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

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-the-eu-time-to-sort-the-leaders-from-the-led

Europe’s inaction is beginning to create a real challenge to its existence



It was hard not to think, these past few days, that whatever remained of a Europe of values, or even of basic humanitarian sentiment, was fast unravelling. The scenes of weary refugees being pushed from one country to the next, sometimes hounded by police or the military, sometimes exposed to tear gas, are challenging the very idea of Europe. Hungary, where the hardline prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has legislated to imprison refugees who try to breach its fences, seems impervious to criticism. That rejection of the refugees has to a degree been imitated in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, all intent on moving the human tide along as fast as possible. The war of words between some of these countries’ representatives was all too reminiscent of the language of the regional tensions of 25 years ago, old hostilities re-ignited by the common European failure to overcome the difficulties and forge a joint strategy to share the problem and address it in a pragmatic and humane way.

Witness how Croatia, where 20,000 people arrived in two days, announced that it had decided to force Hungary to take in a flow of families who had rerouted to Croatia after they had been blocked by the new fence along the Hungarian-Serbian border. In response, Hungary accused Croatia of violating its sovereignty. Now it has reportedly started to build another fence on its border with Croatia, and hinted that it might block its neighbour’s accession to the Schengen zone. Slovenia’s prime minister has spoken of setting up a “corridor” that would give refugees free passage from the Balkans to northern Europe. These acrimonious exchanges should weigh heavily on Wednesday’s summit of EU leaders as they make yet another attempt to reach agreement on how to tackle the refugee question.


Nor will Germany’s Angela Merkel be able to duck the charge of contributing to the upsurge in numbers after laying out the welcome mat three weeks ago. She revoked her offer only after fierce criticism from her Bavarian-based CSU political partner, which complained that neither Munich’s train station nor its social services could cope. While it is impossible to deny the challenge such large numbers pose, Mrs Merkel’s show of humanism should be welcomed, if only as a call to the rest of the EU to mobilise.

But while Mrs Merkel may have contributed a pull factor by offering hope to hundreds of thousands of refugees, the main push factor behind the exodus remains in Syria itself. It is not only Isis. The Assad regime – backed anew by Russia – continues to pursue indiscriminate assaults on urban areas. Now it is forcibly enlisting young men into its army. It is also claimed that Syrian authorities have made it easier to get passports recently, possibly to encourage the flight of refugees as a way of focusing attention on the war’s external fallout, rather than on the methods used to wage it. Determined diplomacy, involving all key players, to end the war must be part of the answer.

There is a second factor driving people north: the outrageous shortfall in international funding for the UN agencies that support the four million Syrians displaced in neighbouring Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. With the diminishing prospect of being able to return home, it is no surprise that thousands have flocked to Europe in the hope of giving their children a better future.

At this week’s meetings, EU leaders must finally set aside their differences. This is not to minimise the difficulties. But, by galvanising damaging populism, their arguments obscure the real nature of the problem. As Alexander Betts, the director of Oxford’s refugee studies centre, argues in the Observer, two trends have collided. The first is the flight of Syrians seeking asylum. To them, there is a clear and unquestioned obligation. But they have been joined by hundreds of thousands of other people who also have powerful reasons to despair of a better life in their own countries: “survival migrants”, as Professor Betts describes them. It is the lack of a policy for these people that makes helping Syrians and other asylum-seekers so much harder.

This great human movement poses a huge strategic challenge that cannot be addressed only at a national level. It needs EU-wide investment and leadership. But properly managed it could (like most previous great migrations into Europe), bring great rewards. This week, though, the attention should be on finding a way for the EU’s 500 million people to welcome in a decent manner a group of refugees who represent less than a third of 1% of its total population.

 

Sorry for not replying earlier Watto, I got caught up in the never-ending Greek drama again yesterday

It's obvious that the EU is going to have to get its act together and figure out a long-term plan of sorts that is in everyone's best interest to handle the influx. However I'd like to challenge your definition of realism here because as I see it, discussing the long-term plan now is actually the idealistic thing to do.

First of all, it is not realistic management of a refugee influx to tell people "please wait until we figure out a long-term plan". A refugee influx is the situation par excellence where you don't get asked if you can manage it in the long term, and that's not idealism, that's reality. Refugees are coming, they will keep coming, and they will find ways around any borders or fences you throw in their way to prevent them from coming. Heck, there have been arrivals of Syrians in Norway through its arctic border with Russia! In this context, the realistic thing to do is not to manage new arrivals as individual asylum-seekers but to establish emergency structures to host large numbers of people FIRST and to discuss the long-term plan LATER or in parallel, but you can't avoid dealing with the influx here and now and you can't pretend that you can stem it. When you look at the EU response, both in terms of individual member states and in terms of the union as a whole, they have done the opposite: they started talking about how there needs to be a common EU asylum system -- and we all know how this sort of treaty-level negotiation in the EU takes years -- and in terms of immediate response they put forward a proposal that has not even been agreed to, i.e. the redistribution among the member states over the next two years of less than half the arrivals this year so far. That response is simply. not. realistic.

Second, it is not realistic, in my view, to call what we have in Europe right now an "extreme" situation when we look at the continent as a whole or even at individual countries. It's an emergency situation because it's an unforeseen (or at least unplanned for) influx but it cannot be described as extreme, because the transit and receiving countries actually have the capacity to provide short-term solutions for the numbers coming through. Even in a place like Kos, population 30,000, the presence of 5,000 transiting refugees at any given moment is not an extreme situation -- it is an issue that needs to be addressed but if we call that extreme, what do we call the fact that 800,000 tourists arrive in Kos airport on international flights every year (that doesn't take into account domestic flights)? Or what do we call the arrival of 250,000 Rwandans in Tanzania in a single day on 28 April 1994? These islands would have the capacity to manage the flow if they were provided with the manpower to do refugee registration in a timely way. The reason there are all these issues there doesn't have to do with the fact that the numbers are overwhelming, but with the fact that Athens hasn't sent the extra police needed to do their paperwork so that they can travel on.

Third, the closed border policy is not realistic either because it is a key component of the transformation of the flow into an emergency. Yes, the number of arrivals increased in July and August, and yes, this creates extra pressure on everyone, from the first reception countries to the transit countries to the destination countries. But the reason we witnessed these dramatic scenes with groups of thousands of people entering Austria in a single day isn't only that the numbers increased, it's also and most importantly that the closed border/slow-them-down policy caused a pile-up in the transit countries and people started arriving in western Europe in large groups rather than as a small trickle that could disperse soon after arrival. A population *flow* was treated as a static phenomenon and that is not realistic at all.

Fourth, it is not realistic to say, "country X can generate only so many jobs a year" and consider that as the key parameter to define how many migrants/refugees that country can absorb. The three top European countries where firms have difficulty filling jobs are Hungary (circa 55%), Germany (circa 45%) and Poland (circa 40%). At the same time, these countries are respectively the 1st, 4th and 2nd where the population is shrinking fastest. In the same way that a population flow cannot be managed as a static phenomenon, demographic growth and labour market development cannot be treated as a static phenomenon. What is realistic in the case of Hungary and Poland, who don't want to take refugees, is to say that their policy has very little to do with the state of their economy and very much to do with nationalism and xenophobia. What is realistic in the case of Germany is not to say that taking in refugees is a grand generous gesture but to examine how this decision to accept large numbers may have been based on economic self-interest. (And for the record, I want to say that, even though there are many issues with Germany's handling of refugee issues in general, they have so far been not only extremely principled but also extremely efficient in dealing with the current influx.)

Fifth, I'd like to challenge the geopolitical realism of insisting that we will help people directly in the refugee camps, in particular when we are talking about Lebanon but also about Turkey. Anyone with minimal knowledge of the Middle East understands that 1.2 million refugees in Lebanon, population 4.5 million, which also happens to be an exceedingly unstable country, is a disaster waiting to happen. Turkey is different in the sense that it isn't a failed state, but its involvement in regional geopolitics and the fact that a significant proportion of the Syrian refugees are Kurds are a recipe for even more instability. It is not realistic to expect that we can contain the problem to these countries now and it is even less realistic to expect that things will not get worse in the near future, which means in turn that without an immediate emergency response on the European side the refugee flow is likely to increase even more while we keep discussing issues of long-term integration and that we will be very realistically swamped because we won't be prepared.

Sixth, it is not realistic to say that an adequate emergency response on the European side would constitute a transformative pull factor when the push factors are so overwhelmingly powerful. Thousands of people are already coming to Europe even in this crappy situation where they get stuck in no-man's lands between fenced borders because where they come from, it's much, much, much worse. There are very few, if any, cases in history where the pull factor played a decisive role in speeding up a refugee influx and I cannot see for the life of me how anyone could realistically believe that people who spent years with barrel bombs and beheadings and whose lives were blasted to smithereens will be motivated to flee because they know that there's a comfortable refugee shelter waiting for them in Sweden. Realistically they're motivated to flee as far as possible because the situation back home is dreadful.

Lastly, I strongly disagree that Germany should be careful about taking more refugees because a bunch of neo-Nazis thugs have gone and burnt down refugee shelters. Neo-Nazis thugs are criminal groups that should be dealt with under criminal law and as such they don't get to define policy. What's next? They start assaulting homosexuals and we address the issue by limiting access to public spaces for homosexuals? Or any other version of blame-the-victim, really? That doesn't make for healthy political life as a matter of principle, and to get back to the subject of realism: show me one country, one, around Europe, where indulgence towards or appeasement of the xenophobes, or, worse, co-opting of a mild version of their discourse by the mainstream political leadership has led to the marginalisation of xenophobic parties on the political scene. It hasn't. Not only are these parties constantly on the rise, but their ideas are going increasingly mainstream because mainstream politicians parrot them. It is not realistic to expect that you can manage a flow of people who will not stop coming, whatever you do, and think that at the same time you can avoid dealing with the extremists in your midst. And if your realistic intention is to maintain the rule of law in your country, which is in your realistic interest, you enforce the law, which is that refugees and asylum-seekers have rights while thugs who engage in violent vandalism are prosecuted.

Yes, they fly them in, but after processing their resettlement application in the country where the refugees file it. It's obviously a much more comfortable situation than what happens in countries that are accessible to refugees, because the host countries get to choose whom they take in and the refugees arrive with all their paperwork in place. The problem with it is that the process is extremely time-consuming as host countries will have their own set of criteria for this selection (e.g. they want to give priority to applicants who have relatives in the host country so that the burden of looking after them doesn't fall on the state) and, in the case of refugees from Muslim countries, they also run security background checks that take forever. So in the case of the planned 185,000 resettlements to the US (which is an immense piece of good news) the logistics aren't only about how to fly them in but also, and most importantly, on how to set up the administrative structures that will allow to process 185,000 files in the adequate amount of time.

 

Indeed. There does need to be a common EU asylum system.

 

Let's call it Arkham!

 

Oh, gosh. Like Arkham City!

 

In the meantime I assume they'll all be living in the parking garage at the Salzburg train station (where I'll be in a minute)?

 

Maybe of interest

 

Jabbadabbado not sure if you saw it yet, but the SPÖ won quite comfortably in Vienna 39.5% to 31 for Hitler, er I mean Strache. The Greens also had a good showing, so they'll have a comfortable coalition.

 

https://www.economist.com/news/worl...l-gains-are-so-vast-objectors-could-be-bribed

If borders were open
A world of free movement would be $78 trillion richer
Yes, it would be disruptive. But the potential gains are so vast that objectors could be bribed to let it happen

print-edition icon Print edition |
Jul 13th 2017
A HUNDRED-DOLLAR BILL is lying on the ground. An economist walks past it. A friend asks the economist: “Didn’t you see the money there?” The economist replies: “I thought I saw something, but I must have imagined it. If there had been $100 on the ground, someone would have picked it up.”

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is not actually true. But occasionally it is. Michael Clemens, an economist at the Centre for Global Development, an anti-poverty think-tank in Washington, DC, argues that there are “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk”. One seemingly simple policy could make the world twice as rich as it is: open borders.

Workers become far more productive when they move from a poor country to a rich one. Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system. Those who used to scrape a living from the soil with a wooden hoe start driving tractors. Those who once made mud bricks by hand start working with cranes and mechanical diggers. Those who cut hair find richer clients who tip better.

“Labour is the world’s most valuable commodity—yet thanks to strict immigration regulation, most of it goes to waste,” argue Bryan Caplan and Vipul Naik in “A radical case for open borders”. Mexican labourers who migrate to the United States can expect to earn 150% more. Unskilled Nigerians make 1,000% more.

“Making Nigerians stay in Nigeria is as economically senseless as making farmers plant in Antarctica,” argue Mr Caplan and Mr Naik. And the non-economic benefits are hardly trivial, either. A Nigerian in the United States cannot be enslaved by the Islamists of Boko Haram.

The potential gains from open borders dwarf those of, say, completely free trade, let alone foreign aid. Yet the idea is everywhere treated as a fantasy. In most countries fewer than 10% of people favour it. In the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, it is a political non-starter. Nonetheless, it is worth asking what might happen if borders were, indeed, open.

To clarify, “open borders” means that people are free to move to find work. It does not mean “no borders” or “the abolition of the nation-state”. On the contrary, the reason why migration is so attractive is that some countries are well-run and others, abysmally so.
Workers in rich countries earn more than those in poor countries partly because they are better educated but mostly because they live in societies that have, over many years, developed institutions that foster prosperity and peace. It is very hard to transfer Canadian institutions to Cambodia, but quite straightforward for a Cambodian family to fly to Canada. The quickest way to eliminate absolute poverty would be to allow people to leave the places where it persists. Their poverty would thus become more visible to citizens of the rich world—who would see many more Liberians and Bangladeshis waiting tables and stacking shelves—but much less severe.

If borders were open, how many people would up sticks? Gallup, a pollster, estimated in 2013 that 630m people—about 13% of the world’s population—would migrate permanently if they could, and even more would move temporarily. Some 138m would settle in the United States, 42m in Britain and 29m in Saudi Arabia.

Gallup’s numbers could be an overestimate. People do not always do what they say they will. Leaving one’s homeland requires courage and resilience. Migrants must wave goodbye to familiar people, familiar customs and grandma’s cooking. Many people would rather not make that sacrifice, even for the prospect of large material rewards.

Wages are twice as high in Germany as in Greece, and under European Union rules Greeks are free to move to Germany, but only 150,000 have done so since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2010, out of a population of 11m. The weather is awful in Frankfurt, and hardly anyone speaks Greek. Even very large disparities combined with open borders do not necessarily lead to a mass exodus. Since 1986 the citizens of Micronesia have been allowed to live and work without a visa in the United States, where income per person is roughly 20 times higher. Yet two-thirds remain in Micronesia.

Despite these caveats, it is a fair bet that open borders would lead to very large flows of people. The gap between rich and poor countries globally is much wider than the gap between the richest and less-rich countries within Europe, and most poor countries are not Pacific-island paradises. Many are violent as well as poor, or have oppressive governments.

Also, migration is, in the jargon, “path-dependent”. It starts with a trickle: the first person to move from country A to country B typically arrives in a place where no one speaks his language or knows the right way to cook noodles. But the second migrant—who may be his brother or cousin—has someone to show him around. As word spreads on the diaspora grapevine that country B is a good place to live, more people set off from country A. When the 1,000th migrant arrives, he finds a whole neighbourhood of his compatriots.
So the Gallup numbers could just as well be too low. Today there are 1.4bn people in rich countries and 6bn in not-so-rich ones. It is hardly far-fetched to imagine that, over a few decades, a billion or more of those people might emigrate if there were no legal obstacle to doing so. Clearly, this would transform rich countries in unpredictable ways.
Voters in destination states typically do not mind a bit of immigration, but fret that truly open borders would lead to them being “swamped” by foreigners. This, they fear, would make life worse, and perhaps threaten the political system that made their country worth moving to in the first place. Mass migration, they worry, would bring more crime and terrorism, lower wages for locals, an impossible strain on welfare states, horrific overcrowding and traumatic cultural disruption.

Open questions
If lots of people migrated from war-torn Syria, gangster-plagued Guatemala or chaotic Congo, would they bring mayhem with them? It is an understandable fear (and one that anti-immigrant politicians play on), but there is little besides conjecture and anecdotal evidence to support it. Granted, some immigrants commit crimes, or even headline-grabbing acts of terrorism. But in America the foreign-born are only a fifth as likely to be incarcerated as the native-born. In some European countries, such as Sweden, migrants are more likely to get into trouble than locals, but this is mostly because they are more likely to be young and male. A study of migration flows among 145 countries between 1970 and 2000 by researchers at the University of Warwick found that migration was more likely to reduce terrorism than increase it, largely because migration fosters economic growth.

Would large-scale immigration make locals worse off economically? So far, it has not. Immigrants are more likely than the native-born to bring new ideas and start their own businesses, many of which hire locals. Overall, migrants are less likely than the native-born to be a drain on public finances, unless local laws make it impossible for them to work, as is the case for asylum-seekers in Britain. A large influx of foreign workers may slightly depress the wages of locals with similar skills. But most immigrants have different skills. Foreign doctors and engineers ease skills shortages. Unskilled migrants care for babies or the elderly, thus freeing the native-born to do more lucrative work.

Would open borders cause overcrowding? Perhaps, in popular cities like London. But most Western cities could build much higher than they do, creating more space. And mass migration would make the world as a whole less crowded, since fertility among migrants quickly plunges until it is much closer to the norm of their host country than their country of origin.

Would mass immigration change the culture and politics of rich countries? Undoubtedly. Look at the way America has changed, mostly for the better, as its population soared from 5m mainly white folks in 1800 to 320m many-hued ones today. Still, that does not prove that future waves of immigration will be benign. Newcomers from illiberal lands might bring unwelcome customs, such as political corruption or intolerance for gay people. If enough of them came, they might vote for an Islamist government, or one that raises taxes on the native-born to pamper the newcomers.

Eyes on the prize
There are certainly risks if borders are opened suddenly and without the right policies to help absorb the inflow. But nearly all these risks could be mitigated, and many of the most common objections overcome, with a bit of creative thinking.
If the worry is that immigrants will outvote the locals and impose an uncongenial government on them, one solution would be not to let immigrants vote—for five years, ten years or even a lifetime. This may seem harsh, but it is far kinder than not letting them in. If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.
This sounds horribly discriminatory, and it is. But it is better for the migrants than the status quo, in which they are excluded from rich-world labour markets unless they pay tens of thousands of dollars to people-smugglers—and even then they must work in the shadows and are subject to sudden deportation. Today, millions of migrants work in the Gulf, where they have no political rights at all. Despite this, they keep coming. No one is forcing them to.

“Open borders would make foreigners trillions of dollars richer,” observes Mr Caplan. A thoughtful voter, even if he does not care about the welfare of foreigners, “should not say...‘So what?’ Instead, he should say, ‘Trillions of dollars of wealth are on the table. How can my countrymen get a hefty piece of the action?’ Modern governments routinely use taxes and transfers to redistribute from young to old and rich to poor. Why not use the same policy tools to redistribute from foreign to native?” If a world of free movement would be $78trn richer, should not liberals be prepared to make big political compromises to bring it about?


* * * *

Thoughts?

I think the argument for more open borders is compelling, but until we have resolved the nascent insecurity brought about by a false sense of recovery following the GFC (and indeed, put the fascism and socialism which has become popular as people become more desperate for change, to bed). Otherwise you're just asking for pogroms.

 

So you're now more pro-migration because The Economist said so, Ender Sai?

 

I was never anti-migration. Having lived in another country, travelled a lot, and being a child of a refugee I'm not sure I could claim to oppose the movement of people.

My concern has always been that you can't just throw people at countries and assume it'll work. I think you'll find at the time of the European crisis, I made the point that Germany cannot absorb 1,000,000 refugees and provide futures for them that don't involve state handouts. And, those handouts are problematic for two reasons: firstly, the create resentment with the German people seeing it as subsidising the indolent; and secondly, more importantly, because refugees want to work. Take that away from them you take dignity and agency from them, and that has historically been fertile grounds for radicalism.

If you're referring to our offshore detention network? If people arriving by boat weren't majority illegal migrants trying to circumvent migration process and undermine the asylum seeking framework globally, we wouldn't have a problem. But as even the non-partisan parliamentary library report found, >50% of prima facie refugee applications failed to meet the criteria for a refugee.

 

I understand what the Europeans are going through.

I look at Russia, for example, they've taken in no less than 800,000 refugees from Donbass, from Eastern Ukraine, since the conflict there started in 2014

These are not some Arab migrants; these are fellow Slavic, even many of them fellow ethnic Russian people, who speak the same language as Russians in Russia, share their Orthodox Christian faith, and most of their culture in general.

And yet, still, there have been some problems integrating all these people into Russian society, getting all of them jobs and housing. In some regions, the refugee families were pushed to the front of the line for government housing, and school spots for their kids, ahead of local families, which caused tensions at times. Etc.

And that's 800,000 people, with, again, minimal cultural and linguistic differences, being integrated into the 146,000,000-strong Russian population.

Meanwhile, Germany, with their 80,000,000 had to integrate about the same number of people of Sunni Muslim, Arabic background, completely alien to most of their society...

Of course they are having huge troubles... And that goes on both sides. It is also hard for a newcomer to automatically immerse him or herself in their new country. I had my own culture shocks, when came to Canada. Same for all these refugees and migrants.

There will be many more difficult years ahead.

 

I can appreciate that concern. But we should probably weigh that potential against the radicalizing effects stemming from living in a literal war zone, the possibility of impressment into a militia, or being forced by necessity to fight for a radical group as a source of income that is otherwise unavailable.

 

DP

 

Wouldn't it still be unavailable regardless of whether they are in the country or not if there are no jobs to employ them? Perhaps you should consider that governments (like the German government in Ender's example) are responsible for the well-being of their citizenry first and foremost so this point is completely irrelevant. You're essentially saying that causing conflict between the refugees and the native population is somehow worth it. It isn't. It's better to take in a smaller number of people whose lives will improve than taking in more than a nation is capable which makes the situation more vulnerable than it otherwise would be.

 

Untrue. If they were refugees in a state that could subsidize their income and/or basic necessities, they would not face a choice between starving and fighting for cause they weren't necessarily committed to.

 

Yes, to a point until they can work for their own income within the nation. Which only becomes more difficult if you're taking, say, one million at once.

If that does not seem like it's the objective, then it most certainly seems like the government is

 

How does that negate my earlier point that this is still less hardship for them than being stuck inside a war zone?

Is that really what you are trying to propose? That being on welfare would be worse than being caught in a crossfire?

 

Of course, 100%. That's why it needs to be better coordinated than it is now, and harsher penalties for say Slavic economic migrants trying to blend in and emigrate with genuine refugees.

 

By this same logic, shouldn't the definition of refugee also be greatly expanded? As I believe you yourself have noted in the past, simply being in a war zone doesn't actually count. But as you've outlined above, there's every reason it should.

 

No, I'm pretty content with the definition of refugee Wocky. It's genocide that needs to be, and won't be, broadened. A reasonable fear of persecution upon refoulment is fine. Chyntuck, from her experiences on the other side of this equation (migration lawyer-as-activist vs former mandarin).

The issue needs management and leadership, and Germany tried the latter through passive-aggressive shaming and martyrdom which was not an ideal approach.

Though are you saying a bunch of Eastern Europeans queue jumping by infilrating Iraqis and Syrian groups means anyone who fails the refugee test (because of lack of evidence of persecution risk) could be unfairly penalised?

 

If one is only fleeing a war, there's no particular reason one would fear persecution. Yet, there's every reason that a person that finds themselves in such a situation might be prey to all the phenomena you just acknowledged refugee status was trying to prevent. So shouldn't they also be included?

 

You mean Internally Displaced Persons?

If so, no. They are not fleeing persecution. There is no risk stemming from refoulement once the conflict ends.

EDIT: I might just dial back the prescriptivity here. They aren't necessarily fleeing persecution.

 

I'm not an expert on the subject but I thought much of the definition depends on whether you cross international borders. Somebody who flees a a conflict zone but remains within the borders of their country is an 'internally' displaced person whereas somebody who crosses borders will be a refugee if they can claim that they have a reasonable fear of persecution if they return? In terms of establishing that 'reasonable fear' standard much would depend on who wins the conflict the are fleeing from, i.e, if they are fleeing from the conquering forces and so may establish that by returning they will be marked as deserters and traitors and shot.