My whole family ended up in the West in an earlier crisis, and they tell us about how they rented crappy boats, almost died, almost got pirated, etc, trying to get across the water.
They also talk about the generosity they met once they got to their respective countries. There's stories about various strangers who volunteered to put up entire families in their own houses, helped them with the language, getting a job, studying, childcare, and so on.
A few weeks ago I was driving through Calais, and there were so many migrants on the road they spilled onto the opposite lane. There's stories about people getting killed clinging on to the bottoms of trucks, people dying of asphyxiation in containers, people getting run over by the train. People dying in overfilled boats.
-How did attitudes change so much that we can no longer accept that someone would like to change an accident of birth?
-Why do we hide behind refugee status (and there are real refugess from war these days, esp in Turkey) when we know that people did not choose to be born in an economic hellhole?
-Are we really happy to let capital move freely but keep the labor stuck where it is cheapest?
EDIT:
So, before I got attacked for not feeding, housing, and educating thousands of migrants on my own, I was going to add this:
- Why is there such reluctance to spread the burden? The numbers arriving in Italy and Greece are orders of magnitude higher that those living in the shanty in Calais, hoping to come to the UK. It was 140K crossing the Med according to the BBC in 2014. There's 350M people in Europe, and several of the rich states are actually shrinking.