3 thoughts on “Europe doesn’t have a migrant crisis, it has a Syrian crisis”

  1. Reporting in The New York Times, National Public Radio, etc has been clear that there are several refugee flows to Europe of which the main one is from Syria. While trying to acquaint Americans with the scale and sheer misery of this most ‘complex humanitarian emergency’ on the Continent, reporters have also noted that (a) security forces worry that enemies of the West have become adept at using ‘forced migrations’ to strategic advantage, and (b) parties of the right in the global north are under pressure to preserve the ‘compositional amenities’* of their constituencies (eg Donald Trump, UKIP). Plainly put, conservatives may be as horrified as anyone else, but sense a prior duty not to admit spies, terrorists, or unassimilable foreigners into their countries.

    ___________________

    * Economists who study immigration and trade policy use ‘compositional amenities’ to refer to the ‘externalities’ by which shared ancestry, language, culture, etc facilitate the transactions of ordinary people. Their hypotheses suppose that all transactions require common conventions and that everyone naturally prefers to limit transaction costs. Importantly, their hypotheses do not require the notions that persons who avoid the higher costs of dealing with strangers necessarily believe any ideology such as ‘xenophobia’ or ‘racism,’ or that empathy for the suffering of other groups is sufficient to result in a willingness to give up one’s own compositional amenities so that others might be helped. All these economists wanted to know was why publics so often oppose immigration more than free trade when the latter has often been equally or more disruptive. What they have found has important moral implications, not least for Christians with a global horizon.

  3. We do have European crises which Britain is incorrectly treating as a Greek and Italian crisis.This is perhaps 250,000 people who have not been properly resettled. Far greater than perhaps 5,000 in Calais which has attracted most of our attention. this has been further misdirected to a dispute about who pays for the security aspect. There has been a refugee problem in Calais since at least 1999 so there has been plenty of time to find a better way of dealing with it.All this dwarfs into insignificance compared with the 2.5m the article points to. The conservatives admit the problem is serious but then go on to boast about what they have done, which is a drop in the ocean.

    Dave

Leave a comment