EU Immigration Crisis Megathread

[Martinus]

His patronizing tone is what really gets me

Is this some person on Paradox?

[Eddie Teach]

Too bad we don't have any Swedes living in Norway.

[Tamas]

Marty's Rightous Rage of Rightousness is getting tiresome.

Am I really anti-immigrant? I am not noticing. There are always two sides to every coin and in this case the other side is that help and settlement of these people in Europe must go in an orderly and thought out fashion otherwise it will lead to tragedy and a lot issues for both migrants and EU citizens a few years or decades down the road.
Is it anti-immigrant to point that out?

[Duque de Bragança]

More news from Hungary after the intense flip-flopping by Angela about illegal migrants

Chaos in Hungary as Budapest rail station closed to migrants
       
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© AFP / Attila Kisbenedek | Migrants protest at the Eastern (Keleti) railway station of Budapest on September 1, 2015, during the evacuation of the railway station by local police
Text by FRANCE 24 
Latest update : 2015-09-02
There were scenes of chaos in Budapest Tuesday as police evacuated hundreds of migrants attempting to board trains to western Europe from the Hungarian capital's main international rail station, sparking angry protests.

The closure of Keleti station came as new figures showed more than 350,000 have risked their lives so far this year crossing the Mediterranean, revealing the gravity of the crisis facing the continent with the biggest movement of people there since World War II.

Over 234,770 migrants have landed in Greece alone this year, statistics from the Organization for Migration (IOM) revealed, more than the whole Europe-wide figure of 219,000 for all of 2014.

At least 2,600 died on the hazardous journey, drowned or suffocated in dangerous or unseaworthy boats, it added.

'MIGRANTS ALSO ARRIVING IN BAVARIA VIA CZECH REPUBLIC'

Another 114,276 made it to Italy, with most of the other arrivals split between Spain and the island of Malta.

Although there were no clashes between migrants and police in Budapest, several hundred refugees staged an angry demonstration outside the station, an AFP correspondent said.

"Germany! Germany! We want to leave!" chanted the crowd, with some holding their babies up in the air.

The station later re-opened but only for non-migrants.

The move came just 24 hours after the EU's border control procedures were thrown into chaos when police allowed people stuck for days in makeshift refugee camps to leave the Hungarian capital on trains bound for Germany and Austria, despite many not having EU visas.

The decision led the highest number of migrants entering Austria in a single day this year, police confirmed, with 3,650 arriving in Vienna by train on Monday.

Many of the migrants slept at Vienna's Westbahnhof station, hoping to continue on their journey to Germany, which last week eased asylum restrictions for Syrian refugees.

German police said 2,200 asylum-seekers had turned up in Bavaria by Tuesday morning, many having managed to switch trains in Vienna. The southern German state's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmman said they would not be returned to Hungary.

The wave of people fleeing war, persecution and poverty in the Middle East and Africa "is the greatest challenge for Europe in the coming years", Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Tuesday on a visit to Berlin.

The migrants' plight was brought sharply into focus last week after 71 people, including four children, were found dead in an abandoned truck on an Austrian motorway near the Hungarian border.

So far, police in Hungary and Bulgaria have arrested seven people in connection with the truck tragedy, among them four Bulgarians and one Afghan. The nationalities of the other two were not known.

The grim discovery led to a security crackdown in Austria with huge tailbacks forming along the border on Monday and Tuesday, as officers inspected vehicles in search of people-smugglers and migrants.

'Don't want Muslims'

The escalating situation has divided the 28-member bloc ahead of emergency talks on September 14.

Western European leaders have repeatedly called for greater efforts to help the new arrivals, as countries on its eastern and southern borders warned they were struggling to cope.

Italy on Tuesday said it had rescued 221 migrants crammed into two inflatable boats off the Libyan coast.

But the crisis is rapidly spreading across the continent, with an unprecedented influx of migrants also arriving in Belgium. A makeshift camp has sprung up near the main refugee processing centre in Brussels, where as many as 1,000 queued outside on Monday to apply for asylum.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier warned that the refugee crisis was testing the core ideals of universal rights at the heart of the EU, urging all states to take their fair share of asylum seekers.

She also made veiled criticism of countries like Slovakia which said it would reject migrants from majority Muslim countries.

"If we start saying 'I do not want Muslims'... that cannot be good," Merkel stressed on Monday.

At heart of the crisis lies the question over how to distribute the migrants across the EU and help relieve pressure on so-called "frontline" nations where migrants arrive by sea or land.

Much-flouted EU rules stipulate that refugees should be processed in the first country they reach.

But bloc member Hungary -- like Austria, a country of transit for migrants heading to northern Europe -- says it cannot host record numbers of newcomers, as 50,000 migrants arrived in August.

False Syrian passports

Budapest's right-wing government has criticised Berlin's easing of asylum rules as "(building) up the hopes of illegal immigrants".

Hungary's own response has been to build a razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia to try to keep migrants out.

As vast numbers surge towards Europe with the hope of claiming asylum, a brisk trade in false Syrian passports has emerged, predominantly in Turkey, the EU's Frontex border agency said on Tuesday.

"There are people who are in Turkey now who buy fake Syrian passports because they know Syrians get the right to asylum in the European Union," Fabrice Leggeri told French radio station Europe 1.

"People who use fake Syrian passports often speak Arabic. They may come from North Africa or the Middle East but they have the profile of economic migrants," he said.

Meanwhile, 20,000 people took to the streets of Vienna late Monday in a show of support for migrants, while government officials attended a church service for the 71 refugees found dead last week.

[Martinus]

Marty's Rightous Rage of Rightousness is getting tiresome.

Am I really anti-immigrant? I am not noticing. There are always two sides to every coin and in this case the other side is that help and settlement of these people in Europe must go in an orderly and thought out fashion otherwise it will lead to tragedy and a lot issues for both migrants and EU citizens a few years or decades down the road.
Is it anti-immigrant to point that out?

Ok, you were co-opted for illustration purposes - I was mainly getting at duque.

[The Larch]

His patronizing tone is what really gets me

I find his faux XIXth century academic style the most grating thing.

That and using examples from the Austro-Hungarian empire to explain current events all the time.

[Duque de Bragança]

Marty's Rightous Rage of Rightousness is getting tiresome.

Am I really anti-immigrant? I am not noticing. There are always two sides to every coin and in this case the other side is that help and settlement of these people in Europe must go in an orderly and thought out fashion otherwise it will lead to tragedy and a lot issues for both migrants and EU citizens a few years or decades down the road.
Is it anti-immigrant to point that out?

Ok, you were co-opted for illustration purposes - I was mainly getting at duque.

We all remember your very harsh tone about Muslims when you lived in Brussels for a while. But then you can't tell a mosque from a church judging by your visit in Paris so maybe you're just completely clueless, rather than patronising, holier than thou bobo-style and sanctimonious.

[Tamas]

Marty's Rightous Rage of Rightousness is getting tiresome.

Am I really anti-immigrant? I am not noticing. There are always two sides to every coin and in this case the other side is that help and settlement of these people in Europe must go in an orderly and thought out fashion otherwise it will lead to tragedy and a lot issues for both migrants and EU citizens a few years or decades down the road.
Is it anti-immigrant to point that out?

Ok, you were co-opted for illustration purposes - I was mainly getting at duque.

We all remember your very harsh tone about Muslims when you lived in Brussels for a while. But then you can't tell a mosque from a church judging by your visit in Paris so maybe you're just completely clueless, rather than patronising, holier than thou bobo-style and sanctimonious.

Well, duh.

[Tamas]

Meanwhile, pan-European spirit is triumphing everywhere: since Austria is moving the army to the Hungarian border, the Hungarian authorities have dumped thousands of migrants on the border with Austria by buses, not caring about registration, just letting them go where they please.

[Tamas]

And just to see that the amount of migrants keep growing: between start of the day and mid-day, 5353 new refugees have been registered by the Hungarian authorities. And of course these are the guys who either seek out the police on the border, or get caught by them. Those who slip by without wanting to register are not counted.

[The Larch]

@Zanza, you made the mistake of trying to talk to Andrelvis - he's an arrogant douchebag. He's a Brazilian who came to Austria to study and who stayed for work/marriage, but he's more Austrian than most Austrians now (anti-EU, xenophobe etc.).

Yes, I know. Not sure why I even took his bait. Fuck him.

Out of curiosity/masochism, which thread was that?

[Martinus]

Zizek on the crisis. I have to say, while I may not agree with everything he says, he is as always thought provoking and thinking outside the box:

The Non-Existence of Norway

Slavoj Žižek on the refugee crisis

The flow of refugees from Africa and the Middle East into Western Europe has provoked a set of reactions strikingly similar to those we display on learning we have a terminal illness, according to the schema described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her classic study On Death and Dying. First there is denial: 'It's not so serious, let's just ignore it' (we don't hear much of this any longer). Then there is anger – how can this happen to me? – which explodes when denial is no longer plausible: 'Refugees are a threat to our way of life; Muslim fundamentalists are hiding among them; they have to be stopped!' There is bargaining: 'OK, let's decide on quotas; let them have refugee camps in their own countries.' There is depression: 'We are lost, Europe is turning into Europastan!' What we haven't yet seen is Kübler-Ross's fifth stage, acceptance, which in this case would involve the drawing up of an all-European plan to deal with the refugees.


What should be done? Public opinion is sharply divided. Left liberals express their outrage that Europe is allowing thousands to drown in the Mediterranean: Europe, they say, should show solidarity and throw open its doors. Anti-immigrant populists say we need to protect our way of life: foreigners should solve their own problems. Both solutions sound bad, but which is worse? To paraphrase Stalin, they are both worse. The greatest hypocrites are those who call for open borders. They know very well this will never happen: it would instantly trigger a populist revolt in Europe. They play the beautiful soul, superior to the corrupted world while continuing to get along in it. The anti-immigrant populist also knows very well that, left to themselves, people in Africa and the Middle East will not succeed in solving their own problems and changing their societies. Why not? Because we in Western Europe are preventing them from doing so. It was Western intervention in Libya that threw the country into chaos. It was the US attack on Iraq that created the conditions for the rise of Islamic State. The ongoing civil war in the Central African Republic between the Christian south and the Muslim north is not just an explosion of ethnic hatred, it was triggered by the discovery of oil in the north: France and China are fighting for the control of resources through their proxies. It was a global hunger for minerals, including coltan, cobalt, diamonds and copper, that abetted the 'warlordism' in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990s and early 2000s.

If we really want to stem the flow of refugees, then, it is crucial to recognise that most of them come from 'failed states', where public authority is more or less inoperative: Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, DRC and so on. This disintegration of state power is not a local phenomenon but a result of international politics and the global economic system, in some cases – like Libya and Iraq – a direct outcome of Western intervention. (One should also note that the 'failed states' of the Middle East were condemned to failure by the boundaries drawn up during the First World War by Britain and France.)

It has not escaped notice that the wealthiest countries in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar) have been much less open to refugees than the not so rich (Turkey, Egypt, Iran etc). Saudi Arabia has even returned 'Muslim' refugees to Somalia. Is this because Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist theocracy which cannot tolerate foreign intruders? Yes, but Saudi Arabia's dependence on oil revenues makes it a fully integrated economic partner of the West. There should be serious international pressure on Saudi Arabia (and Kuwait and Qatar and the Emirates) to accept a large contingent of the refugees, especially since, by supporting the anti-Assad rebels, the Saudis bear a measure of responsibility for the current situation in Syria.

New forms of slavery are the hallmark of these wealthy countries: millions of immigrant workers on the Arabian peninsula are deprived of elementary civil rights and freedoms; in Asia, millions of workers live in sweatshops organised like concentration camps. But there are examples closer to home. On 1 December 2013 a Chinese-owned clothing factory in Prato, near Florence, burned down, killing seven workers trapped in an improvised cardboard dormitory. 'No one can say they are surprised at this,' Roberto Pistonina, a local trade unionist, remarked, 'because everyone has known for years that, in the area between Florence and Prato, hundreds if not thousands of people are living and working in conditions of near slavery.' There are more than four thousand Chinese-owned businesses in Prato, and thousands of Chinese immigrants are believed to be living in the city illegally, working as many as 16 hours a day for a network of workshops and wholesalers.

The new slavery is not confined to the suburbs of Shanghai, or Dubai, or Qatar. It is in our midst; we just don't see it, or pretend not to see it. Sweated labour is a structural necessity of today's global capitalism. Many of the refugees entering Europe will become part of its growing precarious workforce, in many cases at the expense of local workers, who react to the threat by joining the latest wave of anti-immigrant populism.

In escaping their war-torn homelands, the refugees are possessed by a dream. Refugees arriving in southern Italy do not want to stay there: many of them are trying to get to Scandinavia. The thousands of migrants in Calais are not satisfied with France: they are ready to risk their lives to enter the UK. Tens of thousands of refugees in Balkan countries are desperate to get to Germany. They assert their dreams as their unconditional right, and demand from the European authorities not only proper food and medical care but also transportation to the destination of their choice. There is something enigmatically utopian in this demand: as if it were the duty of Europe to realise their dreams – dreams which, incidentally, are out of reach of most Europeans (surely a good number of Southern and Eastern Europeans would prefer to live in Norway too?). It is precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger – when we'd expect them to settle for a minimum of safety and wellbeing – that their utopianism becomes most intransigent. But the hard truth to be faced by the refugees is that 'there is no Norway,' even in Norway.


We must abandon the notion that it is inherently racist or proto-fascist for host populations to talk of protecting their 'way of life'. If we don't, the way will be clear for the forward march of anti-immigration sentiment in Europe whose latest manifestation is in Sweden, where according to the latest polling the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats have overtaken the Social Democrats as the country's most popular party. The standard left-liberal line on this is an arrogant moralism: the moment we give any credence to the idea of 'protecting our way of life', we compromise our position, since we're merely proposing a more modest version of what anti-immigrant populists openly advocate. And this is indeed the cautious approach that centrist parties have adopted in recent years. They reject the open racism of anti-immigrant populists, but at the same time profess that they 'understand the concerns' of ordinary people, and so enact a more 'rational' anti-immigration policy.

We should nevertheless reject the left-liberal attitude. The complaints that moralise the situation – 'Europe is indifferent to the suffering of others' etc – are merely the obverse of anti-immigrant brutality. They share the presupposition, which is in no way self-evident, that the defence of one's own way of life is incompatible with ethical universalism. We should avoid getting trapped in the liberal self-interrogation, 'How much tolerance can we afford?' Should we tolerate migrants who prevent their children going to state schools; who force their women to dress and behave in a certain way; who arrange their children's marriages; who discriminate against homosexuals? We can never be tolerant enough, or we are always already too tolerant. The only way to break this deadlock is to move beyond mere tolerance: we should offer others not just our respect, but the prospect of joining them in a common struggle, since our problems today are problems we share.

Refugees are the price we pay for a globalised economy in which commodities – but not people – are permitted to circulate freely. The idea of porous borders, of being inundated by foreigners, is immanent to global capitalism. The migrations in Europe are not unique. In South Africa, more than a million refugees from neighbouring states came under attack in April from the local poor for stealing their jobs. There will be more of these stories, caused not only by armed conflict but also by economic crises, natural disasters, climate change and so on. There was a moment, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when the Japanese authorities were preparing to evacuate the entire Tokyo area – more than twenty million people. If that had happened, where would they have gone? Should they have been given a piece of land to develop in Japan, or been dispersed around the world? What if climate change makes northern Siberia more habitable and appropriate for agriculture, while large parts of sub-Saharan Africa become too dry to support a large population? How will the redistribution of people be organised? When events of this kind happened in the past, the social transformations were wild and spontaneous, accompanied by violence and destruction.

Humankind should get ready to live in a more 'plastic' and nomadic way. One thing is clear: national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined and new methods of global co-operation and decision-making devised. First, in the present moment, Europe must reassert its commitment to provide for the dignified treatment of the refugees. There should be no compromise here: large migrations are our future, and the only alternative to such a commitment is renewed barbarism (what some call a 'clash of civilisations').

Second, as a necessary consequence of this commitment, Europe should impose clear rules and regulations. Control of the stream of refugees should be enforced through an administrative network encompassing all of the members of the European Union (to prevent local barbarisms like those of the authorities in Hungary or Slovakia). Refugees should be assured of their safety, but it should also be made clear to them that they must accept the destination allocated to them by European authorities, and that they will have to respect the laws and social norms of European states: no tolerance of religious, sexist or ethnic violence; no right to impose on others one's own religion or way of life; respect for every individual's freedom to abandon his or her communal customs, etc. If a woman chooses to cover her face, her choice must be respected; if she chooses not to cover her face, her freedom not to do so must be guaranteed. Such rules privilege the Western European way of life, but that is the price to be paid for European hospitality. These rules should be clearly stated and enforced, by repressive measures – against foreign fundamentalists as well as against our own racists – where necessary.

Third, a new kind of international military and economic intervention will have to be invented – a kind of intervention that avoids the neocolonial traps of the recent past. The cases of Iraq, Syria and Libya demonstrate how the wrong sort of intervention (in Iraq and Libya) as well as non-intervention (in Syria, where, beneath the appearance of non-intervention, external powers such as Russia and Saudi Arabia are deeply involved) end up in the same deadlock.

Fourth, most important and most difficult of all, there is a need for radical economic change which would abolish the conditions that create refugees. Without a transformation in the workings of global capitalism, non-European refugees will soon be joined by migrants from Greece and other countries within the Union. When I was young, such an organised attempt at regulation was called communism. Maybe we should reinvent it. Maybe this is, in the long term, the only solution.

[Martinus]

Marty's Rightous Rage of Rightousness is getting tiresome.

Am I really anti-immigrant? I am not noticing. There are always two sides to every coin and in this case the other side is that help and settlement of these people in Europe must go in an orderly and thought out fashion otherwise it will lead to tragedy and a lot issues for both migrants and EU citizens a few years or decades down the road.
Is it anti-immigrant to point that out?

Ok, you were co-opted for illustration purposes - I was mainly getting at duque.

We all remember your very harsh tone about Muslims when you lived in Brussels for a while. But then you can't tell a mosque from a church judging by your visit in Paris so maybe you're just completely clueless, rather than patronising, holier than thou bobo-style and sanctimonious.

I have always been (and still am) very critical of religious fundamentalism, and Muslim tendency towards it (which is greater than among European Christians, on average) but I also think that we cannot ignore the refugees and we have to treat them with dignity. I think arguing that those two views are incompatible is the trap that Zizek is talking about - I fully subscribe to his first and second points, when he is talking about solutions (the two other points are possibly more complex and require more thought - but these two are pretty straightforward and can be implemented very quickly).

P.S. not sure what's the part about not being able to "tell a mosque from a church" was about, though. Is this something figurative or are you referring to something specific?

[Legbiter]

If there was a swap where the virtue-signalling Gutmenschen were airdropped into Raqqa and the Islamic horde taken in their stead we could work something out. 

[Duque de Bragança]

P.S. not sure what's the part about not being able to "tell a mosque from a church" was about, though. Is this something figurative or are you referring to something specific?

Both.