PETER HITCHENS: We won't save refugees by destroying our own

[mistermack]

Those refugees are not illegal immigrants. They have a right to seek asylum according to that thing, you know, what's it called, human rights. Yeah, that thing that we Westerners are so proud of.

You still don't get it, do you?
None of these people are genuine refugees. They ARE illegal immigrants. They are not fleeing war. That stopped the day they left their own country.
They are moving from one safe country to another, heading for the countries with the best benefits, and the best chances of getting work in a rich country.

The right to asylum was never designed for these people. They are bogus refugees.
The GENUINE refugees are in camps, near the Syrian Border. In safe countries, close to their own homes.
Anybody else is abusing the system.

It's the BOGUS refugees who make it hard for the genuine ones. The system is now so abused it needs to be scrapped. It's being used by 100% economic migrants.

[JimC]

The problem with this perspective is that the camps are pretty miserable places to be. Even if there is "barely" enough food and shelter, the people in them would feel like they were staring into a very bleak future, with no jobs, education or freedom. It is not simply a matter of economic improvement. If they knew it was only going to be temporary, and that stability would return to their homelands within a year or so, they may cope, but there seems no end in sight to the various conflicts, particularly in Syria. That is why I argue for a much stronger effort to reach a peaceful resolution.

[Brian Peacock]

As well as an increased number of refugee intake, the west collectively needs to do more, politically and perhaps militarily to end the conflict in Syria and allow for many to return. A big ask, but ultimately the best solution.

This can only be achieved if the West is prepared to invest far more political and economic capital in those areas of the world where democratic and economic institutions are fragmented, or non-existent. In the long run this will mean spending more abroad with little prospect of a short-term (domestic electoral) reward, but the long-term gains in terms of political and economic stability and the benefits that will bring to the wider international community seem not only well worth it to me - but a global-social imperative.

[mistermack]

The problem with this perspective is that the camps are pretty miserable places to be. Even if there is "barely" enough food and shelter, the people in them would feel like they were staring into a very bleak future, with no jobs, education or freedom. It is not simply a matter of economic improvement. If they knew it was only going to be temporary, and that stability would return to their homelands within a year or so, they may cope, but there seems no end in sight to the various conflicts, particularly in Syria. That is why I argue for a much stronger effort to reach a peaceful resolution.

That's all true.

The people trying to get to Germany are fleeing a bleak camp. Not danger. I don't blame them at all. But they aren't genuine refugees, once they're safe. The asylum system is not meant for people who want to improve their conditions.
That's why David Cameron said that Britain would take some refugees FROM THE CAMPS.
Because at least they are not illegal immigrants.

[Brian Peacock]

Is not wishing you or your family to live here not reflect a reasonable and understandable desire to improve one's conditions?

[JimC]

Brian, to be fair to mistermack, he was talking about people leaving the camps, which although bleak, are not a war zone. Your pictures show war zones, from which of course it is reasonable to flee to neighbouring countries. Western countries need to take a strong flow of people directly from the camps in Turkey and Lebanon.

[Brian Peacock]

Indeed. I know there is some general confusion between refugees and those seeking asylum, but MrM did seem to imply it was unreasonable for the asylum system, a convention on political recognition and protection, to be applied to those merely seeking 'to improve their conditions.' When your very being places you in danger, aside from the usual dangers of simply trying to exist in a warzone, then the asylum system should be applied to improve someone's conditions. Concentrating those fleeing a warzone into organised camps does not relieve a State of its obligations to process asylum-seekers simply because they are in no longer in any immediate danger. I posted the pictures (the last one is of what used to be hospital btw) to emphasise the point that the Syrian people deemed to be on the wrong side of whatever version of the conflict was playing out for them locally, have nothing to go back to, and indeed many of them will never be able to go back after what's been done to them - and perhaps after what they've done themselves. This crisis is not about hordes of Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis coming to Europe on the scrounge.

[cronus]

Europe didn't emigrate after WW2. They rebuilt. So get the war over with - send them back where they come from to rebuild. Saudi Arabia offered to build 200 Mosques. Build them in Syria?

[cronus]

Europe didn't emigrate after WW2. They rebuilt. So get the war over with - send them back where they come from to rebuild. Saudi Arabia offered to build 200 Mosques. Build them in Syria?

[mistermack]

It's a pathetic argument, to try to pull emotional levers to gloss over the fault in your argument.

There is NO moral onus on Europe to take people in, just because their current conditions are uncomfortable. Not one person, arriving in Germany, is fleeing physical danger. There are no flights from the war zone. It's all a pack of lies.

If Europe had any brains at the top, they would give more generously to the refugee camps, and leave it at that.
This flood is purely down to the Idiot Angela Merkel, and the idiots running Sweden. Etc etc.
You can't open the sluice gates, and then be amazed by the flood, unless you're a moron.

And now that Mekel has fucked it up, she expects everybody else to help mop up her mess. With no intention at all of closing the sluice gates !

[Hermit]

Europe didn't emigrate after WW2.

Utter bullshit. Somewhere between 11 and 20 million refugees moved west, fleeing from the red army front. Hundreds of thousands were "housed" under tarpaulins suspended from the walls of roofless ruins. And no, they were not just ethnically German. They came from as far as the Ukraine. There were Serbs, Slavs, Poles and other ethnicities among them, the very people the Germans were trying to exterminate only months earlier. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were still living in displaced persons camps by 1947.

You talk shit because you know jack shit. And you know jack shit because those millions of refugees have assimilated to the extent that the third generation of them has assimilated to the extent that you cannot distinguish them from Germans whose ancestors have lived in Germany for scores of generations. They have become as indistinguishable as the Normans have become from the Anglo-Saxons.