Ben Meets World: Europe’s Refugee Crisis

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As the son of Vietnamese refugees, I am keenly aware of the plight and suffering of refugees. I know the hope and fear that comes with leaving your home, your belongings, your friends and even your family behind in order to seek that small chance of a better life for you and your children in a distant land. I know the desperation of refugees when they knock at the doors of other countries, begging for just a chance to start anew.

The story of the refugee is my legacy and I am heartbroken as I watch the unfolding refugee crisis in Europe that has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands in a limbo between countries, pleading for the mercy of asylum.

Thousands of images and videos have come in of dilapidated boats and rafts, overflowing with tired and beggared refugees making for the shores of Southern Europe:

Of some of those boats sinking in the unforgiving waters of the Mediterranean.

Of bodies washing up on the very shores they had hoped to reach.

Of a man, in tears, as he recounts how he took his family in his arms on their boat, only to realize that they had died when the boat flipped.

Of a child in the arms of a Turkish gendarme. A child found on the shores of Greece, who looked as though he might be peacefully asleep, robbed of his life having known nothing but war and fear in his short life.

In this Ben Meets World, I take a look at the tragedy of the refugee crisis of the Mediterranean and Europe, what drives it, and how the international community has poorly responded.

The Refugee Crisis in Europe

There is a distinction between migrants and refugees. Migrants are those under little to no pressure, who willingly seek a new place to work and live in. Refugees are those who have been forced to flee armed conflict or persecution and are seeking asylum. Without this asylum, refugees may face suffering and death. This crisis in undoubtedly about refugees.

Refugees, mostly Syrians fleeing the civil war, have been streaming towards Europe in hope of asylum. Travelling by land first, refugees either go north through Turkey into Europe, or go west towards Libya before seeking rafts or boats to make the crossing into Italy, Greece, or Spain. From there, most again try to make their way north, towards countries that willingly accept refugees.

While the number of refugees, four million and counting, is in of itself a tragedy, the crisis has been inflamed by how deadly the journey has been for thousands.

In the Mediterranean, dozens of boats have sunk over the past couple of years, leaving thousands drowned. In April of 2015, a single boat capsized and at least 400 refugees died. The frequency of deaths at sea for refugees has increased steadily, and it has almost become a daily occurrence to find bodies washed up on European shores.

In Hungary, the government’s refusal to permanently accept refugees left thousands to march by foot hundreds of miles to Austria and Germany. They detained and barred refugees, and it was only under pressure that the Hungarian government authorized some buses and trains to help the refugees and let them move through the country. And in response to their country being used as a transit point, the Hungarians are rushing to build a fence to block more refugees coming in from Turkey in the south.

In the Czech Republic, the government started incarcerating refugees and was labelling them with numbers (reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps) before they yielded to outrage.

In Austria, a Hungarian van was found abandoned on the highway, crammed with 71 refugees, all dead having suffocated from the heat and lack of air.

The situation has gotten so bad that even Pope Francis of the Catholic Church has had to make repeated calls for aid for the refugees. While the EU is slowly waking up to the crisis on land, the crisis at sea was largely abandoned in 2014 when both Italy and France cited a lack of funding as the reason why they could not continue major rescue operations.

A lack of political will from the international community to effectively respond to this wave of refugees has precipitated it into a mass crisis.

What Sparked the Crisis

The refugee crisis can all be traced back to a single force: the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the aftermath that has destabilized several countries across the Middle East and North Africa.

The Arab Spring was a series of protests, riots, and uprisings across Arab countries that were populist and revolutionary. What triggered the initial protests was a Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi, who self-immolated in protest of government oppression in Tunisia. What started as protesting in Tunisia quickly ignited a massive movement. Protesters across the Arab world sought to reform or replace the autocratic governments that dominated the Arab world, but many were soon met with more oppression and even violence from their governments. The movement quickly became a bloodbath in several countries as protestors and government forces escalated clashes. Hundreds died in Egypt alone on a single day when government soldiers turned guns on protesters in Rabaa square and massacred them.

For all the blood of the Arab Spring, there has been little positive outcomes. Few lasting reforms were made. Despotic rulers were overthrown in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen; but Egypt has reverted back to de facto military rule, Libya has collapsed into a new civil war, and Yemen is facing a takeover by the disenfranchised Houthis. The uprisings in Syria escalated into a war that has left the country broken and torn between the Assad regime, Islamist rebels, al Nusra, ISIS, and the Kurds.

With bloodshed, death and even enslavement a daily reality, millions of people have been displaced by war in Syria and instability in several other countries. Many have chosen to flee the region as refugees, opting to start with nothing elsewhere rather than live in a hell at home. There are few viable asylum counties in the Middle East and North Africa, and with our wonderful allies (note this should be read with as much sarcasm as you can possibly muster) Israel, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Monarchies refusing to accept refugees, hundreds of thousands have turned to the EU and the Americas for help.

Why the Hesitancy of Nations is Misplaced

The Western world has been slow to address the refugee crisis. Many nations have only accepted a couple hundred or a couple thousand, and many more refuse to open up to new refugees. Countries like Greece, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, and Macedonia have all refused to accept asylum seekers, only willing to act as a transition point to Germany. Several, including Denmark and Israel, have point blank refused to accept any refugees or migrants in any capacity.

When looking at why this is, a common trend appears amongst excuses: whether they claim they can’t handle the refugee load, or claim that letting some in will spark a greater crisis, or even saying something plainly racist – they don’t want to deal with it.

Opposition to letting in refugees in the US and Israel is blatantly xenophobic, claiming that some of the Syrians are terrorists and saying that the rest will just be like other illegal immigrants, causing a burden on the economy and country. In trying to justify why Israel is refusing to accept refugees, Israeli PM Netanyahu stated, “”Israel is a small country, a very small country that lacks demographic and geographic depth. Therefore, we must control our borders, against both illegal migrants and terrorism.” Several EU nations follow in the same thread of thought.

These excuses, especially for the economically larger countries, have no merit.

Several studies have shown that any influx of immigrants produces more positive benefits than negative effects (if it produces anything negative at all), and poses no threat to the economy or stability of the country in question. Analysis of US Congressional Budget Office data by the American Action Forum shows that in the first 10 years of immigration reform, economic growth and expansion of tax revenue from immigrants would reduce the federal deficit by $2.7 trillion. A paper from the University of California, Berkeley reports that “The productive capacity per worker has grown in the U.S. economy at a constant rate during the period from 1960 to 2009…capital per worker was higher when immigration was at its peak in 2007 than it was in 1990 before the immigration boom began…Hence, immigrants did not crowd out existing firms over the long run. Rather, they increased the size and number of firms providing investment opportunities.” And this is applicable to any country that accepts immigrants and refugees, relative to the size of their economies.

Claims of terrorist infiltration through immigration are similarly unfounded, with refugees trickling into the Western world for years, there has been no sudden uptick in terrorist attacks, no outbreak of lone wolf insurgencies, no terrorist assassination plots. Nor will be there any uptick if refugee limits are raised or lifted. The statistics for an increase in terrorist attacks all show that the vast majority of these attacks take place directly in the countries the various terrorist groups operate in (Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, etc.), not in Europe or the Americas. Some of these same countries in the Middle East still went ahead and accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees anyway.

It is also simply untrue that immigration or refugee influxes cause spikes in crime. If anything, newcomers (as shown in the US) are less likely to commit crimes than the native population.

Letting in refugees has never led to mass problems or economic collapse in the history of modern Western countries. If there were problems, those had existed well before each immigration wave.

Conflating immigrants and refugees with terrorism, violence, and economic failures has long been the cry of nationalists. When countries like Israel refuse to accept refugees while their less stable and poorer neighbors accept a combined couple million refugees, citing only the threat of terrorism and illegal immigration as their excuse, they are doing little more than fear mongering to cover for their unwillingness to let others dilute their nationalistic majority in demographics.

The argument against letting in refugees is not valid.

A Plea for Mercy

The countries in the region that have helped: Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, have all tried to soak up as many refugees as they can, with tiny Lebanon taking in an amazing 1.1 million Syrians. With Lebanon seeing a 30% increase in population by Syrian refugees alone, we should ask no more of that country.

Even the Gaza Strip, the small Palestinian enclave controlled by the violent Hamas next to Israel, with a population of only 1.8 million and blockaded by the Israelis and Egyptians, accepted 1500 refugees. This is 1500 MORE than bloody Israel, or Saudi Arabia and any other Gulf Monarchy rolling around in billions of oil dollars. While the Gulf Monarchies are happy to fund militias and rebels, they apparently have no taste for dealing with the mess they are partially responsible for.

Out of the EU, only Germany, Austria and Sweden have made strides to take in refugees. This accounts for a hundred thousand in Germany and tens of thousands in both Austria and Sweden, and Germany agreeing to take on hundreds of thousands more.

The UK and France, in response to outrage over the images of death in the refugee crisis, have each agreed to accept a few tens of thousands over the next couple years, and a few other EU members are expected to follow suit on an even more limited scale.

The US has only accepted a couple thousand since the start of the Syrian War.

It is not enough.

With four million refugees fleeing from the Syrian War alone, and no signs of that war stopping anytime soon, we can only expect this crisis to worsen unless greater action is taken. And this is only a fraction of the 20 million estimated refugees worldwide, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

The Western world, especially the US, Canada, the major countries of Central and South America, the UK, and France can and should drastically increase the number refugees they accept. The US alone would be more than capable of accepting hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees, and absorbing them into the American population.

While I can only say so much about other countries, as an American I demand an end to the hypocrisy of the current US refugee and immigrant policies. America is a nation built on centuries of immigration and refugees and to deny this legacy with poor policies and ridiculous limits on refugees is to do little more than politically appease the more xenophobic parts of the US population.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These are the words of Jewish American poet, Emma Lazarus, part of a poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in New York City, from when the city was a major immigration center decades ago. Words that neither America nor the world have ever truly followed.

As I watch heartbroken as thousands die and suffer in their attempt for a better tomorrow, a chance for a life of peace and good gone as they sink beneath the waves or are turned back from shores they once saw as hope, there have never been words I wished humanity would take to heart more than these.

These refugees could’ve easily been my parents and grandparents, they could’ve easily been yours. Change a little of the situation and it could’ve been you or me on a pathetic little boat praying to God we don’t face the kiss of death under the Mediterranean waves before we reach the shore.

How many more families must be torn apart before we open our doors?

How many more must die before we show mercy and reach out with a hand of compassion?

 

Feature photo courtesy of: Wikipedia

Sources include: The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Independent, ABC News, Politico, NPR, BBC, The Guardian, Euronews, Business Insider, NBC News, UNHCR, Aljazeera, Mises Institute, Wired, The Atlantic, The Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, American Action Forum, The Huffington Post UK, The Cato Institute, The Wall Street Journal

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