The EU migrant problem is, from my perspective as an EU citizen, the real elephant in the room that everyone talks about but still doesn't quite appreciate the depth of.

We have a union that claims to be be committed to human rights such as the right to seek asylum. That union recently experienced serious political unrest after receiving a bit over a million migrants around 2015 and clearly the political leadership decided that could not happen again. So the problem was offshored to Turkey, and to some extent Greece, and I'm sure to some North African nations in deals I'm not aware of.

This is going to be horrific, frankly. Whatever you think of the ethics of the whole business, it's pretty clear that politically, EU leadership is not willing to face another migrant crisis. Unfortunately, the EU also doesn't seem able to do a whole lot about the root causes of the crisis, namely political instability and war south of the EU borders. So what that leaves is the EU turning a blind eye to the problem, trying to get the authoritarian states on our borders to deal with the problem in a deniable fashion instead.

It's not going to work in the long run. People move across borders when they need to. Where it's all going, I don't know, but it's going to be a big, big problem for the EU if the conflicts in the Middle East and Africa can not be stabilized.

The EU has to protect its borders, there's no other option. Not doing so is a political suicide. People here don't want to share their wealth with immigrants and they don't want their mostly homogenous societies being changed by an influx of people with different behavior, culture, religion, language, etc.

But I think there will be an interesting twist - aging of the population. This feels like an abstract problem, but it will become very real.

> The EU has to protect its borders, there's no other option.

As an European, I agree. At the very least, I think that we have the right to protect our borders.

However, this is not an isolated thing that can be morally decided independently of the rest of our foreign policy. We have provoked and participated in many wars in neighboring countries to defend our "economic interests". We are supporting authoritarian dictatorships in Africa so that European enterprises exploiting their natural resources have an easier job. Heck, when a neighboring country (Libya) threatened a bit our cheap oil supply (that is, our supply of their oil) we got all angry and violent and provoked a war there to change the regime.

Most of the immigrants in question come from countries that we have messed with. We certainly have the right to close our borders to them, but to do so we must first stop destroying and exploiting their countries.

> We have provoked and participated in many wars in neighboring countries to defend our "economic interests".

"We"? How many of those wars were started by popular demand, with protests on the streets demanding our leaders take military action? "We" are being blamed for the actions of oil and weapons lobbyists (whose wars are paid by our taxes), and then asked to face the consequences of the actions due to their subversion of democracy.

We pay for the wars we don't want, we get the blame, we get to deal with the immigrants, and in the end, we still have to pay for the oil - the oil companies that benefit (always unnamed) don't hand it out for free!

> We pay for the wars we don't want, we get the blame, we get to deal with the immigrants, and in the end, we still have to pay for the oil - the oil companies that benefit (always unnamed) don't hand it out for free!

I understand the evil ways of our leaders... However, I cannot face a person whose town has been bombed to oblivion by my purportedly elected officials, and tell him that I'm a "victim of the system" just like him.

As for "protests on the streets", I've certainly participated in most of the anti-war protests that have happened around me. Problem is that my neighbours consistently keep voting for our ever murderous leadership!

> We pay for the wars we don't want

Simple solution: don’t vote for people who start wars? The EU claims to be one of the most democratic entities. Why do people complain they’re being screwed by some minority group?

People did vote for people who didn't want to start wars. For example, Donald Trump was elected on an anti-interventionist platform and attempted to pursue it as Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces. The wars didn't cease, and late in the Trump administration prominent Pentagon officials actually bragged in public how they lied to the President and his officials for years and unconstitutionally misappropriated military resources to continue the foreverwars until he was out of office. Trump was specifically elected to end the endless quagmire of foreign intervention and mass immigration, and yet it turns out that there are no democratic or peaceful means to eliminate these things. Believing you simply have to stop voting for the military-industrial complex is counter to all available data and just incredibly naive at the outset.

Trump sped up climate change, making the scenario in the article happen more and more often. People like him (Trump) are some of the worst, for those living in Africa. (Also, the voters in the US didn't primarily vote for Trump for the reasons you seem to think.)

Okay but that doesn't change the fact that Trump tried with withdraw the troops from Syria and the Pentagon officials lied to his face and told him they took the troops out, and later bragged in public about misleading the duly elected President. That's a thing that happened, regardless of what reasons you think people elected Trump for, even though the economy, immigration, and anti-war sentiments were vigorously popular reasons among the base.

The point is that you are not allowed to vote against war anymore. It is demonstrably not possible to vote a different Commander-in-Chief in and end the war. Republicans tried that.

We are also not in Syria because of climate change. We are there because they are a geopolitical adversary of Israel.

I don’t think elections are being won by being honest about your military intentions.

The problem is the scale. How many people can you realistically lock up in camps, especially considering those camps are leverage for the dictators you’re making deals with to operate them?

Either the root causes get fixed or things start breaking, badly.

I don't think it's a problem. On land, you can use drones, walls and fences. On the sea, don't allow boats get into your territory.

In addition, there are many "soft" measures. Cooperation with countries like Lybia and Turkey. Help to alleviate the problems they are running from. Announce that anyone who crosses illegaly will not receive an asylum. Etc.

At the same time if you do nothing then you turn a sprinkle into a roaring river which is equally as hard and expensive to deal with.

The sheer number of people who keep moving after reaching France, Germany etc to try and get the UK, purely because they like the UK more, shows that choice and relatively small differences in final living conditions can have a dramatic effect.

If you need, you don't need to bring people from the most orthogonal cultures.

(Though that's only half the problem, and when you get xenophobia even against French in Quebec you see it's complicated)

> People here don't want to share their wealth with immigrants and they don't want their mostly homogenous societies being changed by an influx of people with different behavior, culture, religion, language, etc.

That ship has sailed for many countries.

> People move across borders when they need to.

Both Hungary and Poland have shown that a modern state can largely prevent illegal crossing of its borders. We have the technology. It's not that difficult. Even easier when you have a sea acting as a barrier.

When the migration happens on a massive scale regardless, it's usually with tacit or explicit establishment's approval.

But Hungary and Poland aren't a destination goal for the vast majority of migrants, so they only have to make the route through their countries worse or harder than alternative routes. That's not comparable to the EU as a whole.

Actually, seeking an asylum is perfectly legal. What those border countries are doing is illegal.

Also, seems like the values changed drastically after 2015. I was told it was our moral obligation to help the refugees. Now it’s 180 degree turn. Makes you think helping people wasn’t really a value in the first place, since those can’t change so radically.

The EU as an institution/trans-national government has virtually no identifiable values beyond self-expansion and consolidation of power. All other claimed values disappear the moment they come into conflict with those other two.

Consider human rights. The ECJ loves to overrule government decisions on migration/asylum on the grounds of human rights, they do it all the time. The inability to deport Islamic "hate preachers" was one of the contributing factors in the Brexit campaign, in fact. Yet the moment Austria placed a large fraction of its own population under indefinite house arrest without trial, in violation of the Nurenberg Code no less, the EU was mysteriously silent.

Or how about the rule of law. When eastern European countries were electing conservative politicians the EU couldn't shut up about how the "rule of law" was being violated, though they never quite explained how. Then Latvia's parliament banned unvaccinated MPs from voting, violating the most basic rule a democracy has and at a stroke disenfranchising whole chunks of their population. Once again, the EU couldn't find anything to say about this.

I rest this case with a few quotes from Jean-Claude Juncker, former head of the EU Commission. He said these things whilst running the EU's most powerful body:

"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."

"When the going gets tough, you have to lie."

"I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates"

"I believe neither the French nor the Dutch really rejected the constitutional treaty." (they did, of course)

In the end the, the EU does have values but those values are not the sort of values they're willing to publicly advertise.

This is a temporary situation with relatively few people involved. Counterexample: the US - Mexico border.

Keeping an airtight border is a very expensive task. You can probably be harder to get into than the next country, but in the context of the EU, that's not really a solution, it's just a way to make the problem worse.

The goal is not to have 100% foolproof solution, but one that makes it not worth a try.

People are willing to risk their children drowning in the Mediterranean in order to get into the EU. How much worse can we make it?

They only do that because they believe they can succeed. Widespread propaganda could resolve that.

Well, the basics remain the same

Asylum is not a "free migration card" as some NGOs or some people purport it to be. You don't get it just because you were born in a poor country.

And as much as some maybe, sheltered (or just idealistic) think borders shouldn't exist, no, they're there for a reason.

And the more asylum gets abused the more it will be harder to get.

The EU is paying Turkey to make sure people do not show up to request asylum in the first place. You think there's someone from the EU making an assessment of how many people in Turkish camps would be legally entitled to asylum, reporting back in a way that determines who gets held in those camps? Please. The EU is already taking steps to hold back migrants, whatever their need for aid.

> Asylum is not a "free migration card" as some NGOs or some people purport it to be. You don't get it just because you were born in a poor country.

One problem is that if asylum is refused, very few are forcibly repatriated. Most just ending up living in the EU illegally.

Sounds like this mirrors the situation in the United States, where the root causes are political instability and economic devastation in nations of the south, some of which exacerbated by American policies.

The war on drugs is over. Drugs won and the loser was Mexico.

No, people don’t just “move across borders if they need to”. This is what militaries are for, to enforce sovereignty. Saying that is impossible is undermining the notion of statehood.

There are 11 million people in the US who "moved across borders when they needed to". Is there a country people want to migrate to that successfully keeps them out?

This is a fraction of the actual population which would happily move to the US but is kept away by immigration controls. 11 million on a population of 330 million is 3%.

You think the whole population of Mex wants to "happily move" into gringolandia? Naive and arrogant at the same time.

I mean there are people from all around the world who would like to move to the U.S, I guess because their situations in their home countries suck enough to warrant it or some cases because they are personally ambitious and the U.S is seen as the place to realize that ambition. Many of them are not allowed to move though because of immigration controls.

Are you saying it's impossible to keep 3% of the people out?

It’s possible, just not worth the effort.

Efforts to keep them out are constantly being sabotaged from within, it's not exactly proof we couldn't.

So you are saying the solution is for the EU to take an active role in the government of the Middle East and Africa? Perhaps through establishing some kind of colony? I am sure I have heard of this before. The US invested hundreds of billions in attempting to secure the Middle East...that win them a lot of friends down there?

The problem isn't political instability or war. Both things have existed in the past, even within Europe, and there has been no migrant crisis. European nations have always taken huge numbers of asylum seekers, the doors are still open but it has to happen legally and in a controlled way...Europe is a democracy after all. And be clear, there are lots of economic migrants too...some from Sudan, some from Syria but the majority are economic migrants (I am in the UK, admittedly the stuff you see here is particularly extreme but you have asylum seekers taking over LGBT support groups or getting confirmed so they don't get sent back...it is crazy). That is why the article talks about climate change a lot (nutty right-wingers were saying this would be the justification years ago...funny how things work out, it is now apparently an argument made by very serious people...it is bizarre because Africa has one of the greatest endowments of arable land anywhere, so why these people are seeking to move to a region with less arable land and no route for migrants to acquire land is...beyond me)...although I am not sure what someone seeing his brother making money in Spain has to do with climate change, Elon Musk is making tons of money in the US so can I claim asylum there?

Right now, you have activist groups assisting human traffickers, we have no idea who is coming here or why, we have people who are suffering in our own countries (youth unemployment is often lower in the places these people are coming from)...the only solution is to do what governments are doing. Be totally clear too, the only people who differ on this point are people who believe that borders should not exist. That is fine, but this minority view should not be imposed on the public through undemocratic means (the amount of money here is huge: human traffickers are making hundreds of thousands per day, activist groups are collecting wheelbarrows of cash from donors...a lot of people are getting very rich, very fast).

This isn't something that the public is going to yield on. In the UK, an asylum seeker who was cosplaying as a Christian killed an MP. Sweden, bombings through the roof, shooting through the roof. France, attacks on churches and priests constantly. There is a reason why this is happening...these people are not legitimate asylum seekers, there are no controls, they are here to take and not contribute (and btw, both sides of my family were migrants, I know asylum seekers that came to the UK from Uganda, I have friends who are coming here from HK now...the mentality in some parts of the UK is already totally different to the groups that we welcomed in the past, the UK is still tolerant but look at Europe...you are seeing that this is creating real opposition to all forms of migration, it is very worrying, it is having the opposite effect that the "open borders" crowd think, they are creating the thing they say they are fighting).

Gaddafi's government had tight border controls and prevented illegal entry into europe. Since Libya fell the country has become a prime route for migrants seeking to cross the borders into europe. 2014 Vice film https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/europe-or-die-storming-th...

Now Libya is again a barrier to european entry as Vice and now Ian Urbina /nyt describe. https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/europe-or-die-libyas-migr...

I was getting the immigration story of a friend the other day, as I often do. How did a brown guy end up in the UK? I've been even more keen on it since my parents died, having left me in a part of the world where I'm clearly foreign. To be fair I did move around a bit myself, but Western Europe is not that big. In our family we have horrendous stories. People who fell in the water, terrible fights breaking out in the camps. People feeling so desperate they sent their kids to foreign countries under false pretences.

As we were talking, it struck me that there's no right to free migration. There's all sorts of other things in the human rights convention, but going where you want somehow isn't one of them. This is despite the economic orthodoxy being that mobility, particularly of capital, is good.

I do get it. It's not actually a plus for absolutely everyone in the receiving country. Perhaps they compete for jobs or housing. There's legitimate concerns about people bringing values that aren't compatible with existing ones. Or they might commit crimes.

But there's also a lot of evidence that future generations assimilate. You'll meet plenty of darker skinned people in Europe who pretty much think the same as anyone else. They take a job, they pay their taxes, they root for the national team.

It's true up to a point, but there's also a lot of evidence that multi-ethnic societies don't work very well. See e.g. Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000. "Participation in heterogeneous communities" or Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly "Public goods and ethnic divisions" or Putnam "E Pluribus Unum".

Why do they strive for Europe? Economic refugees are in for a surprise when they actually make it to Europe. Maybe it’s better than what they had, but there is no doubt in my mind that they aren’t getting the warm welcome social media activists portray.

I don't understand why EU does not fund widespread anti-migration propaganda in those countries. Showing them that it's way more likely that they will lose all of their savings trying to get to EU and ending up in a prison like in this article would certainly turn some of them back.

People are replying "it's better than what they had" but that's often not true.

Many are promised something that does not exist, go through lot of danger only to discover that they were better off where they started. But now, they can't go back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_fz9EW5Iw

I think people don’t immigrate because of slightly better conditions. There’s a lot of hardship with being a refugee which won’t even end with getting a new citizenship. People sometimes do it to run away from i.e. Taliban, or bombs or some imminent danger.

_Most_ immigrants, like other humans, have a sense of self respect. I bet most of them prefer to stay in their own country even if the situation is worse than Europe if they know they won’t randomly get killed tomorrow.

That being said, of course, there are a group who abuse the system.

Edit: Corrected a statement in the first sentence to be more accurate.

It’s simple, and you said it: It’s better than what they had. The places they are coming from are terrible.

Not getting treated properly is not the same as not knowing if one is going to be alive today.

There are a lot of refugees in South Africa. Not sure if anyone actually knows how many because many are illegal.

Because it’s better than where they came from, usually.

What is an “economic refugee” anyway? Are Norwegians immigrating to USA “winter refugees”?

No, I assume that most of them flew across the Atlantic and went through US border control. We don’t have waves of Norwegians attempting to cross the US borders illegally on ships, like the EU has with African/Middle Eastern immigrants.

There are ample social services and NGO help in the EU that immigrants can take advantage of. Such programs don’t exist in most ME/African countries. Ironically, Norway and other Scandinavian countries do have these programs as well as stable economies.

Being inconsistent on migrants irks me a lot. Entire developed world is paying someone to stop the migrants before they could cross the border and treat them without any humanity. And on the same time, many of those same countries' government heads gives pro migrant speeches.

The entire case somehow hinges on whether the immigrant is successful is crossing the border which gives worst incentives to the migrants as they are ready to risk the life to cross it. Germany is ready to pay Turkey to treat the immigrants badly, but couldn't do it itself. I think either we should remove the life threatening non humane solution deployed outside the border or treat immigrant as bad when they enter. This way immigrants would have clear incentive of what they are about to get and not take any life threatening decisions in crossing the border.

Some reasons a migrant should be automatically disqualified for asylum.

1. Traveling through a safe/peaceful country and not requesting asylum there first.

2. Attacking anyone protecting the border of the country you are apply to asylum for.

3. Destroying border barriers of the host country.

4. Committing any violent crime while applying for asylum in the host country.

5. Prostituting minors or other asylum seekers while in the host country.

Maybe a lot of other reasons, but otherwise some compassionate method for dealing with migrants should be worked towards.

I just don’t see how we can keep a good conscious and turn away these people. Their countries aren’t poor because of pure luck of the draw, they are poor because European powers have exploited and extorted these countries. They remain poor because of neocolonialism. They are getting poorer because of climate change, caused in a large part because of the European industrial revolution.

Most migrants don’t leave because it’ll be a great adventure or on a whim, they leave because there is nothing left for them or they want a better life for their family. You don’t get in a boat unless the water is safer than land. Some of the comments in this thread are pretty heartless and dehumanising, would we not want the exact same for our families?

How can we discuss tougher borders being the solution, if the result is camps like these?

This is what happens when people push things like open borders. It creates a problem that must be stopped, and legally.

A refugee has the right to claim asylum in the first country they set foot in, not the 5 or 8th one of their choosing.

The natural response to open borders thinking is to enforce this result.

Beyond that, it's a little hard to stir up an emotional response. If these people truly are fleeing something terrible, this place isn't so bad.

Relevant: Why don’t refugees fly? https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/why-refugees-do-not-take...

I'm sorry, but I don't buy what some German NGO says. German NGOs are the ones responsible for ferrying illegal migrants to Europe.

You can bing :) that phrase and see other resources, e.g. https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2016/02/11/why-dont-refugees-fly/

A lot of people here are saying the problem is open borders, we need to control immigration, and sure, I agree. But this seems to miss the point of the piece: at the moment we're trying to control immigration by outsourcing the job to very poor, very unstable neighbouring countries. This leads to horrible cruelty and human rights violations. (Did anyone else see the graphic of bed space in the prison and think of the layout of an 18th century slave ship?)

We need a way to solve this very difficult problem which doesn't absolutely violate the most basic decencies that Europe has prided itself on since the Enlightenment.

I couldn't find the archived version but I did find this https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1059861708/secret-prisons-in-...

wow, this is something i didn’t even know about until i saw this post. makes a lot of sense now with how people are ignoring other crisis around the world. that’s sad

A US newsoutlet reporting about the refugee crisis in Libya and not a word about Gadaffi. New York is really far from the Meditterenean.

There's a whole paragraph about him, you need to grep an alternative spelling:

> Europe had long pressed Libya to help curb such migration. Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, had once embraced Pan-Africanism and encouraged sub-Saharan Africans to serve in the country’s oil fields. But in 2008 he signed a “friendship treaty” with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, that committed him to implementing strict controls. Qaddafi sometimes used this as a bargaining chip: he threatened, in 2010, that if the E.U. did not send him more than six billion dollars a year in aid money he would “turn Europe Black.” In 2011, Qaddafi was toppled and killed in an insurrection sparked by the Arab Spring and supported by a U.S.-led invasion. Afterward, Libya descended into chaos.

I stand corrected, I searched for multiple variants of spelling of Gadaffi. Never seen the Q-variant before.

It comes from the arabic spelling of Gadaffi: قذافي‎

The ق at the beginning is a mix between a glottal stop and a k sound (depending on the dialect). There's no real way to spell it in English, hence the variants. This is similar to Osama/Usama (أسامة)

We came. We saw. He died! cackles maniacally

Yes, there is. Did you even read it or just searched for his name?

Well, he is basically old news by now.

He is still very relevant regarding said refugee crisis.

Wow, some of this stuff is truly incredible. You have "activist groups" assisting human traffickers, that is very surprising (these groups are very suspect, the person who led one of the largest "activist group" in Calais was having sex with migrants...apparently this is rife). You have someone who works for a nonprofit claiming they are a journalist when they are, unsurprisingly, imprisoned for doing things they shouldn't be doing. The author describes the danger of Libya at great length but the implied solution is: just let everyone come in...ofc, makes perfect sense.

Just generally, is it a good idea to enter a country that is in a state of war in order to illegal migrate to another country (which, btw, has very open routes for people to seek asylum legally)? No, it is not a good idea.

offtopic: Why are they making webpages like that?

What is wrong with few <h3> <p> and <img>, the page will be 10 times easier to read.

It's not against the law to seek asylum in Europe. I think bringing up the idea of rule-following to people who are in dire straits is dismissive of their plight.

Granted. But there are accepted rules surrounding "first country". It seems to me that if you are crossing 2 or more borders, you are no longer a refugee seeking asylum. You are more likely an economic migrant. In the case of mass migration to Europe, the vast majority would appear to fit the definition of migrants rather than refugees.

Isn't this the crux of the matter?

If you pass through hundreds of miles of safe land to get to a 4th or 5th country, don't you think that should automatically disqualify you for asylum?

A lot of these migrants are traveling via sea from the coast of Africa to European countries, no? The article posits that the EU is funding the Libyan government to intercept these boats and put them in offshore detention -- what safe land did they pass through? Would you consider Libya a safe country for their ultimate asylum if they're being detained in these horrific conditions?

They're not Lybians escaping Lybia.. They're Subsaharan Africans trying to get to Europe because they don't like where they were born, which is understandable, but is not grounds for asylum.

The reason the EU asks the Lybian coast guard to intercept is because German NGO ships are patrolling just outside the maritime borders waiting to ferry people to whatever unlucky Southern European country is forced to accept them.

How about those who buy plane tickets from Iraq to Belarus and then try to go through Polish border to get to EU?

Also, which country in North Africa is currently not safe to be? I'm not aware of any war currently happening in Lybia, Tunisia, Egypt?

Walking to another country is _way_ safer then crossing the water in an unsafe boat.

> Step 1. Destroy country

Removing Libya's dictator was entirely on France's hands, you're casting your net to wide blaming the whole EU bloc.

Countries like Poland or Portugal had little to gain from Libyan Natural Gas and had nothing to do with the power vacuum created in Libya.

I'm perfectly fine with my own history. I'm not apologising for anything I did not partake in, nor will I take any responsibility for them.

its perfectly fine if you want to not apologize for benefiting from a system that you didn't partake in building.

Just don't go prattle on about border security like most privileged people do if you don't care why the problem exists.

neither you (nor I) or most people on this thread would survive more than a few days under the conditions these people are fleeing.

That might be true. There's actually, contrary to stereotype, little consensus among historians about whether imperial rule made Africa richer or poorer. The past half-century of independence has also not unambiguously improved the situation. Lastly, you claim that forced free trade makes Africa poor, but the last time people acted on that theory, they tried import-substituting industrialization, and it (cough) did not work very well.

Africa is trying to get from zero to one. Its not surprising to me that independence after having all their institutions destroyed would not result in an immediate rise to prosperity. It takes leadership with vision and a distinct lack of selfishness to push a truly long term vision. I'd argue that africa is still reeling from cultural trauma. Fixing that is going to be difficult.

As far as import substituting industrialization. The devil is in the details. There are as many ways to do it wrong as to do it right. In many countries, its cheaper to buy a bag of onions from europe than to buy locally grown. Thats not right. I dont' have all the answers but some degree of controlled import-substituting industrialization needs to be done and informed by people who've spent considerable time studying the economy.

As a start, Europe could easly bring people from africa to study civil engineering, modern agricultural practices which they would then bring back with them along with financial assistance to bootstrap the very institutions that they destroyed. Expensive? sure, consider it reparations.

They won't be going back when done with education. Why would they? They can immigrate elsewhere at the blink of an eye with a degree in civil engineering from any random European accredited University

If you were looking a looking for a place to recruit future jihadist here would be a great place to start. Ppl who were abandoned or disaffected by Europe in general the west. This would great chance to act with humanity a missed opportunity.