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Comment by mjolk | Hacker News Reader

> Despite the difficulty of access to westerners, the country is relatively open to fellow Muslim nations, particularly during the Haj season when pilgrims from across the world come to Mecca and Medina.

This is helpful as I assume this means that they'll be able to take in large numbers of refugees. It seems like Saudi Arabia is very intent on keeping themselves safe from attack, so it seems a geographically close safe-haven is an ideal situation for those that would otherwise have to brave trips to Europe or the Americas.

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They can certainly accommodate a lot of people. They have over 100,000 air conditioned tents at Mecca which can hold over 3 million people:

http://www.bricoleurbanism.org/beautiful-urban-moments/mina-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mina,_Saudi_Arabia

Despite the facility to do so, they take in no refugees. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/12/facts-figures...

> The six Gulf countries - Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain - have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.

That's really shocking to me as these countries are rich in resources. Further, AFAIK, the majority of the populations share a religion/culture and these countries are very close (comparative to Europe/US) to the current middle east struggles, so why would they turn away refugees? I'm surprised there's not more political discussion happening to pressure stable, neighboring countries to help in this global challenge.

The reason is simple: incoming refugees will cause internal strife and fracture the Saudi Royal family's tenuous hold on power. I don't agree or disagree with that premise, but that's the reasoning.

The same is occurring in Europe and even America. The establishment is threatened as a result of this mass immigration. Perhaps the difference is that the Saudis do not suffer from white guilt and, hence, attempts at rational discourse are not drown out with calls of racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.

The Haj visas are only open for certain areas of the country - mostly the airport in Jeddah and then the pilgrim trail to Mecca and Medina. There's not much infrastructure there aside from very ritzy / high end hotels that've been being built at Mecca as well, so it'd be a bit tougher to take refugees. Getting them from their origin points to Jeddah as well would be difficult - by sea that's 1080km or so, assuming they're coming out of Jordan's tiny sliver of gulf access (which getting to is pretty rough on its own).

> The Haj visas are only open for certain areas of the country - mostly the airport in Jeddah and then the pilgrim trail to Mecca and Medina.

Sounds like this is would just be a simple action of politics to extend those visas or just waive the need to wait for access -- that's what is expected of nations when talking about refugees. This sounds like a great cultural fit as well, which is important for refugees trying to adjust to a new country.

> There's not much infrastructure there aside from very ritzy / high end hotels that've been being built at Mecca as well, so it'd be a bit tougher to take refugees.

If it's very ritzy hotels, then Saudi Arabia is very financially capable of organizing buses and transport to either temporary accommodations or the facilities that would need to exist for pilgrimages. Of course, these accommodations wouldn't have to be _in_ Mecca, so this isn't really a reason to turn refugees away.

> Getting them from their origin points to Jeddah as well would be difficult - by sea that's 1080km or so, assuming they're coming out of Jordan's tiny sliver of gulf access (which getting to is pretty rough on its own).

I'm sure Saudi Arabia has a naval presence and can organize mass immigration by plane. Refugees are trying to make it to Europe by raft, so it seems as if Saudi Arabia could very easily afford to help bridge this distance.

Err, some observations:

The Haj visa are just for the Haj, during the Haj period (last week of the lunar year), for the Haj, i.e. to go from the airport to Mecca and Medina and back. You could do the pilgrimage outside the Haj season (that's called Umrah), but it's rare. (Well, "you" can only if you're a Muslim, otherwise you can't even enter Mecca, and of course if you're female you need to come with your male guardian, unless you're over 45 yrs old).

> There's not much infrastructure there

You have 2 million people passing through within one week. There is a huge infrastructure there, busses, tents, monorail, dedicated airport terminals, massive crowd control measures (every now and then you have a panic where several hundreds of people get crushed). I wouldn't call that "no infrastructure".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajj#Modern_crowd-control_prob...

You might have meant infrastructure for refugees, and that's true.

Refugees and Haj are totally orthogonal topics. Saudi Arabia has little interest in refugees, or tourists: they did not even issue tourist visa until 2014. This is changing ever so slowly as the end of the flow of oil money is coming into sight.

> The Haj visa are just for the Haj, during the Haj period (last week of the lunar year), for the Haj, i.e. to go from the airport to Mecca and Medina and back.

A visa is just a political device -- we're talking about refugees.

> You have 2 million people passing through within one week. There is a huge infrastructure there, busses, tents, monorail, dedicated airport terminals, massive crowd control measures (every now and then you have a panic where several hundreds of people get crushed). I wouldn't call that "no infrastructure".

Wow, moving 2 million people to accommodations in a week should be massively helpful!

> Saudi Arabia has little interest in refugees, or tourists: they did not even issue tourist visa until 2014. This is changing ever so slowly as the end of the flow of oil money is coming into sight.

No country has interest in refugees, but modern nations have an implicit obligation to minimize human suffering.

Based on what you've taught me, I'm curious about the absence of political pressure on Saudi Arabia -- it seems to me that they could greatly help.

> No country has interest in refugees, but modern nations have an implicit obligation to minimize human suffering.

Well, yes. But Saudi Arabia is not a modern, moral nation. It is a monarchy, a totalitarian autocracy, a hereditary dictatorship, with an abysmal human rights record promoting a particularly toxic version of Islam (Wahabism), which in turn legitimises the Saud dynasty's hold on power. They execute more people than the USA (though less than China and Iran).

(Note that I'm saying that it's a terrible political system - many Saudi individuals are fine people and suffering under their regime; just as can be said about North Korea, Iran, etc.)

The reason they get away with it is their oil wealth.

At any rate, they don't give a rat's ass about refugees, and used to have enough money that they didn't need to care much about anyone's opinion. That is slowly changing, and I hope the country will open up and modernise, but I wouldn't hold my breath for any substantial contribution to the refugee crisis.

>> This is helpful as I assume this means that they'll be able to take in large numbers of refugees.

Up to this point, I thought SA was refusing to take any refugees from Syria. Has this changed recently?

http://time.com/4025187/arab-states-syrian-refugees/

According to a report by Amnesty International, the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council offered zero formal resettlement slots to Syrians by the end of 2014.

Rights groups point out that those countries — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — with wealth amassed from oil, gas, and finance, collectively have far more resources than the two Arab states that have taken in the most Syrians: Jordan and Lebanon

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