. Though I'm sure there will be resistance to this plan.

 

OK, so "look, I lack the interest in addressing your point and frankly even if I could I know it hurts my cause so I won't; and besides - I don't care if the refugees are happy in 2, 5, 10 years time. By then I'll have moved on to some other cause du jour but right now, I can make a huge case for how compassionate I am which will in turn give me a feeling analogous to the warm glow effect. So I'm not going to address your point, I'm instead going to bang on about how there's a humanitarian crisis which admittedly you've neither denied nor suggested should be ignored but since I have no arguments, just soundbytes and trite emotional appeals I'm going to assume you did say 'to hell with the refugees' so I can make an impassioned, pre-fabricated argument against that monstrous sentiment" - you can just copy paste this for the next dozen replies since it saves us both time and money and pays the courtesy of being honest about your intentions.

Does Ikea in Greece sell the prefab ideas, or do you make them and store them away? A pitiful attempt at addressing a point which, if you were actually concerned about their wellbeing, you would acknowledge is a massive, massive issue. Hell, I want to see how irrelevant you can be when we contemplate the question of, in the event of stabilisation, whether people are encouraged to return and rebuild Syria given the exodus of talented and qualified professionals.

 

So because we can't offer a perfect solution, we should offer no solution at all. Gotcha.

 

GrandAdmiralJello The answer to that is rather multi-layered so I'll try to keep it short (edit one hour later: I didn't keep it short ).

One aspect has to do with process because seeking asylum is a right. Even if we stick strictly to the letter of the refugee convention, the authorities of the country where a refugee is seeking asylum cannot fail to give the asylum-seeker a fair hearing even if they have good reasons to think at first sight that the asylum claim is bogus. Country A has the right to examine the claim of a refugee and tell him/her, "sorry, you can avail yourself of the protection of country B, where you are a resident/a citizen/already have asylum, therefore you should go back there" but it doesn't have the right to tell the refugee "I won't take your application, go and apply for asylum somewhere else". In the current situation in Europe, where it is public knowledge that all these people trying to get into various countries are seeking asylum, closing the borders is tantamount to depriving them of their right to seek asylum.

Another aspect has to do with the fact that "a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1" doesn't necessarily mean that this has to be the asylum-seeker's country of origin. There are several examples of such cases in European jurisprudence, even for people who were coming from other EU countries. One prominent case is Mamadou Ba, a Guinean man who had been given refugee status in Greece circa 2005 but became the target of a harassment campaign from Golden Dawn after 2010; he ended up fleeing to Belgium in 2014 and was granted asylum there on the grounds that he could not avail himself of the protection of the Greek authorities. Another example came just a few days ago in Austria, where a judge struck down a deportation order to Hungary for an Afghan asylum-seeker on the grounds that "Hungary is no longer a safe country for refugees".

Yet another aspect is that the practice varies wildly from one European country to the next because there's no unified asylum system, but in general it can be said that the "you have to come directly from Syria" rule was never at the centre of the debate until a couple of months ago when the number of people arriving increased dramatically (as a side note, if we were to implement such a rule, no European country would ever take asylum-seekers since we have no borders with the countries they come from and it's impossible for them to fly direct from Damascus to Stockholm). In France, anyone arriving from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, CAR or any other country where the situation is qualified as "generalised violence" will be automatically granted subsidiary protection with the option to appeal and file an application for refugee status. In Greece, funnily enough, we now grant full refugee status to anyone coming from such countries, with the caveat of course that hardly any of them apply for asylum here since this country has nothing to offer (I visited Lesvos last week and found myself in this crazy situation where the police registration centre was packed with thousands of people who just wanted to declare that they have arrived in Greece, whereas the asylum office was empty and they told me they were easily processing about 20 cases a week). In Belgium on the other hand, the practice is much more stringent and we get regular reports of, say, groups of Iraqis in detention centres who accepted "voluntary repatriation" to Baghdad after their asylum claim was rejected on the basis that Iraq may not be entirely safe, but Baghdad is (*pulls hair out*)

The practice for administrative detention also varies wildly (there's a useful summary of a 2014 EMN report here). Crazy Hungary just introduced a 3-year imprisonment measure for anyone caught crossing the border illegally, with a slew of complementary measures such as separating children from their parents to place them in orphanages (the ECHR are going to have a field day when someone takes the case there). In Greece under the New Democracy government, the maximum detention period was 18 months and didn't really discriminate between migrants and asylum-seekers (it actually prevented a lot of people from seeking asylum at all as the police wouldn't let them file an asylum request). The SYRIZA government reduced that to 6 months, but in reality this policy was completely overrun by recent developments. Under Greek law, everyone is a detainee until they register with the police and that should be the full Eurodac Monty with fingerprinting and all (which means that, funnily enough, all these people you see on TV roaming around the Greek islands are, technically, detainees) but in reality the police gave up on that because they simply can't cope and now "registration" for Syrians means getting a piece of paper on the island where they arrive that gives them an appointment in February 2016 to get themselves Eurodac-ed in Athens. Needless to say that no one will wait until February 2016 and that they will all be somewhere well beyond Greece when the time for their appointment comes.

Then there's the issue of Syrians vs everybody else. I'm not entirely sure how this became the commonly accepted practice because I spent the past year and a half working on issues that didn't directly have to do with refugees, but around Europe right now, with the exception of very few countries, Syrians will be automatically considered as bona fide asylum seekers (which is a fair appraisal) but everyone else is expected to prove that they are not "economic migrants". This is of course patently absurd when you consider the situation in Afghanistan or Eritrea, to name but two countries whose nationals should be considered as prima facie refugees, but it is also highly problematic when you have an asylum applicant from the Gambia, where there is no war and the dictatorship is not as brutal as in Eritrea, but it's still a brutal dictatorship even though the EU are considering to put it on their list of "safe countries".

IMO the core of the problem right now is this concept of "safe countries" that has become the backbone of the European asylum discourse even though it has no proper foundation in law (actually it has been ruled discriminatory and unconstitutional by Supreme Courts in several countries around the world, the latest example being Canada sometime in July this year). It really blurs the lines of what is acceptable and what is not in terms of asylum management and the result is that a lot of people who should have a fair chance of obtaining asylum in any country where they apply just fall through the cracks and find themselves in even more dangerous situations than before. I have a colleague who is conducting research on the matter to determine if there has been a clear shift in the way European asylum processes are managed in recent months/years but I don't know how far she got, I'll check it with her and get back to you.

Lastly, on a more philosophical level if you will, what is at stake is the very understanding we have of a refugee population movement. For decades, all the EU advocacy, whether public statements, lobbying towards individual governments of third countries or bilateral relations with countries receiving large refugee populations, was focused on the idea that a refugee flow was not a one-off event you could stem, but an on-going phenomenon that had to be addressed with adequate respect for human rights, international conventions, blah-blah. But now that the refugees are coming to Germany and the Netherlands instead of Kenya or Pakistan, all these nice theories flew out the window and the EU as a whole, as well as individual governments, are treating the current influx as something that can be stopped. If they don't realise very, very soon that they have to apply to themselves the same standards that they have been demanding from much more disadvantaged countries for decades, we're going to witness here human rights abuses on a scale unseen since decades (actually, when you look at things on the Serbia-Croatia-Hungary front, I think we already are witnessing something that hasn't happened in Europe in a very, very long time).

I hope the above is helpful (I realise that I'm rambling a bit) and I'm sorry I can't provide you with links and sources and the like right now, since all that stuff is in my computer in the office and I'm hoping not to have to go there in the coming few days, but I can look up more stuff and get back to you on details if you want any.

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Ender Sai Your concern for the future well-being of refugees is touching, but your claim to the moral high ground and the purity of your intentions come across as laughable when, twenty posts up, you chose David we-won't-be-invaded-by-a-swarm-of-illegals Cameron as an example to illustrate the idea that countries wanting to keep control over their borders is a matter of immigration management and not of xenophobia.

I'm quite confident that in ten years, I'll still be working with refugees, migrants and minorities, since that's my profession, and I'm equally sure that you'll still be pontificating, here or elsewhere, about your superior understanding of geopolitics with inane arguments regarding how poor little Australia got bullied by the Great Satan into invading Iraq.

You can consider your paragraph copied-pasted a dozen times here already, because I'm sure that our little conversation is tiring not only for me but also for other readers of this thread.

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No, we have a solution. We ask them politely to stay put wherever they are -- be that a camp in Turkey or a no-man's land between Serbia and Hungary -- and we wait to see if Australia will be generous enough to take in an extra 3,000 over the next ten years

 

What sadly gets ignored on a constant basis, is that most of the refugees are not Syrian, nor do they come from any area were there is a war or any danger to them.
Taking the numbers of until August, only 20% of the refugees that arrived in Germany were Syrian, with another 5% from Iraq. Over 40% came from the Balkan states and were moving purely on economic reasons. Virtually non of them have the chance to be granted asylum, but the money they get from Germany until their request has been answered is way more than they would get if they worked back home, and since the time needed to answer the requests get longer and longer due to an incredibly high work-load, it is definately worth it for them, even if they know they will get rejected. Not to mention that hardly anyone actually gets send back once the request has been rejected, thus putting a further strain onto society.
It doesn't help that people use fake passports now, with up to a quarter of the people who claim to be Syrians not actually being Syrians. It doesn't help that those were weren't actually fleeing from war often showed entitlement and behaved like jerks. It also doesn't help that people believed lots of myths and now only want to travel to one or two countries.

To make things worse, many of the refugees aren't interested in following any rules or laws. Being registered? No, we don't want that. Following the refugee-rules, ah, who cares. We don't get our way? Lets throw stones at people and start a riot. They are trying to move us somewhere? nah, lets just pull the emergency breaks and leave the train wherever we want to. When you have to deal with that kind of garbage behaviour, it is no wonder that the population isn't all that happy. Not that it matters to a certain peculiar bunch of citizens, who don't mind all the rules being broken. Not that these kind of people ever made sense anyway. I guess none of them ever bothered to think that rushing to help those refugees who break all the rules and have a sense of entitlement punishes those refugees who actually do follow the rules, but then again, thinking things through has never been a strength of these people.

What also gets constantly ignored by the "we have to help everyone!!1!" crowd, is that doing so is the opposite of helping the refugees. Germany all but inviting immigrants was the worst thing they could have done. Taking on more and more people, way more than you are capable of supplying on the short term or integrating in the long term, isn't helping anyone. It doesn't help the refugees, as you cannot supply them, it doesn't help the people working on the asylum requests or those who have to supply the refugees, because the workload is just insane. It creates resentment among the population, because their fears and valid complaints get constantly ignored. Putting way more refugees into one place than the place can handle makes the local citizens vary and increases frustration among the refugees, because they get bunched in huge numbers without having anything to do, which in turn automatically increases violence and crime, which in turn makes the local population resent the situation even more.

Just one or two days ago, the SPD party-leadership met with all their local leaders and mayors, and what they had to say was what everyone who spend more than 5 seconds thinking about the matter could have told you before. The situation was completely unbearable in every single way. None of the districts or cities were capable of dealing with this anymore. They were running out of houses, tents, supplies, doctors and teachers; people working for the government were breaking down on a daily basis because they just couldn't handle the workload anymore; support in the population was erroding more and more with a real danger of things getting out of hand if there aren't some drastic changes very soon. The list goes on and on. If all the local leaders - the people who actually have to deal with this stuff, not those who make big speaches and then ignore the outcomes because they don't have to deal with it - tell you that this is a chaotic mess that cannot be dealt with, you should realise that you made a mistake. It's not like this is coming from some sort of conservative party either.

The people who clamor to help at all costs will probably be the first ones who cry out about a lack of help once the refugees they so desperately wanted to bring in against any logic and potential ability to deal with them will freeze to death once winter comes. Completely ignoring that they were the ones who forced this mess onto a system that couldn't possibly have dealt with it.

It's funny how those few states that actually do follow the rules get insulted for it. It is also funny how the very same useless EU-leaders clamor for a quota that everyone knows won't work at all. How is it supposed to help any? These states don't want the refugees and the refugees don't want to go to these states. As soon as they are forced to move there, they will just run away and try to get to their original target again. What are you supposed to do about that, put people into guarded camps with a fence around it?
If you create this mess by being way more inviting than you should have been, you cannot force others to help you out. They were the ones who pointed out how idiotic such a move would be, and they were right. Now you are drowning in a self-created mess and want to force those who basically begged you not to go that way to help you out or face punishment. That kind of behaviour is simply a joke.


Asylum was never - ever - meant to apply to more than a selective few people. There is a reason why even a civil war is NOT enough reason for asylum going by the actual international rules. Trying to apply asylum on masses of people is bound to fail. It was never meant for such a thing.
Taking on people from everywhere does not help one bit. It doesn't help the refugees, it doesn't help the countries they want to move to, it doesn't help the countries they are moving from.

 

Owing to your very long trip, I am going to assume you were jet-lagged when making this post.

What, in particular, did you want to see? How would you imagine it playing out?

I would remind you that much the same was true of the Libyan protests. They also managed to be more organized from a standpoint of internal cohesion and infrastructure than Syrian protesters ever have, by whole orders of magnitude. The country was also much less the subject of its neighbors competing geo-political designs, and their was a broader international consensus about the need to intervene. In spite of all that, the medium-term outcome has still been poor, with the territory still war-torn and any notion of a functional state in full collapse. It is a major source of refugees in the present crisis.

What then, were you proposing, in this imminently less favorable situation? How would American involvement, short of a full-scale occupation, been likely to stop the country from devolving into wellspring of refugees? Further, given the lengths some organizations have proven themselves willing to go in pouring resources into that conflict, what would have stopped a pretty rapid escalation in any American participation in the conflict to sustain the desired outcome? Finally, exactly what outcome would be desired (let alone just) in this case, and how would the US be positioned to impose it on the multittude of participants in this conflict?

Or were you just sort of lazily working an old saw because that's easier than confronting the questions Chyntuck has raised about your approach?

 

I'm not really sure anything remotely approaching validity could be assigned to Chyntuck's posts, Wocky. This is someone in a deeply cynical profession that makes its coin fleecing migrants, so I'll not really cede any ground there. My personal favourite is how they make banks and financial service providers pay them a commission on AU$5mil over 4 years for referring subclass 188 applicants to those institutions. In addition to their fees. No, sorry, the migration lawyer high horse is a bit too gilt edged for me to give anything close to a damn about what they say.

All I'm asking, Wocky, is that America does that thing it doesn't always do an take some accountability. Going back to Toynbee's point about the dog wagging its tail - maybe pick some of those chairs up. Taking 10,000 refugees when we're taking 12,000 is disappointing, no? Considering the shove the US gave the whole thing, to get it moving?


Perhaps, since Chyntuck is busy wasting my time, you could take a look at my point about the risk of throwing all these people at Germany? I don't think it's actually unreasonable.

What? No. You'll note I said that this crisis actually highlights the limits of border and refugee policies in Europe, and have merely said the answer is to think long term about it. Not just to expect Germany to absorb them all. I can understand Chyntuck's contempt for Germany - they're to be hated as you go begging for money to keep yourself afloat because you're unwilling to give up spending more than you earn (and paying proper tax). But for the rest of Europe, you need a solution which is equitable to most importantly, refugees but for Europe as a whole. Otherwise you end up with resentment, social unrest, and people who haven't actually found that the new life they're seeking materialised.

 

Shorter Ender: Chyntuck can't be right because she's Greek, she's a leftist and I just made up her CV. Oh, and because I say so, she's evading taxes, so don't listen to her.

The Refugee Convention was made to deal with 40-60 million displaced people in Europe after WWII. Selective few?

Oh, and there are some clichés about refugees you forgot to mention in your post, would you like me to list them for you?

 

Chyntuck, I know it can be hard, ES' realism used to give me a hangover sometimes, too. But in the end it's more useful than idealism. It seems to me that in the argument the two of you are having, which I don't find tiring by the way, he is the one who is prepared to think outside the box, and to imagine a future. Which is what extreme situations really call for. I strongly agree with him that there's a risk for Germany to take in so many refugees. Just today, a refugee center was burned down. And it wasn't the first. There's a long history of violence towards refugees in Germany, and the anti-immigrant sentiments are strong. The demographics of some of the big cities have transformed in the past decaded, and it's obvious the people need to get used to it. There's a delicate balance that must be maintained if the country is not to fall in the hands of some extreme right-wing populist. Making large noble gestures plays right into the hands of somebody like that. Sure, it's a beautiful thought - but it only works if more countries do it. I'm sure we can all agree on that, at least.

 

The entire point of policy is that it has to be objective and free of sentiment. Treating refugees or hell, even migrants like widgets absolutely strips humanity out of the equation but if you're even fractionally sensible that will lead to better outcomes.

Such as asking about the long term impacts to a) the refugees themselves if they can't get work and b) Germany too. Yes, the Convention was established in the wake of World War II, but it also didn't contemplate a Schengen scenario.

Nor did it reasonably expect that the burden of caring for and absorbing refugees would be born by any one state, especially to the point of overwhelming the state's ability to resettle these refugees into a new life. (I am assuming of course that when they say they want to work, they want to work and not just live off paternalistic welfare so white people can feel like they're doing something meaningful). This is expressly stated in the preamble of the Convention.

So too is the obligation of all contracting parties to avoid the Convention, and the issue of refugees, from becoming a source of tension between States.

So yeah, look at my inhumanity for wanting to solve the problem beyond the immediate and visceral images of people suffering. How dare I put them before my own need to feel like, in the chronic short term, I'm helping.

 

The Alternative for Deutscheland(AfD) party I read is polling higher than ever(still only 5% but that's headway for them). In fact, didn't their founder break away(I can't recall his name) because they were too hardline and he formed his own party? Geesh. They and NPD could see a large rise in popularity.

 

Separating this particular branch of discussion from the broader one, this is not "all you were asking" nor is it an accurate reflection of what happened in this thread. You made repeated, explicit claims that the US is especially responsible for the collapse of Syria, and doubled down when questioned about it.

As evidenced by your lack of response to the last post, you don't actually have a case to be made here. While the US can rightly be assigned responsibility for the particular group ISIS, it is not more broadly a prime mover in the country's disintegration, nor is it particularly evident that another group might not have filled the void ISIS now occupies. That makes you come off like a blowhard.

 

Let's move that discussion to the appropriate thread then.

Do you have anything to add on the other points I raised here?

 

I have a logistical question: How are refugees getting to distant countries that have agreed to take them in? Does the US or Australian government, for example, just fly them in? How does that process work?

 

In general, or in this instance specifically?

 

U.S. to now accept 185,000 refugees over the next 2 years.

 

Meanwhile, Canada has only promised to re-settle 10,000 refugees by September of 2016.

 

This is a really good development and the US should be commended for it.

 

My only concern is that I don't think it should be valid to cite racism as a rationale for not accepting more refugees when leading governmental figures from said countries are also making race-baiting public remarks. At the very least, that sort of self-serving hypocrisy ought to be heavily denounced.

 

Great. Nice job, Canada.

 

OK but you understand politicians say stuff they don't often mean, because it makes them look good. Like Obama lying about officially recognising the Armenian genocide because he has no conviction to speak of.

Specifically, what I'm concerned about are:

* The long term effects, economically, to Germany absorbing more than its fair share of refugees
* The long term health considerations of refugees who, based on pure numbers, will be guaranteed to miss out on jobs for a number of years, and
* The issues Schengen can create for the Convention