‘The world is being redivided into regions of “order” and “disorder,” and for the first time in a long time, we don’t have an answer for all the people flocking to get out of the world of disorder and into the world of order.’ — Thomas L. Friedman
For several weeks, the top international story has been the seemingly endless waves of refugees pushing their way into Europe from Africa and the Mideast — and the response to European nations to these newcomers. Who has responsibility for the crisis? What should Europe do? Does the United States have a part to play? Are American policies part of the situation? New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote, “Some very big tectonic plates are moving, and people feel it under their feet. The world is being redivided into regions of ‘order’ and ‘disorder,’ and for the first time in a long time, we don’t have an answer for all the people flocking to get out of the world of disorder and into the world of order … we have some hard new thinking and hard choices ahead.” Today, we share some of what’s being written in journals about the crisis. Your thoughts, as always, are welcome to keep the conversation going. Email rrollins@coxohio.com. — Ron Rollins
From William Saletan, at Slate: This is one cost of globalization.
The flood of migrants into Europe is just another stage of economic globalization. Today, information and images circle the world in a flash. Capital flows across borders toward cheap labor. Goods find their way to countries with disposable income. And increasingly, people who hate where they live, whether for economic or political reasons, can find out where they’d be better off and how to get there. Websites and social networks tell you which country has the best government benefits, which borders you’ll have to cross, and what it’ll cost you. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a human trafficking expert quoted in the Washington Post, “You’re never more than two conversations away from someone who can get you to Europe.” …
Once you understand the crisis this way — as a black market in which humans are treated like goods — the practical steps become obvious. Step One is to drive down demand for emigration to Europe, by making life more bearable and hopeful in the countries people are fleeing. That means bolstering economies in West Africa, negotiating some kind of peace in Syria, and doing more to help people in refugee camps. If they can’t stand life there, they’ll find a way to go elsewhere.
Step Two is to shrink the supply of goods migrants can expect on arrival. … To discourage further migration, Denmark is now buying ads in Lebanon to warn people that it has toughened its immigration policies and has halved its welfare benefits. You may think this is cruel. But if it alters the balance of supply and demand in the smuggling market, it could save lives.
Step Three is to open the market’s choke points. Many of the people who die on the way to or through Europe aren’t economic migrants. They’re political refugees. They ought to be able to travel in broad daylight, not in the backs of trucks or in overloaded dinghies at night. … That way, Germany can be more generous than Hungary. And nobody has to ride the highway between them in the back of a chicken truck.
From Steve Hilton, at The New York Times: Deal with the causes, not the symptoms.
While we can argue forever about the causes of conflict in the Middle East, it is impossible to ignore the impact of American foreign policy on what’s happening in Europe. It was shocking to see an “expert” from the Council on Foreign Relations saying that the situation is “largely Europe’s responsibility.” How, exactly? The Iraq invasion (which could reasonably be described as “largely America’s responsibility”) unleashed a period of instability and competition in the region that is collapsing states and fueling sectarian conflict.
European leaders wanted, years ago, to intervene directly in Syria in order to check President Bashar al-Assad’s cruelty; the United States didn’t. You can understand why — I wouldn’t for one second question the judgment of American political leaders that their country was reluctant to participate in another military conflict. But at least acknowledge the consequences of nonintervention: the protracted Syrian civil war, the emergence of a lawless territory ripe for exploitation by the sick zealots of the Islamic State, and the resulting flood of millions of displaced people. …
There’s one more simple truth to acknowledge. Today’s crisis will worsen in the years ahead unless we deal with the causes, not just the symptoms. That means serious and sustained action to create free societies people actually want to stay in. Places with a market economy, property rights, the rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary and accountable democratic processes.
This is America’s chance to say, “We have a moral responsibility to help. So the United States will welcome as many refugees as Europe: Not just thousands; hundreds of thousands. But there has to be a bargain. We cannot keep doing this. So we will now embark on a new effort to bring the basics of a decent life to the world’s hot spots.”
From Philip Giraldi, at The American Conservative: America bears responsibility for the crisis.
I would assign to Washington most of the blame for what is happening right now. Since folks inside the beltway are particularly given to making judgments based on numerical data they might be interested in the toll exacted through America’s global war on terror. By one not unreasonable estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.
There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia. …
Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war. …
It is perhaps past time for Washington to begin to become accountable for what it does. The millions of people living rough or in tents, if they are lucky, need help and it is not satisfactory for the White House to continue with its silence, a posture that suggests that the refugees are somehow somebody else’s problem. They are, in fact, our problem.
From the editors of The Economis: Germany is setting the moral example for all.
For too long Europe has closed its eyes to Syria’s foul and bloody civil war, and tried to keep the suffering multitudes out. Suddenly the continent’s gates have been pushed open by two political forces. One is moral conscience, belatedly wakened by the image of a drowned Syrian child on a Turkish beach. The other is the political courage of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who told her people to set aside their fear of immigrants and show compassion to the needy.
Tens of thousands of asylum-seekers flowed toward Germany by rail, bus and on foot, chanting “Germany! Germany!”, to be welcomed by cheering crowds. Germany is showing that old Europe, too, can take in the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It says it can absorb not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Such numbers will inevitably raise many worries: that cultures will be swamped by aliens, economies will be overburdened, social benefits will have to be curbed and even that terrorists will creep in. Anti-immigrant parties have been on the rise across Europe. In America, too, some politicians want to build walls to keep foreigners out.
Yet the impulse to see migrants as chiefly a burden is profoundly mistaken. The answer to these familiar fears is not to put up more barriers, but to manage the pressures and the risks to ensure that migration improves the lives of both immigrants and their hosts. The starting point is a sense of perspective.
Germany’s Willkommenskultur is right morally, economically and politically. It sets an example to the world. … Helping Syrians is a clear moral duty. That responsibility falls not on Europe alone, but the world as a whole. It needs a coordinated policy to manage the Syrian crisis along the entire chain of displacement. There must be a concerted effort to contain the war, starting with the creation of protected havens. …
Refugees are intertwined with economic migrants. They get on the same boats and resentment of migrants erodes support for refugees. How, then, to deal with those who want a better life rather than a safer one? …
There are surely limits to how many migrants any society will accept. But the numbers Europe proposes to receive do not begin to breach them. The boundaries of social tolerance are fuzzy. They change with time and circumstance and leadership. Willkommenskultur shows that the people of Europe are more welcoming than their nervous politicians assume. The politics of fear can be trumped by the politics of dignity. Mrs. Merkel understood this; so should the rest of the world.
From Michael Rubin, at Commentary: Ideological extremism is driving the crisis.
Compassion is a noble European and American trait but, without context, it is shortsighted. …
Angela Merkel may talk about absorbing 500,000 plus Middle Eastern migrants each year, and Obama may wish to absorb thousands more. There has been some discussion about the failure of the Gulf Arab states to pull their weight, and surprisingly little discussion about why China and Russia should absolve themselves, as usual, of providing humanitarian relief. While it might feel liberal and nice to welcome refugees with open arms, it can be counterproductive in the long-term.
The problem isn’t simply the question about whether new refugees accept broader American or European values, or whether they seek opportunity without compromising culture and assimilating into the rule-of-law. Nor is the main problem that a willingness to embrace migrants encourages a brain drain which ultimately makes Syria, Libya, Iraq and Kurdistan more difficult to stabilize and rebuild. Rather, while embracing and welcoming refugees make governments feel good, statecraft shouldn’t simply be social work. The refugees are the symptom. The disease, as in World War II, was ideological extremism. Until the United States and Europe craft a policy to deal with the cause of the refugee flight, they are only welcoming discord at home and more tragedy abroad.
From Patrick Weil, at AlJazeera America: There is world precedent for helping the refugees.
In order to put an end to the ongoing tragedy in the Mediterranean, a global international response is necessary. The first priority should be a coordinated resettlement effort.
Two iconic precedents come to mind for this sort of action. First, in response to the Nazi persecution of the European Jews, Franklin D. Roosevelt convened a multilateral conference in July 1938 in Évian, France. However, it went down in history as an enormous failure: With the United States and Britain refusing to take in substantial numbers of Jews, the attendees’ initial commitment to resettle refugees proved hollow.
Multilateral burden-sharing negotiations re-emerged in the late 1970s in response to the exodus of people fleeing Vietnam during the war. When the North Vietnamese took control of the South, thousands of people escaped into the South China Sea in boats, and, as in the Mediterranean today, enormous numbers of them never arrived at any destination. It was clear that without real solutions to help those whose lives were destroyed, boat departures would continue, so in 1979, governments came together in Geneva at the United Nations to negotiate the Orderly Departure Program, which aimed to provide a framework for resettlement.
Thanks to the Orderly Departure Program and a number of similar resettlement programs, almost 2 million visas were granted to Southeast Asian displaced people from 1975 to 1997. The most were resettled to the United States, which took in 1.3 million individuals, but it was by no means an exclusively American effort. …
There are many reasons for the disintegration of Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Yemen, and no single grand narrative can capture the entire picture. But the very least we can do is agree that Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which have taken in millions of refugees, are not to blame.
We cannot ignore the decisive role that the United States and its allies played in bringing about the current refugee crisis. This role began immediately after 9/11, with the invasion of Iraq. The more recent intervention in Libya further contributed to the disaster.
Today the spirit of the Orderly Departure Program should be renewed. Under an agreed framework, those who left Syria and Iraq would register in offices in safe countries of temporary refuge, in the Middle East, Europe or North America. The displaced people would then wait for resettlement in these havens.
From the editors of The Nation: This may be the new world order.
This is not a problem for Europe to solve alone. The Syrian civil war has displaced more than 4 million people, most of them to other countries in the region — though conspicuously not to the Persian Gulf states or Saudi Arabia, friend to the West and armorer of Islamist fighters in Syria. The rise of the Islamic State — now terrorizing Syria and Iraq and threatening neighboring countries — was sparked by the aftermath of the Iraq invasion and further fueled by the misguided tactics of the United States and Britain in Syria. Yet the United States has accepted just 1,500 Syrian refugees since the civil war began. …
Meanwhile, the people keep coming, and will continue to risk their lives to come. The Syrians entering Europe now are fleeing war, not poverty, but anyone who has spent time among refugees and migrants knows that these forms of violence often go hand in hand. Two billion people live on less than $1.25 a day. The barrier that once protected the rich world from the poor has been crumbling for years, undermined by globalization and the information revolution. No amount of barbed wire or steel can stand it up again.
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