There is also a third option, which is to send them somewhere else. There are a number of countries in Africa that are poor, but still aren't in the midst of any active war or genocide. If you're from a country that is, why not go there?
The answer is that the real reason so many want to come to the EU isn't the humanitarian crisis at home, it's for the better money. But when that's their primary motivation, and they have the same alternative as anyone from any of the other countries they could live in, then their claim is no better than anyone else's.
It's fair to not want to be in Libya right now, but when you have the option to move east, west or south, there is a lot less moral force in the argument that you have a right to move north.
Why? Those people are _economic migrants_, we don't have a duty to welcome them (unlike, say refugees from Syria)
Some countries in the Middle East are already hosting as much as total EU is hosting and even more.
They just don’t complain as much as some of our politicians do to get voted.
Which is why they want to leave, but has nothing to do with the point that there are many other places for them to go.
> They just don’t complain as much as some of our politicians do to get voted.
Because they don't have redistributive social assistance systems based on assumptions about what proportion of the population are net recipients that accepting large amounts of indigent immigration would violate.
A poor and rural country can accept almost arbitrarily large numbers of refugees because they're also a labor force, so you give them jobs building housing and growing food and they support themselves.
That doesn't work in urbanized countries because there isn't any cheap land available and in a lot of places there is already an oversupply of unskilled labor, so in that environment they can't support their own weight and it limits the number you can accept.
I think most of us agree that migrants traveling long and dangerous distances to Europe don't have much to loose back home. Now the question is if their lives are not in danger anymore why should Europe host them and pay them a better life ? Is this supposed to be a solution to world's poverty? As we've seen if support is provided or better said lack of counter-measures you may experience a continuous stream of migrants(i.e millions). Even if we want, we can't welcome everybody, I fear we can't coup even with the people who really need help, let alone the economic migrants.
On the other side there is also the cultural issue. Millions of people change the landscape for sure and the natives don't want to compete with migrants(why would they?). UK is leaving EU because of european "migrants" so it's not something to ignore.
Well I don't think "anyone" in Europe wants to send these migrants to the bottom of the sea. A solution currently worked on is to pay other countries closer culturally, socially and even geographically (i.e Turkey) to host these people.
The lack of border security gives a sense of unease especially if you expect people from a war torn country or a country where crime is high so I fully support securing the borders.
However the deshumanisation of migrants and treating them as criminals (or worse) is totally wrong and has no place in a civilised country. You can have both border security and immigration. Just be honest who is allowed in and who is not, put in place agreed quotas and that's it. At least everyone knows(including the migrants) what your stance is.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/08/14/let-them-drown-italys-trum...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/09...
https://inews.co.uk/culture/radio/caller-says-let-them-sink-...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/11/09/evidence-shows-...
Because if you're going to uproot your life, you're not going to simply go to another miserable country like Bulgaria, you'll go to a country where it's worth moving to. When you buy a new phone, do you buy last year's phone ("it's good enough!") or do you buy the damn best phone you can afford ("it'll last me a long time!")? France will "last" someone a longer time than Bulgaria.
In any case, I don't think it would change too much, since most of the migrants are not Libyans running away from the civil war.
The people that live in those countries, the warlords they support, the wars they fight, the human atrocities they commit, their ethnically motivated conflicts, are never their fault, we are supposed to treat them as infants when it comes to all the shortcomings of their actions.
The pattern is: There is a dictator that is oppressing his people, we feel bad about it and want them to be able to have democracy. We overthrow the dictator, and then things get complicated and we walk away, leaving the place in civil war and ruin.
Often the problem is that the only reason it's a country at all is that some guy in London drew a line on a map a couple of hundred years ago, and the borders do not reflect ethnic or religious loyalties. In this post colonial situation, often the only thing holding the country together was the violence of the dictator. We then swoop in with fighter jets and maybe even ground troops, maybe stick around a while to run a few elections, but generally without the understanding of what's left of the power structure in the country.
This is precisely what happened in Libya, and after Iraq and Afghanistan it's shameful that we just continue to do the same thing. Bomb Gaddafi and let the chips fall where they may, which turns out to be years long civil war.
If you want to look for a relatively successful model of U.S. intervention, it's what we did in Yugoslavia. Just recognize that the country doesn't have enough holding it together to be a functioning democracy, break it up along ethnic lines, institute democracy in the statelets, and then let them all join the EU when they're ready.
Wouldn't the diversity give them strength?
I’m actually in favour in smaller nation states and redrawing lines as a solution to the failures of centralized mega states and old world borders, such as lack of representation and cultural differences which cause policy conflicts (the smaller stuff, not just violence which is atypical in most places). Plus smaller states = way more experimentation, which the US states were supposed to be with Federalism but has had that slowly taken away.
But that’s another story which doesn’t help explain the contradictions of this common explanation used selectively in Africa.
If democracy is instituted, and the ruling group was a minority, there will be resentment on the side of the majority for past treatment, and resentment on the side of the formerly ruling minority for their diminished status. This has a tendency to boil over into civil war.
This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia, and we solved it by breaking up the country, and it has been fairly peaceful for twenty years. The main place where there are still problems is in Bosnia, and specifically because we left Bosnia together and the Bosnian Serbs want out.
I agree with you that many countries had flawed leadership to begin with it's not really the case with many others(i.e much of the middle east). Removing the government of another country by military force and destroying the social and physical infrastructure is the direct reason for the current situation. Arming various extremist groups does not help either. As we know Al-Qaeda was armed and trained by the U.S in the first place.
Why did US invade Iraq? We know it's for the oil now but at least it should have had the decency to provide security/safety transition to a democracy in exchange for their resources. Not to mention that US vets their leaders/administration. They are not infants but have little choice in the face of the world's most powerful country/countries.
That's why I believe the world starts loosing its faith in the West. The latest interventions brought nothing good.
Why did Iraq invade Kuwait? Start a fight with a US ally and then complain when the US intervenes.
The pretext of invasions were different though. Busch said it was because Saddam was evil and had weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was more decent in its allegations and said Kuwait was stealing Iraqi petroleum through slant drilling.
Btw Saddam Hussein regime was "created" by the US and the UK...
Unfortunately some politicians are harming the way we feel about each other for the sake of their own game.
EU is already rejecting many refugees. It’s not like someone that makes it to the shore is going to stay without a good reason.
That’s not just a good solution to this problem.
Your position can be rephrased as "It is better to let refugees drown in the Mediterranean than think Europe might welcome more of them." I agree - it is likely over the long term that the more dangerous and hopeless the journey, the fewer might attempt it.
So now, we pit the "moral responsibility" to Europe to minimize population growth via immigration vs. the moral responsibility to save the lives of those in your backyard who have risked it to get there.
OR the EU could make/force an agreement that Libya/Algeria/Morocco take back migrants recovered in the Mediterranean.