“short hop”: are you fucking kidding?
Put some small time 3rd world farmers in a boat and tell them to navigate through channels and currents for 500K - they may as well aim for the moon.
Hyperbole. It’s obviously an extremely dangerous trip, and far too many lives are lost for a shot at having some hope.
But yeah, getting up to England would be impossible.
I’m not sure you’re getting it: Libya to Sicily is 500k or 320 miles, it is not “a short hop”.
Ok, but Rabat to, say, Penzance is 1,400 miles as the crow flies. It’s impossible. That’s all I’m saying. Sailing directly to the UK is impossible.
Tunisia to Lampedusa is just over 100km. On a good day I can see Africa from southern Spain. I don’t know why they’re not heading directly to Gibraltar.
If you think we’re on the level on a slight inconvenience, you’re impressively but gloriously uninformed.
In any case, refugees go to the nearest safe place. When you travel 8000 miles through ten nations (& pay a substantial sum to smugglers) you’re not a refugee, you are a migrant.
Because it’s fucking small and being farmers and shit from the arse end of some desperate country, in the water they don’t even know which way is north.
They’re not coming from Tunisia. Some from near the Tunisian border but not from that country. Merry Christmas:
Jordan, a country of about six and a half million people, currently hosts over two and a half million refugees. Pakistan has a million and a half. Comparatively, yeah, “inconvenienced” is the right word.
And “refugees should stay in the nearest safe country” is a convenient cop-out for people who’ve checked a map and discovered that there is a nice big buffer between themselves and any refugee-producing country. It essentially means that the fallout from countries in crisis will always be disproportionately borne by the resource-poor and marginally-stable countries right next door.
That. Exactly.
That. Eexactly. Nothing. If any of the neighbors of Denmark started to disintegrate, Denmark would gladly accept a massive influx of refugees comparable to what the neighbors of Syria and Afghanistan have taken. And the burden will be that much more acceptable since Norwegians/Swedes/Germans will be that much compatible with Danish culture, the same way Syrians are more compatible with Jordanian culture.
Turning local refugees into global migrants is an exceptional bad solution to a refugee crisis, since the amount of money going to aid migrants to a Western nation is orders of magnitudes higher than the number of people which could have been aided locally with the same money. In fact, for Denmark, it’s exactly a zero sum game. Money that goes to house and clothes Syrian migrants to Denmark are taken from the same pool of money that goes to aid Syrian refugees in Jordan.
A cop-out implies other people had a responsibility to start with. They do not. The whole world is not our responsibility. Afghan/Arab/African culture and Islamism in general are on the whole fucked up. But we didn’t create it. We are in no way culpable for the predictable results.
What is it “we” didn’t create - imperial conquests, shoving together tribes and ethnicities to make convenient ‘countries’ to rule, fake state institutions to suck the natural resources out of these 'countries, bogus independence that was replaced by corrupt corporations, interference with national politics in order to produce leadership conducive to western influence, more and more and more corruption and bribery. More and more raping of national resources so western shareholders can profit. And then the poorest of the poor from these countries, in desperation, start washing up on the shores of Europe. Mostly dead. Fuck em and fuck where they came from.
I happen to believe that those of us in wealthy nations should help those who had the poor sense to be born in some shithole.
I realize that among wealthy westerners that makes me a minority.
Just to clarify: so you’re saying that diversity is harmful, segregation is preferable, and homogenous ethnostates are the ideal polities?
I agree completely.
If putting different ethnic groups in proximity caused the Middle East’s crisis, how is embedding extremely alien Middle Easterners in European society possible a good idea?
In an immediate crisis, I’m sure that the countries of Europe would step up for their neighbors. That’s pretty much what happened in the Yugoslavian crisis for instance - the various refugees spread out to countries nearby, and were taken in.
I will note, however, that it’s been seventy years since there was a crisis of anything like the severity of the current Middle East situation. Yugoslavia was an isolated case, and there were bucketloads of stable well-resourced countries around them to take in. I’ve talked to people who were refugees after the last real refugee-producing crisis - WWII - , and frankly, if they were in an untenable situation, they didn’t give a monkey’s buttcrack if they were “allowed” to go to the next country, or the next one, or the one after that, they just went, and quite right too.
The problem is not that Syria’s neighboring countries aren’t stepping up to deal with refugees - they clearly are. The problem is that their resources are inadequate to the task, and they are overwhelmed. So they do things like let the refugees sit in their camps, but forbid them from taking jobs and earning money - which I for one don’t agree with, but it’s pretty hard to finger-wag about that when all the rich Western countries also have similar rules - and people sit in the refugee camps for decades, and their lives are basically ruined.
What’s turning refugees into global migrants is the fact that the deal we are attempting to offer them is something like “Go sit in a refugee camp in the next-door country while we work this out. You won’t be allowed to do any productive work, you’ll be ‘temporary’, with no particular rights to anything, you may or may not be resettled somewhere where you actually can have a job and a normal life but quite likely not, we’ll boot you out when we decide the crisis is over which may or may not be when you think it is, and this situation will continue for an indefinite period, possibly decades.”
Unsurprisingly, some people are refusing to accept this deal. And why not? It’s a shit deal. I wouldn’t accept that deal. And the rules - international treaties on refugees - don’t actually say that they have to. The rules just say if a refugee rocks up on your doorstep, let 'em in and don’t send 'em back.
The situation in Syria and Iraq isn’t Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey’s responsibility either. They just happen to be situated next door. It’s nothing to do with being culpable. A certain number of people every year need to leave their countries, because it’s not safe for them to stay. So they need to go somewhere. So the international community - all of us - needs to decide what rules should govern where they should go.
The original rules for refugees didn’t actually say anything about having to apply for asylum in the closest place you could. That’s something Western countries are trying to impose, within the last few decades, because with increasing mobility we’re starting to say “but hey! If refugees just get to choose willy-nilly which country they go to to seek asylum, then they’ll ALL come here, and we’ll be overwhelmed. And there’s so many of them! The ‘refugees choice’ rules are unfair to us!”
I don’t actually agree that ‘refugees choice’ is an unfair way of sharing the burden. A lot of refugees would try for a rich country because we’re rich. But a lot only have the resources to slip just next door, if that. In any case, if it’s going to be some other scheme than ‘refugees choice’ then it can’t be ‘country next door’ because that’s clearly a massively unfair sharing of the burden - which is just as much, or just as little, our burden as it is Turkey’s.
Regarding the “but they can’t assimilate here” argument - been there done that. All through the 70’s when the Vietnamese boat people were coming “Oh, they’re so different and weird and foreign, and they’re all drug smugglers and they live eight people to a house and they’re not assimilating, you walk down Victoria Street and you won’t see a single word of English blah blah blah etc etc.” And now here it is forty years later and we’ve got Anh Do and Hieu Van Le and so on and so forth. And now we don’t worry about the Vietnamese any more, they’re perfectly normal, we’re supposed to be scared of Muslims these days. Well, bugger that. Come back in forty years and we’ll see.
They speak English in the UK?
More generally, this stems back to decolonisation and the appalling state of some of those countries today. People see the stability and prosperity provided under Western governance and are desparate to share in it. Which begs the question, would those countries be better run if the West intervened again? Presumably, they couldn’t be any worse. But that isn’t politically feasible even though people are risking their lives to escape.
The birth rates in many of the countries where people are fleeing are such, that you’d expect this issue to escalate in the coming years as more people compete for limited resources. Unless the West wishes to be swamped, it needs to intervene with more aid and support to provide stability in those countries.
In fact, birth rates in most developing nations have collapsed during the last decades. To pick some countries with a significant immigration, the fertility rate in Pakistan is 2.86 children/woman for instance, which isn’t huge at all. In Morroco, it’s 2.15, which is just the population renewal rate. The only countries with a significant fertility rate are sub-saharian African countries, and even there, it’s dropping.
The “they’re making so many babies that they’ll overwhelm us” argument is a canard.
I don’t know who this “we” is, but whoever it is “we” aren’t offering them a deal at all. I’m not offering a deal to Chinese farm labors or US inner city ghetto kids either. Their problems aren’t of my making. What you are presenting is in fact a blackmail scenario: give us money or accept the consequences. Such a fine nation, a pity if anything should happen to it. As it turns out we (meaning Denmark) are in fact – very generously and without any compulsion except for the largeness of our heart – sending quite a lot of money to the Syrian refugee camps. Although as I said earlier, those money are being siphoned off to support Syrian refugees coming here instead, so it is a great deal less than what could have been if the refugees had not come here. Anyway, they fucked up their own country. It’s a pity and I have sympathy for their self-made situation and will gladly help them to some extend to try to set things right in their country – but not to the extend of them coming here and fucking things up here.
In any case, a lot of talk about Syrian refugees. The people flooding Calais aren’t actually from Syria. They’re from Africa. And mainly they’re economic migrants from places like Senegal – stable, peaceful democratic country undergoing rapid economic growth. They just want more. In the process of wanting more, they’re causing a great deal of trouble for others that have nothing to do with them and have no moral obligation to aid them in their quest for more. They should be interred and sent back.
Denmark just got a new government a month ago, which took immediate steps to curtail the economic benefits of migrants coming to Denmark. This has had an almost immediate and quite dramatic effect on the number of people coming here. Did anything happened in the world the last 30 days to cause such a dramatic reduction in immigrants? No, they’re just seeing a better deal in other countries.
You have to be both blind to what your eyes tell you and what numbers document if you can’t see there are massive problems with integrating people from the ME and Africa into Western society. In Denmark it’s into the third generation (with the first generation not even being refugees) well past the forty year mark, and they’re still having extreme problems with getting an education (even learning to read for fucks sake, how low do you have to set the bar!), finding jobs, staying off public assistance, staying off crime, staying out of prison, being a net positive benefit for society, etc.
As it turns out, there are in fact immigrant groups which are doing better than others, and Vietnamese being one. Clearly, as I wrote, the problems lies with a combination of culture and Islam – both for creating such fucked up societies to start with and for perpetuating the original problems in their new locations. It’ a simple matter of wherever you go there you are.
The demographic transition in much of Sub Sahara Africa has in fact stalled, even in some cases reversed. The population of the whole continent is projected by the UN to expand by a factor of between 3 and 5 during this century. Now it’s of course nowhere certain that this scenario will materialize, but waving it away as “canard” is both silly and stupid, especially since if current projections come anywhere close to being realized then it will result in major upheavals, wars, famine, extreme poverty, etc.
Europe cannot solve this problem for them and certainly not absorb the resulting massive waves of poverty migrations. This is something we need to realize, prepare for and take the necessary steps to address. If it then turns out that contrary to current expectations there will not be an African population explosion then at worst we have prepared for a catastrophe which did not occur.
I’m sure you’re not getting it: even sven was merely contrasting the *relatively *short trip across the med to sailing around Spain to reach the UK directly.
I wonder if this is actually part of it. UK cops rarely carry firearms, which is unusual.
I also think kunilou’s idea that they may speak English better than French makes a lot of sense. Migrants from places that are not Francophone Africa may prefer the UK as a place where English is the native tongue and not just an international language. It makes assimilation easier.
Then again, without statistical context, it may not mean much of anything.