More than one picture, more than one kid.
Oh, I'm sure the future's climate refugees will be much more warmly welcomed than today's war refugees.
Football fans in various countries have been holding 'Refugees welcome' banners, and ordinary Greeks and Italians helping on Lesbos, Lampedusa, and elsewhere, but the official state responses have been woeful at best and repugnant at worst.
Yes. At my job we each have 2 screens. One of my co-workers had the dead child picture from The Guardian covering almost all of one screen.
Glad to be missing this particular image.
Europe is really falling down on this, but the US damn well ought to be flying relays of cargo planes back and forth to Turkey with aid on the outbound leg and refugees on the inbound. It's not like this isn't our mess.
I heard that the proportional US population equivalent of the # of asylum seekers in Germany (or the EU) was 10 million people. [Note: I have no idea if that stat is true. I tried doing a search to see if that figure was true and totally fell short. So maybe it's not true. And I don't have the time to calculate these things myself.] That put it into context for me in a lot of ways (like why people would be freaking the f out by such a huge onslaught). What a crisis. And yeah, we should be sending over boats or planes or whatever, and bringing people over here.
This sounds like a job for.. PRESIDENT TRUMP!
5.2 I'd like to see the 6th Fleet conducting rescue operations in the Mediterranean (alongside the navies of other European countries, of course). This is Europe's and the world's shame and my anger on this has been steadily rising for some time. I don't think I've been this angry about an issue since the US decided it was going to openly torture.
6 seems highly unlikely. The population of Europe as a whole is more than the US. The population of Germany is about one quarter the US.
Wiki tells me there were 220,000 migrants entering the EU in 2014 compared to 500 million EU inhabitants. The pace has increased drastically this year, but even if it tripled, it would merely equal the US rate of illegal entry (roughly 1 per 600 inhabitants per year).
8: Seriously. If you want to become further enraged, read the comments on a Guardian story on the topic. Where are all these borderline fascists coming from and why are they reading the Guardian?
11
And the Brits are being complete whiny c***s about the whole thing, seeing as how the UK is accepting a tiny fraction of the asylum seekers that Germany is. Germany will receive applicants equal to 1% of it's total population (the equivalent of 3 million in the US in one year).
"Germany, France and the Netherlands agreed to take on the highest number of these migrants. As a percentage of a country's population, the UK's commitment (0.003%) is the second lowest among EU members (after Hungary, which has refused to welcome any). On this measure, Luxembourg (0.064%), Cyprus (0.028%) and Ireland (0.024%) are taking the most."
Re: 12
Yes, the Tory government response is specifically the one I was thinking of as repugnant in 3.
Sweden is also taking a very high number relative to population.
I'm relieved to hear Ireland is taking a fair share of these people in terrible trouble. We have a really horrible system for processing asylum seekers though, they are basically warehoused in hostels for years ("direct provision").
Where are all these borderline fascists coming from and why are they reading the Guardian?
I have no idea, but they've always been there, although they're having a field day on this issue. What do you suppose it would take to persuade a majority of people in the west that countries do not "fill up"?
Shifting a couple of million of these poor bastards to the US would be a nice gesture and a bit of welcome leadership, but I'm not sure it would make a significant overall impact. The population of Syria is 22 million and most of the country has been rendered uninhabitable.
[Meanwhile, in Iceland (pop. 330,000), 11,000 households have offered to house refugees.]
6: Whoever told you that is not to be trusted. The population of Germany is twice the population of California.
6, 16, etc.: that said, Germany's expecting 800k asylum applications this year, so that would be 3.2m for the USA.
Oops, F already said that in 12. By contrast, the USA had only 120k asylum applicants in 2014. It's true the USA also has lots of undocumented immigrants every year that aren't claiming asylum, but if F is right that the total is 1/600 population, that's under 700k total illegal entrants + asylum seekers (and some are probably both) in the USA. Way way below the corresponding numbers.
Also there were over 600k asylum claims made in the EU in 2014 according to Eurostat - http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/mobile/index.php#Page?title=Asylum%20statistics&lg=en - so there's no way there were only 220k migrants total.
I also feel both rage-filled and powerless around this issue. I don't understand why governments are being so awful. How can people be so lacking in compassion? Does thinking about "the greater good" somehow give people permission to turn off their empathy?
I don't understand why governments are being so awful.
Because they're democratically elected and are responding to their constituencies, many of whom are awful.
To be fair, a lot of the politicians themselves are also utter scum. At least in the UK context, anyway, which is the one I'm most familiar with.
Where are all these borderline fascists coming from and why are they reading the Guardian?
It's a really good paper.
Part of me wants the US and Europe to strike at the heart of the problem, which is the Syrian civil war. I don't see how to do that without boots on the ground, though. Last time didn't work out that well.
Also, as an aside - does anyone else find themselves typing really long comments that you know you'll never post but you type them out anyway as a way of clarifying your thoughts?
I used to have an internal filter that stopped me from posting horrible puns, but I got over it.
23: The Syrian refugees are a big chunk of the refugees, but still more come from other places, mainly the Balkans and Africa. There's big trouble all over the place these days.
Actually, a pretty big proportion are fleeing a situation directly caused by the United States and a few European countries putting boots on their ground.
26: Exactly. That's why it's not practical. It wasn't practical last time, either.
We have a really horrible system for processing asylum seekers though, they are basically warehoused in hostels for years ("direct provision").
Could be worse. In this US, if you ask for asylum in person at the border when you enter [as opposed to filing a form once you get settled] you generally get imprisoned. With people who have actually been convicted [sometimes only charged] with crimes.
(It's possible that has changed in the 18 months since I stopped paying close attention, but I doubt it very much.)
My take on the Syrian refugee situation is that the sheer scale of it is paralyzing people, as well as the relatively high SES of the people being displaced. Based on my years of talking to American audiences about these kinds of issues, it's much easier to trigger people's empathy over "Wow, look at these desperately poor people who just got hit by a hurricane or an earthquake" than "Wow, look at these people who have iPhones and are strategizing with each other about the best countries in which to seek asylum."
Also, the US has had an annual ceiling of refugee admissions of 70,000 for decades now -- maybe as far back as the post-Mariel-boatlift early '80s refugee act. The system is a well-oiled machine, but not a well-funded one and not one that can easily be ramped up substantially.
The thing that I absolutely cannot believe* has not been an issue in the endless Republican presidential discussions on immigration is the years-long backlog in immigration courts due to a shortage of judges, and disastrous crash of their computer system a few years back.
You'd think the ONE THING that R and D politicians could agree on is the need for speedy, effective immigration courts. It serves everyone's interests. And it's a relatively cheap fix. But nope.
*Of course I can; it isn't visceral in the same way that a Border!Wall! to Prevent!Invasion! is.
Also, go Iceland:
"They are our future spouses, best friends, the next soul mate, a drummer for our children's band, the next colleague, Miss Iceland in 2022, the carpenter who finally finishes the bathroom, the cook in the cafeteria, a fireman and television host. People of whom we'll never be able to say in the future: 'Your life is worth less than my life.'"
Witt doesn't get it. Backlog clearing not necessary when you have a WALL. No new ideas from her about how to make America great again, just same old stuff. Stupid!
Iceland is behaving admirably, and I don't want to shit on that, but I'm thinking about the Nebraska post that I just posted above a few minutes ago. It's very easy to say things like 30 when you're comfortably homogeneous.
Nebraska post? I'll have to go look.
My parents happened to be on vacation in Hungary this week. They say that at the train station armed guards with machine guns, after seeing their US passports, pushed a hole through a teeming mass of refugees to escort them, while detaining everyone with vaguely brown skin on the train and sorting the train into sections. Glad that they could get this nostalgic experience of the old, traditional Europe.
34: When NATO was bombing Serbia/Kosovo, I saw something similar crossing into Switzerland on the train. Everyone who didn't look European and didn't have a passport that allowed them in was escorted off the train. Nothing like the scale of the crisis now, obviously.
Speaking of white people getting off too easily, Tom Brady won't even be suspended.
Apparently, dog fighting is really, really frowned upon. Like, even if somebody has done their time, they get protested for it when they move to town.
My aunt lives pretty near the Austrian border in CZ. She is a nice person, but has a strong feeling that these immigrants are different from previous ones. (Her closest statement to a rationale is that they would right away ask for mosques, rather than spending time assimilating the way many Vietnamese have done successfully).
Her kids feel differently, they would like compassion. I'm puzzled by it, she's not a bigot-- just reporting. There's work in the town near where she lives-- not bustling growth, but basically a place that's doing OK, so I do not think that fear born of economic despair is the root.
When I last saw my young Syrian friend / student at the beginning of the summer her family in southern Syria were basically fine - horrible inflation, but not in physical danger. I so hope that is still true.
Also I find one of the ways people sometimes (often) talk about accommodating refugees or any immigrant population really irritating, recent example was Yvette Cooper yesterday, that if every town just took in one family it would somehow all become so much more palatable/easier. This is ludicrous. It is entirely predictable and completely understandable that many, perhaps most, immigrants will prefer to at least start off settling in urban areas with enough numbers of other people from the same place to make it easier to navigate new surroundings. One Syrian family per Outer Hebridean island, my god would *you* want to be the mum of that family? How shallow are we? How lacking in imagination and empathy, or worse cynical? Maybe this belongs in the Nebraska thread.
The classic version of that what in Clueless.
No Emma and Clueless are about something else, although small-ly related.
There's a speech that Cher gives in "Clueless" about refugees (from Haiti, I believe) that I was thinking about.
41. The language for many political conversations in public is restricted to the language of personal experience. "My extra room", "the house down the street," "kids in need." Anything abstract won't fit on screen and is a kind of conversation that confuses people.
There was a nice editorial in the good CZ paper Respekt, contrasting the response of the parliamentary spokesmoron ("I'm scared, I have 4 kids to protect") with that of Sigmar Gabriel ("We need to generate support by talking with people who disagree" and "It's nice that people want to come here.")
Ah. By the way, Emma makes excellent reading for a fourteen year old - Austen's wicked trick of making her juuuuust likable but constantly getting herself deeper and deeper in the mire of social hideousness is horridly wonderfully awful for everyone but the peak sensitive reader for can't-look-away-but-this-is-nearly-unbearable may well be the 14 year old. He loved it.
My son fast-forwards through the emotionally awkward scenes of Pokemon cartoons.
I wish I was joking. It's even worse than watching uninterrupted Pokemon cartoons, but not as bad as watching Beyblade cartoons.
Here's the Economist with last year's data on accepted asylum seekers per capita.
Sweden, Malta, and Switzerland are at the top with 0.2-0.3%. Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands are near 0.05% and Britain and Ireland even less. And the EU as a whole is at 0.03%.
But it sounds like some policies, destinations and total numbers have changed in 2015.
I'm puzzled by it, she's not a bigot-- just reporting. There's work in the town near where she lives-- not bustling growth, but basically a place that's doing OK, so I do not think that fear born of economic despair is the root.
There's been a background drumbeat against Muslims for decades now, such that what seems like a neutral, non-bigoted position is nonetheless substantially informed by anti-Muslim sentiment. To some extent, all prejudice works this way, but I think that whatever is the most salient societal prejudice in a given time/place is especially susceptible to the effect.
That is, unless you're a conscious feminist, you're going to be more or less pro-patriarchy*; in the US, a non-black has to work really hard to fight racist defaults, in a way that they don't wrt e.g. anti-Semitism.
*OK, the patriarchy isn't time/place dependent
Sweden, Malta, and Switzerland are at the top with 0.2-0.3%.
Wow, so that's 1,000 people for Malta.
The guys who are really behaving disgustingly here are (surprise! ) the Gulf Arabs, who are directly funding the worst players in the Syrian war (as well as waging their own bloody and chaotic war in Yemen) while refusing to lift a finger to help with the refugee problem... but then what else would you expect?
Hey, I just had an idea: could Greece "work off" its debt by housing a disproportionate number of refugees? I'm thinking about the fact that Germany just apportioned €6B for refugees. Something like, every EU member sends a chunk of cash to Greece to cover hard costs, while the Greeks would manage the social aspects as an in-kind contribution. The cash would be stimulative, and the contribution* would cut down on the otherwise unpayable debt.
Does that make any damn sense? I mean, you don't have to tell me that it would be a hard sell politically, but if, like Lawrence Lessig you were going to get to fix things and then resign, would this be a good way to do it?
*reasons you could say that hosting the refugees would be worth the matching cash: the cash payments essentially represent other countries saying, "We value not hosting refugees €thismuch," plush debt is never getting paid off anyway, so it's a polite fiction for a politically unpalatable writedown; it could be any number, but tying it to EU contributions has a certain logic
29.2 I'd suspect the 'the IRS could send everyone completed tax returns' phenomenon applies here.
Sure, it would be good from a generally social standpoint if we had better/more efficient immigration courts. And sure there's nothing particularly left wing about that in a way that any common right wing philosophy would object to. But there is a group of people who both benefit electorally from the government looking inefficient/slow, and from there being a large number of people without visas sitting around in (effectively) jails in the country. And so any attempt to improve that gets immediately (and quietly because the press has no interest in boring wonky stuff like "what the government is actually doing") shut down.
You know who was interested in what the government was doing? Hitler, that's who.
55 is certainly intuitively appealing. The major question mark on my end would be jobs. In every refugee-camp situation that I have been aware of, host countries have turned themselves into pretzels finding new and creative ways to prevent refugees from looking for work.
The IRC and the UN typically cooperate, making it near-impossible in many situations for refugees even to find legitimate* work experience in refugee camp, selling goods or services to other refugees.
On the surface this makes some kind of sense -- why allow guests/recipients of charity to take a paying job that one of your native-born workers could have. But it ignores two other issues: first, refugees are also on some level consumers (albeit with limited buying power) and second, there is a social cost to having a large, unoccupied adult population.
*People being people, they of course find ways around this, particularly in camp situations that drag on for 10-20 years, but overall it's pretty dreadful, and of course leads to worse outcomes if they are eventually resettled in a new country, because at that point they've been out of the labor market for a looong time.
(cont'd) The more interesting approach would be if Greece did something like what the US does -- not housing people in camps, but giving them a work permit and a few (6-8 months) of support and help finding a first job and housing. But I think pulling that off would require a lot more than the $6 billion (?) that Germany has pledged.
You know who else put a lot more resources than he had originally intended into solving problems involving Greece?
"Marshall" has two too many letters.
there is a social cost to having a large, unoccupied adult population.
For instance, when it happens in Greece you get social unrest and the rise of the not-really-cryto cryptofascist Golden Dawn party.
Maybe the refugees could provide a counterbalance to the fascists.
Also, the population of Greece is only 10 million, making it roughly an eighth the size of Germany.
The more interesting approach would be if Greece did something like what the US does -- not housing people in camps, but giving them a work permit and a few (6-8 months) of support and help finding a first job and housing.
Since Greece also has epically terrible unemployment rates, I think the better plan would be to do this whole thing in a different part of the EU where there are jobs to be had. Regardless of whether creditor nations would accept such an arrangement (very very unlikely, I think, especially if you actually want the deal to involve both sufficient cash contribution and significant debt writeoff), it is almost certainly not a good plan to arrange things deliberately so that the refugees are concentrated in the poorest corners of Europe with the highest unemployment rates.
And anyway, man, can you imagine? "I know we're wealthy, but first we're going to engage in some wheeling and dealing and now you're going to be shipped off en masse to a much poorer place. That sounds super fair and makes us look really great! I'm sure you'll be pleased at this outcome! It's a win for everyone!"
What if we hired Greek mercenaries to run the middle east. Respect the lessons of history
"What? 'Shoving you off on' Greece? No no! Not at all! It's more like matchmaking. And bonus! Your new home has a significant population of fascists who will hate you and blame you for their economic troubles!"
They could try to sell it as a form of hazing.
I assume that's how the U.S. justified sending people from Somalia to Minnesota.
To be fair, 69 is more or less equivalent to the way the Germans handled the Greek fiscal crisis.
Hmm, that analogy seems too equitable to me.
73: Eh, it was more like:
A. We had an existing refugee infrastructure
B. We're not quite as psychotic about race as some other places one could mention
C. There was a pre-existing East African community here
D. And, um, the similarity of the climate?
75: Yeah, fair enough. At least the plan being discussed here could potentially benefit someone.
76: A lot of South Sudanese refugees ended up in Anchorage for what I presume are similar reasons.
Admittedly, wrt 76B, one of the big wheels in the Somali community here told me a few years ago that his wife, herself also a Somali, and a medical doctor, frequently gets referred to as "nurse" by cow orkers she's known for years. (This is in the suburbs of course, not MPLS proper.)
But maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're just sexist, and not actually as racist and xenophobic as that anecdote makes them sound.
Further evidence for the "German people just really, really hate Greek people for some reason" explanation of their goverment's inhumane economic policy over the previous few months.
I generally assumed the Somali/Sudanese population had to do with policy makers believing in some sort of 'opposites attract' theory. "You're from a hot, dry place? Oh man, you'll love it there!"
76B is probably true, as far as places in America go. I don't know if it says something positive about the country that a mostly homogenous (especially racially), deeply introverted local culture nevertheless manages to be a better place for settling refugees than a lot of the country.
I'm glad they did it though, because the Hmong and Somali population in the Twin Cities probably covers at least half of what I like about living here.
I thought the Germans were just using the Greeks to scare the Italians and Spaniards, like when the court order says you can't spank your children so you beat a dog in front of the kids in hopes that they won't figure out you got nothing.
Actually, I used to volunteer for a refugee resettlement agency in high school, and I think the idea is that refugees assimilate much more quickly if they're put in really white homogeneous areas--the Northern Midwest, the PNW, Northern New England, parts of Alaska, etc.
82
The thing about Scandinavian-Americans is in terms of outward behavior, the difference between them liking you and them not is non existent. Chilly politeness covers the entire range, basically. Unless there's a lot of alcohol involved, then you might get some Real Feelings.
(This is in the suburbs of course, not MPLS proper.)
Of course!
Does St. Paul count as a suburb for these purposes?
As someone living in Minneapolis, I don't think St Paul counts at all.