Refugees, Migrants and helping (Merged Thread)

[davidbfpo]

Three small SWJ Blog pointers merged into this closed thread, prompted by the next post - so the thread has been re-opened.

Refugees / Migrants have become a more charged issue, primarily with the exodus from Syria and those attempting to enter Europe from North Africa. Especially as terrorists are suspected to have "hidden" within them.

[davidbfpo]

Catching up on my reading of 'The Spectator' I found this April 2017 article by Ian Collier, a UK academic, who sometimes has a controversial opinion.

Here is a "taster" in the second passage:

To rise to the challenge, we need to combine the instinctive compassion that mass suffering arouses with the dispassionate analysis necessary to craft an effective response. We need the heart supported by the head. The growing humanitarian crisis has come about because we’ve deployed one without the other. Our response has veered between the heartless head and the headless heart, and the results have been calamitous.

Link:https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/...days-refugees/

[Azor]

Catching up on my reading of 'The Spectator' I found this April 2017 article by Ian Collier, a UK academic, who sometimes has a controversial opinion.

Here is a "taster" in the second passage:
Link:https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/...days-refugees/

Firstly, Collier does not truly distinguish between migrants and refugees. The Iraqis and Syrians displaced in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey are indeed refugees. But once they decide to seek their fortunes in Europe, they become migrants along with the greater number of welfare migrants who comprise 50% to 60% of the flows across the Mediterranean. Moreover, these migrants care not for the comparatively secure, free and prosperous countries of the Balkans or Central Europe: no, they demand only the best welfare available, which is in the wealthiest European countries. More than 2.6 million migrants crossed into Europe illegally from 2014-2016, and yet 14% of the world’s population still wants to migrate, including a further 170 million to the EU and Switzerland.

Of course, the “migrants” do not include those who are in UNHCR refugee camps and are accepted and transported to Canada, the U.S. and other countries as refugees. These refugees tend to not have EUR 10,000 for the journey to Germany, or iPhones, and tend to include a more representative proportion of women, children and the elderly, rather than middle-class male draft dodgers and Assad’s gangsters who have grown weary of murder and pillage.

Secondly, Collier does not explain why Europe is obligated to “help” these migrants, while the Gulf Arab states do not. What of Iran and Russia, who are fueling these wars?

Thirdly, Collier refers to an obligation to “rescue” migrants. Yet that should entail airlifting tens of millions from Sudan, South Sudan, D.R. Congo and Burundi, as the wars there are worse than those in Iraq and Syria in terms of duration, intensity of killing, overall bodycount, and civilian casualty ratio.

Fourth, Collier makes unsubstantiated claims that these migrants accept Western social values. The spate of Muslim supremacist terrorism in the West perpetrated by Muslim migrants, refugees and their children, in addition to the sojourns to Iraq, Somalia and Syria, indicate otherwise. It would be reasonable to expect that migrants’ desire for economic change is not necessarily coupled with a desire for social change.

Lastly, Collier wants the West to integrate migrants into its societies so that they can gain employment and thereby autonomy. Yet I had been under the impression that full employment and improving living standards were the main objectives of all Western governments with regard to their own citizens. Are the unemployed former colliers (no pun intended) of Wales to be sent to the “back of the queue” as Westminster integrates migrants first? There are problems with opportunity and equality in England, and yet it subsidies Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and Britain as a whole already subsidizes the European Union for the moment.

If these migrants truly want to integrate into a socially familiar society and have job opportunities, why not migrate to the Gulf Arab states, which are reliant upon migrant labor and where some 40 million already want to move to?

Collier is truly out to lunch...

Sources include: http://www.gallup.com/poll/211883/nu...0-million.aspx

[Azor]

David Goldman at The Asia Times: http://www.atimes.com/to-be-kind-is-...is-to-be-kind/

From April 14, 2016. Selected excerpts:

Turkey’s President and de facto dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan last October threatened European officials with 10,000 to 15,000 drowned migrants...“We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses, What will you do with the refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees? the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

The leader of a prominent Muslim country who claims to speak for the Muslim world threatened the Europeans with 10,000 or 15,000 Muslim deaths. When in world history has one side in negotiations threaten to kill its own people in order to gain leverage?

This is the first time in the entire history of warfare that a combatant intentionally set out to maximize civilian casualties on its own side, the better to gain diplomatic leverage.

The more the West indulges its humanitarian sentiments–that is, its squeamishness in the face of absolute evil–the more calamities will befall Muslim civilians, because Muslim leaders from Raqqa to Ankara have learned to weaponize horror. Staging humanitarian catastrophes in order to blackmail the West has succeeded for the most part.

What would be required to persuade the likes of President Erdogan that the West will not accede to blackmail? Sadly, the West would have to watch with indifference as horrors unfolded on its borders.

To be kind is to be cruel: it encourages horrific outcomes staged to manipulate the Western conscience. Paradoxically, to be cruel is to be kind.