No wonder the two recent UN refugee summits found it so difficult to offer solutions. More aid was promised, the refugee quotas were raised – but an additional $4.5 billion and 110,000 refugee places in the US do not address the 65 million. The quiet presumption is – as voiced by the UK – that if we take in refugees, we encourage more to come and take their places in the camps, in the hope they will be let in next. Cut off one head, and another grows in its place. The best way to tackle a problem like this, then, is to offer some aid, but to generally stifle migration with red tape, and build walls, so that gradually people will just … give up. The world will eventually reabsorb these problems, long before they come to our shores. That is, in the end, the compassionate and cost-effective thing to do. That is the ultimate solution to the refugee crisis.
But, of course, the world isn’t some problem-absorbing sponge – these people do not melt away.
This month, the French authorities tear down the camp at Calais – without any plans for where the 1,000 unaccompanied child refugees will go. Already, 127 have disappeared – almost certainly onto the streets, where they will be easy pickings for the unscrupulous. By dragging our feet on our promise to take in more children, their disappearance has indeed solved the problem – for now. But while the US spends $11 million a day fighting an air war against Isis, for the wont of a much smaller sum in aid, we gift criminals and terrorists a limitless supply of desperate men, women and children, whose exploitation funds attacks.
No wonder the two recent UN refugee summits found it so difficult to offer solutions. More aid was promised, the refugee quotas were raised – but an additional $4.5 billion and 110,000 refugee places in the US do not address the 65 million. The quiet presumption is – as voiced by the UK – that if we take in refugees, we encourage more to come and take their places in the camps, in the hope they will be let in next. Cut off one head, and another grows in its place. The best way to tackle a problem like this, then, is to offer some aid, but to generally stifle migration with red tape, and build walls, so that gradually people will just … give up. The world will eventually reabsorb these problems, long before they come to our shores. That is, in the end, the compassionate and cost-effective thing to do. That is the ultimate solution to the refugee crisis.
But, of course, the world isn’t some problem-absorbing sponge – these people do not melt away.
This month, the French authorities tear down the camp at Calais – without any plans for where the 1,000 unaccompanied child refugees will go. Already, 127 have disappeared – almost certainly onto the streets, where they will be easy pickings for the unscrupulous. By dragging our feet on our promise to take in more children, their disappearance has indeed solved the problem – for now. But while the US spends $11 million a day fighting an air war against Isis, for the wont of a much smaller sum in aid, we gift criminals and terrorists a limitless supply of desperate men, women and children, whose exploitation funds attacks.
