europe’s challenge strangers in strange...
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9/16/2015 Strangers in strange lands | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/21664217/print 1/6
It has all been seen before
Europe’s challenge
Strangers in strange landsThe world’s institutional approach to refugees was born in Europe seven decadesago. The continent must relearn its lessons
Sep 12th 2015 | From the print edition
IN 1951 a group of
diplomats in Geneva
committed their
countries to absorbing
huge numbers of
refugees from a region
plagued by ethnic
hatred, fanatical
ideologies, and seemingly interminable war: Europe. The second world war left millions of
people wandering across the ravaged continent. Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union
deported 14m Germans in the years after Germany’s defeat. Redrawn borders saw millions of
Ukrainians, Serbs and others kicked out of their homes. Six years on, 400,000 people were
stranded in “displaced persons” camps with no clear prospect of resettlement.
The UNmandated Geneva conference came up with a convention that required its signatories
to assess claims to refugee status made by anyone in their territory, and to grant it whenever a
refugee had a “wellfounded fear of being persecuted” in his or her country of origin. To begin
with the right of asylum was limited to Europeans, but this limitation was removed when a new
protocol gave the convention global scope in 1967. The Refugee Convention has now been
ratified by 147 countries; over 64 years it has framed the international response to humanitarian
crises around the world (see chart 1).
The convention’s adoption marked one of the “never again” moments of the postwar era, with
states pledging themselves to overcome the modern evils their war had made manifest. The
hundreds of thousands of refugees who have streamed across Europe this summer have both
recalled that pledge and called it into question. For months refugees from Syria, Afghanistan
and Eritrea have been retracing the routes used by European refugees in the 1940s. They pick
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their way through razorwire fencing on Serbia’s
northern border, where ethnic Hungarians once
fled Titoist partisans. They are smuggled in trucks
across Austria, just as Jews headed from Poland
to Palestine once were. But this time the flow is
moving in the opposite direction: towards
Germany.
In early September a new mood of welcome for these refugees sprang up in western European
countries, and especially in Germany (see article
(http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21664216ordinarygermansnottheirpoliticians
havetakenleadwelcomingsyrias) ). But central and eastern Europe have not joined in the
enthusiasm. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, has turned into a bête noire for liberal
Europeans, putting up barbed wire and walls against refugees and treating those who get in like
cattle, appearing insensitive to associations with Nazi concentration camps or East Germans
fleeing across Hungarian barbed wire 26 years ago. A poll this month in the Czech Republic
showed 71% of the population opposed to taking in any refugees at all.
Slovakia has made it known that, if it must have refugees at all, it would rather not have
Muslims, a sentiment echoed by rightwing politicians across the continent happy to play on
animosity towards Muslims and fears that Europe is incapable of absorbing them. The migrants
are looking for European social benefits, the populists say, not fleeing persecution. The
Netherlands’ Geert Wilders calls them gelukszoekers (“happinessseekers”), while Mr Orban
says the “overwhelming majority” are economic migrants. After all, the argument runs, those
fleeing Syria mostly cross into Greece from Turkey, where they face no physical threats. Surely
that means they are not real refugees?
Wrong. For one thing, a quirk of history means that though Turkey has signed the convention,
it does not grant Syrians the right to stay there as refugees. It is the only country that, when
ratifying the 1967 protocol to the convention, retained the original geographical limitations.
Thus the convention only obliges Turkey to deal with asylum applications from Europeans.
More generally, state signatories to the convention are obliged to let those who have applied for
asylum stay while their applications are evaluated, whether they have arrived via other countries
where they might not face persecution or not. Soviet Jews who requested asylum in America in
the 1970s were not rejected simply because they had first passed through Austria.
There are exceptions. The European Union’s Dublin rule says that people applying for asylum in
an EU country other than the one they first entered should be returned to that first country.
And international law permits applicants to be sent to “safe” countries that afford equivalent
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opportunities for asylum. But this does not mean they can be returned to the Middle East—
where most of Syria’s refugees remain (see chart 2). Neither Lebanon nor Jordan is a signatory
to the convention, and though both have taken in far more refugees than Europe, the situation
in both is now far from welcoming.
Over the past year Lebanon has put into place
tortuous rules that require its 1.5m Syrians either
to pledge not to work or to find Lebanese
sponsors—which often means getting exploited as
unpaid labour. Jordan, with 629,000 refugees
living mainly among local communities, has been
ramping up restrictions that seem aimed at
squeezing them into camps or forcing them to
leave. Lacking the convention’s protections, most Syrians in Jordan, Lebabon and Turkey are
unable to work legally, and live in dire poverty. The World Food Programme has halved its
assistance to the neediest Syrian refugees, providing just $13.50 per person per month. In
Turkey, Kurdish Syrian refugees are vulnerable to the government’s renewed war against its own
Kurds. Arrivals in Europe have rocketed this year not so much because the civil war is worse
than ever—though it is (see article (http://www.economist.com/news/middleeastand
africa/21664155hopesdiplomaticprogressaimedendingwargoreversepositions) )—as
because the situation in the countries neighbouring their homeland has grown desperate.
For all this, some reluctant Europeans continue to
be certain the new arrivals are not “real” refugees.
If so something is gravely wrong with EU asylum
authorities, which are convinced that most of the
applications they are seeing are genuine.
European countries grant asylum to 94% of
Syrian migrants who ask for it, along with the vast
majority of Eritreans, Afghans and Iraqis (see
chart 3).
A lessthanonepercent solution
This is not to say there are no economic migrants trying to get into the EU. Most applications for
asylum from Serbia, Albania and Kosovo are rejected. Many subSaharan Africans who make it
across the Mediterranean to Italy and Malta do not try to show that they are persecuted, hoping
instead to make their way undocumented. As a prosperous continent next door to much poorer
places, Europe can expect ever more such migration over the years and decades to come. But
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that does not mean that it can ignore the growing flux of refugees who have a claim to
protection under the convention.
When the fear that few of the migrants will qualify as refugees proves unfounded, it is likely to
be followed by a fear that too many of them will—especially now that Germany has put out the
welcome mat. There are 4m Syrian refugees outside Syria. Even if they all came to the EU they
would amount to a small demographic change in a club of more than 500m people—if evenly
spread. Under the Dublin rule Greece and Italy have handled a share of asylumseekers they see
as deeply unfair, but Germany has already put those rules to one side as far as Syrians are
concerned, and the rest of the EU is working on a quota system to make the distribution more
even (see article (http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21664224throughyetanother
crisiseugropingtowardsexpansionitspowersleading) ). Yet on a continent where, for a
decade and a half, politicians have been preoccupied with the failure to integrate Muslim
communities—and where that failure has boosted the likes of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in
France and Mr Wilders’s Party for Freedom—the prospect of more such communities worries
many.
How easily Europe can absorb more Muslims depends largely on how the absorbing is done. To
appease anxieties over costs and crime governments often restrict asylum applicants’ work
permits and house them in isolated refugee centres. This is the most expensive and least
effective approach possible. Putting asylumseekers into governmentrun centres is not only
alienating, it also costs a lot more than housing in the community—about €100 a day per
person, according to a British study. Letting asylumseekers work—if, in areas of chronic
unemployment, they can find jobs—replaces the costs of government relief, and leads them to
learn the local language much faster. That said, letting them work has costs that are not evenly
shared. German studies of the labour effects of immigration suggest that while it raises the
incomes of better off workers with complementary skills, it does some harm to those who already
have low wages.
Success also depends on who does the absorbing. European nationstates have been coping with
acute refugee flows at least since the Protestant exoduses of the Thirty Years’ War—that is, for as
long as there have been European nationstates. But the immigrant nations of the Americas and
Australia have tended to do a better job, and any resolution of the Syrian crisis should probably
involve them as well.
One model might be the Vietnamese “boat people” crisis that started in the late 1970s and
unfolded in much the same way the Syrian diaspora has. Initial uncontrolled emigration led to
resistance from neighbouring countries and tragic drownings that mobilised public opinion in
the West. So the international community set up camps for processing and distributing asylum
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applicants. Some were repatriated, while deals with Vietnam let others leave legally. Some 1.3m
refugees from Indochina ended up in America; many others went to Australia, Canada and
France, and some to other parts of Europe.
The boat people had fewer skills than the refugees who had first fled the fall of South Vietnam
in 1975, and less ideological identification with the West. In Australia they became the first large
group of Asian immigrants in an overwhelmingly white colonial population sensitive to
preserving its ethnic identity. Yet today the boat people are for the most part a success
everywhere they ended up. VietnameseAmericans have lower levels of educational attainment
and English proficiency than the average American immigrant, but higher income levels and
naturalisation rates.
If an analogy between Vietnam’s boat people and Syria’s migrants seems glib, it is because of a
widespread sense in Western countries that Muslims are more threatening than other
immigrants. The fear is not just of Muslims’ cultural differences, but of the development of anti
Western political sentiment in Muslim communities. Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe this
year have intensified such anxieties.
But every wave of immigration has been accompanied by fears. In 1709 the War of the Spanish
Succession sent thousands of refugees from lower Saxony down the Rhine and across the North
Sea to London. Believing that they would then be offered free passage to America, the socalled
“Poor Palatines” instead ended up in refugee camps. Daniel Defoe and other Whigs argued that
they were Protestant refugees from Roman Catholic oppression and should be settled in
England—an argument that suffered a blow when, on closer inspection, half the Palatines
turned out to be Catholic themselves. A Tory faction meanwhile argued that they were economic
migrants, lowskilled undesirables who would prove an endless burden on the Crown.
Ultimately, investors were found to put some of them on boats to America, where they founded
Germantown, New York.
Continuously connected
America itself, though often welcoming, has also had its periods of doubt. The millions from
southern and eastern Europe who arrived at the end of the 19th century provoked fears that the
“Englishspeaking race” could not withstand such pollution. After 1945 America refused for
years to accept any refugees from eastern Europe: Senator Chapman Revercomb of West
Virginia warned it would be “a tragic blunder to bring into our midst those imbued with a
communistic line of thought”. These fears, like those over Islamist terrorism today, were not
baseless. In the 19th century some eastern European immigrants in Western countries engaged
in anarchist terrorism; in the 20th some spied for the Soviet Union. But these were not, in the
end, huge problems.
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How much room at the inn? An alternative look at Europe's refugee intake(http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/09/dailychart)
In one respect, though, today’s refugees and migrants truly are different from those of earlier
eras. Many have some higher education, material resources and networks of family or friends
already in Europe with whom they can keep in touch through phone and Facebook. Some are
working out their plans as they go, others have coherent strategies. In a word, they have agency.
On September 6th, at the railway station of the small Austrian village of Nickelsdorf, Waleed al
Ubaid stood waiting to catch a train towards the German city of Kiel. He had researched it on
his phone: “So many Syrians are going now to Munich and Berlin. It’s better to go where there
aren’t too many.” Nearby on the platform Hussein Serif plans to find a job in Germany, then
apply for a scholarship at the French business school, INSEAD (he had just finished a
marketing degree when, at risk of being drafted, he left Damascus).
Millions of Mr Serif’s compatriots are still waiting in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, gradually
despairing of their prospects there. They are aware of their rights under the convention; they
know of the successes and failures of their friends and family through social media. Many of
them will probably be coming west soon. Europe has the capacity to welcome them; at the
moment, in many places, it has the inclination to do so, too. The challenge is to turn that warm
and decent impulse into a programme that will make the newcomers safe, productive and
accepted.
From the print edition: Briefing