Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
We have a union that claims to be be committed to human rights such as the right to seek asylum. That union recently experienced serious political unrest after receiving a bit over a million migrants around 2015 and clearly the political leadership decided that could not happen again. So the problem was offshored to Turkey, and to some extent Greece, and I'm sure to some North African nations in deals I'm not aware of.
This is going to be horrific, frankly. Whatever you think of the ethics of the whole business, it's pretty clear that politically, EU leadership is not willing to face another migrant crisis. Unfortunately, the EU also doesn't seem able to do a whole lot about the root causes of the crisis, namely political instability and war south of the EU borders. So what that leaves is the EU turning a blind eye to the problem, trying to get the authoritarian states on our borders to deal with the problem in a deniable fashion instead.
It's not going to work in the long run. People move across borders when they need to. Where it's all going, I don't know, but it's going to be a big, big problem for the EU if the conflicts in the Middle East and Africa can not be stabilized.
Asylum is not a "free migration card" as some NGOs or some people purport it to be. You don't get it just because you were born in a poor country.
And as much as some maybe, sheltered (or just idealistic) think borders shouldn't exist, no, they're there for a reason.
And the more asylum gets abused the more it will be harder to get.
One problem is that if asylum is refused, very few are forcibly repatriated. Most just ending up living in the EU illegally.
Both Hungary and Poland have shown that a modern state can largely prevent illegal crossing of its borders. We have the technology. It's not that difficult. Even easier when you have a sea acting as a barrier.
When the migration happens on a massive scale regardless, it's usually with tacit or explicit establishment's approval.
Keeping an airtight border is a very expensive task. You can probably be harder to get into than the next country, but in the context of the EU, that's not really a solution, it's just a way to make the problem worse.
Consider human rights. The ECJ loves to overrule government decisions on migration/asylum on the grounds of human rights, they do it all the time. The inability to deport Islamic "hate preachers" was one of the contributing factors in the Brexit campaign, in fact. Yet the moment Austria placed a large fraction of its own population under indefinite house arrest without trial, in violation of the Nurenberg Code no less, the EU was mysteriously silent.
Or how about the rule of law. When eastern European countries were electing conservative politicians the EU couldn't shut up about how the "rule of law" was being violated, though they never quite explained how. Then Latvia's parliament banned unvaccinated MPs from voting, violating the most basic rule a democracy has and at a stroke disenfranchising whole chunks of their population. Once again, the EU couldn't find anything to say about this.
I rest this case with a few quotes from Jean-Claude Juncker, former head of the EU Commission. He said these things whilst running the EU's most powerful body:
"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
"When the going gets tough, you have to lie."
"I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates"
"I believe neither the French nor the Dutch really rejected the constitutional treaty." (they did, of course)
In the end the, the EU does have values but those values are not the sort of values they're willing to publicly advertise.
But I think there will be an interesting twist - aging of the population. This feels like an abstract problem, but it will become very real.
Either the root causes get fixed or things start breaking, badly.
In addition, there are many "soft" measures. Cooperation with countries like Lybia and Turkey. Help to alleviate the problems they are running from. Announce that anyone who crosses illegaly will not receive an asylum. Etc.
As an European, I agree. At the very least, I think that we have the right to protect our borders.
However, this is not an isolated thing that can be morally decided independently of the rest of our foreign policy. We have provoked and participated in many wars in neighboring countries to defend our "economic interests". We are supporting authoritarian dictatorships in Africa so that European enterprises exploiting their natural resources have an easier job. Heck, when a neighboring country (Libya) threatened a bit our cheap oil supply (that is, our supply of their oil) we got all angry and violent and provoked a war there to change the regime.
Most of the immigrants in question come from countries that we have messed with. We certainly have the right to close our borders to them, but to do so we must first stop destroying and exploiting their countries.
"We"? How many of those wars were started by popular demand, with protests on the streets demanding our leaders take military action? "We" are being blamed for the actions of oil and weapons lobbyists (whose wars are paid by our taxes), and then asked to face the consequences of the actions due to their subversion of democracy.
We pay for the wars we don't want, we get the blame, we get to deal with the immigrants, and in the end, we still have to pay for the oil - the oil companies that benefit (always unnamed) don't hand it out for free!
Simple solution: don’t vote for people who start wars? The EU claims to be one of the most democratic entities. Why do people complain they’re being screwed by some minority group?
The point is that you are not allowed to vote against war anymore. It is demonstrably not possible to vote a different Commander-in-Chief in and end the war. Republicans tried that.
We are also not in Syria because of climate change. We are there because they are a geopolitical adversary of Israel.
I understand the evil ways of our leaders... However, I cannot face a person whose town has been bombed to oblivion by my purportedly elected officials, and tell him that I'm a "victim of the system" just like him.
As for "protests on the streets", I've certainly participated in most of the anti-war protests that have happened around me. Problem is that my neighbours consistently keep voting for our ever murderous leadership!
(Though that's only half the problem, and when you get xenophobia even against French in Quebec you see it's complicated)
That ship has sailed for many countries.
The problem isn't political instability or war. Both things have existed in the past, even within Europe, and there has been no migrant crisis. European nations have always taken huge numbers of asylum seekers, the doors are still open but it has to happen legally and in a controlled way...Europe is a democracy after all. And be clear, there are lots of economic migrants too...some from Sudan, some from Syria but the majority are economic migrants (I am in the UK, admittedly the stuff you see here is particularly extreme but you have asylum seekers taking over LGBT support groups or getting confirmed so they don't get sent back...it is crazy). That is why the article talks about climate change a lot (nutty right-wingers were saying this would be the justification years ago...funny how things work out, it is now apparently an argument made by very serious people...it is bizarre because Africa has one of the greatest endowments of arable land anywhere, so why these people are seeking to move to a region with less arable land and no route for migrants to acquire land is...beyond me)...although I am not sure what someone seeing his brother making money in Spain has to do with climate change, Elon Musk is making tons of money in the US so can I claim asylum there?
Right now, you have activist groups assisting human traffickers, we have no idea who is coming here or why, we have people who are suffering in our own countries (youth unemployment is often lower in the places these people are coming from)...the only solution is to do what governments are doing. Be totally clear too, the only people who differ on this point are people who believe that borders should not exist. That is fine, but this minority view should not be imposed on the public through undemocratic means (the amount of money here is huge: human traffickers are making hundreds of thousands per day, activist groups are collecting wheelbarrows of cash from donors...a lot of people are getting very rich, very fast).
This isn't something that the public is going to yield on. In the UK, an asylum seeker who was cosplaying as a Christian killed an MP. Sweden, bombings through the roof, shooting through the roof. France, attacks on churches and priests constantly. There is a reason why this is happening...these people are not legitimate asylum seekers, there are no controls, they are here to take and not contribute (and btw, both sides of my family were migrants, I know asylum seekers that came to the UK from Uganda, I have friends who are coming here from HK now...the mentality in some parts of the UK is already totally different to the groups that we welcomed in the past, the UK is still tolerant but look at Europe...you are seeing that this is creating real opposition to all forms of migration, it is very worrying, it is having the opposite effect that the "open borders" crowd think, they are creating the thing they say they are fighting).
Now Libya is again a barrier to european entry as Vice and now Ian Urbina /nyt describe. https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/europe-or-die-libyas-migr...
As we were talking, it struck me that there's no right to free migration. There's all sorts of other things in the human rights convention, but going where you want somehow isn't one of them. This is despite the economic orthodoxy being that mobility, particularly of capital, is good.
I do get it. It's not actually a plus for absolutely everyone in the receiving country. Perhaps they compete for jobs or housing. There's legitimate concerns about people bringing values that aren't compatible with existing ones. Or they might commit crimes.
But there's also a lot of evidence that future generations assimilate. You'll meet plenty of darker skinned people in Europe who pretty much think the same as anyone else. They take a job, they pay their taxes, they root for the national team.
Many are promised something that does not exist, go through lot of danger only to discover that they were better off where they started. But now, they can't go back.
There are ample social services and NGO help in the EU that immigrants can take advantage of. Such programs don’t exist in most ME/African countries. Ironically, Norway and other Scandinavian countries do have these programs as well as stable economies.
_Most_ immigrants, like other humans, have a sense of self respect. I bet most of them prefer to stay in their own country even if the situation is worse than Europe if they know they won’t randomly get killed tomorrow.
That being said, of course, there are a group who abuse the system.
Edit: Corrected a statement in the first sentence to be more accurate.
The entire case somehow hinges on whether the immigrant is successful is crossing the border which gives worst incentives to the migrants as they are ready to risk the life to cross it. Germany is ready to pay Turkey to treat the immigrants badly, but couldn't do it itself. I think either we should remove the life threatening non humane solution deployed outside the border or treat immigrant as bad when they enter. This way immigrants would have clear incentive of what they are about to get and not take any life threatening decisions in crossing the border.
1. Traveling through a safe/peaceful country and not requesting asylum there first.
2. Attacking anyone protecting the border of the country you are apply to asylum for.
3. Destroying border barriers of the host country.
4. Committing any violent crime while applying for asylum in the host country.
5. Prostituting minors or other asylum seekers while in the host country.
Maybe a lot of other reasons, but otherwise some compassionate method for dealing with migrants should be worked towards.
Most migrants don’t leave because it’ll be a great adventure or on a whim, they leave because there is nothing left for them or they want a better life for their family. You don’t get in a boat unless the water is safer than land. Some of the comments in this thread are pretty heartless and dehumanising, would we not want the exact same for our families?
How can we discuss tougher borders being the solution, if the result is camps like these?
A refugee has the right to claim asylum in the first country they set foot in, not the 5 or 8th one of their choosing.
The natural response to open borders thinking is to enforce this result.
Beyond that, it's a little hard to stir up an emotional response. If these people truly are fleeing something terrible, this place isn't so bad.
We need a way to solve this very difficult problem which doesn't absolutely violate the most basic decencies that Europe has prided itself on since the Enlightenment.
> Europe had long pressed Libya to help curb such migration. Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, had once embraced Pan-Africanism and encouraged sub-Saharan Africans to serve in the country’s oil fields. But in 2008 he signed a “friendship treaty” with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, that committed him to implementing strict controls. Qaddafi sometimes used this as a bargaining chip: he threatened, in 2010, that if the E.U. did not send him more than six billion dollars a year in aid money he would “turn Europe Black.” In 2011, Qaddafi was toppled and killed in an insurrection sparked by the Arab Spring and supported by a U.S.-led invasion. Afterward, Libya descended into chaos.
The ق at the beginning is a mix between a glottal stop and a k sound (depending on the dialect). There's no real way to spell it in English, hence the variants. This is similar to Osama/Usama (أسامة)
Just generally, is it a good idea to enter a country that is in a state of war in order to illegal migrate to another country (which, btw, has very open routes for people to seek asylum legally)? No, it is not a good idea.
What is wrong with few <h3> <p> and <img>, the page will be 10 times easier to read.