Thursday, November 5, 2015

From Problem to Crisis to Chronic Condition: Refugees In Europe



Over the past few years tens of thousands of people have made an arduous and perilous journey from their homes in Africa to Europe.  Endemic violence and anarchy in Somalia, brutal civil war in Sudan, an increasingly violent and repressive government in Eritrea, and the chaos that has descended on Libya after the ouster of Qadhafi have impelled desperate people to pay smugglers for the opportunity to board boats in Egypt, Libya or Morocco and hope to land in Greece, Spain or Italy.  The journey across the Mediterranean is usually miserable and all too often fatal.  Somewhere between one and two thousand people have drowned each year when overloaded, decrepit boats or flimsy rubber rafts sank.  (As I am finishing this blog entry the Spanish coast guard is announcing that a raft trying to cross the 9 miles from Morocco to Gibraltar overturned in high seas.  Fifteen people were rescued, 11 people died.)

The countries of the European Union have developed processes and policies for dealing with this influx.  Migrants are held in camps until they can be registered, then permitted to travel within the European Union to a country where they can hope to be given a residence permit.  Germany and Sweden have been the preferred destinations because their strong economies and relatively low unemployment have led to more liberal criteria for issuing temporary residence permits that allow people to seek jobs and find a place to live.  France has long been a magnet for people from their former North African colonial possessions, especially Algeria.

Ultimately each migrant=s case will be reviewed by a local court to determine if the person will be allowed to stay or must return home.  The decision will hinge on whether the applicant is deemed an economic migrant or political refugee. [Click here if you want a discussion of the various international legal categories of people who have been left their homes.]

The system worked reasonably well until this summer when the flow of people was more than doubled by desperate Syrians.  The EU countries accommodated some 250,000 migrants in 2014; more than one million will have arrived by the end of this year.  The approaching winter weather will slow the flow somewhat but will make even more miserable for those on their way or who have already arrived.

I want to address three major points: 


  • why the sudden influx of Syrians;
  • the short term impact of the crisis;
  • the longer term implications for Europe


Why the sudden surge in Syrian refugees?

Five years of civil war have forced roughly half of all Syrians to flee their homes.  Around 7.5 million of the  12 million Syrians who have been displaced by the war have stayed within the country.  Those who have left Syria have ended up in Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.  While some have found shelter with relatives or have had enough resources to live on their own, most have ended up in refugee camps in Turkey or Lebanon run by a collection of international NGOs (Non-Governmental Organization).
Desperate Syrian refugees began showing up in significant numbers in the flow of people from North Africa to Europe in the spring of 2015.  The increasing flow of people and some highly publicized sinkings of boats carrying hundreds of refugees led to a shift in strategy by European countries.  Patrols by Spanish, Greek and Italian naval vessels increased sharply in an attempt to curtail the smuggling traffic, as well as respond to ships in distress. 

A combination of push and pull factors has fueled this year’s Syrian exodus. 

The biggest push has been the steadily worsening conditions in the countries of refuge.  More people cross the border from Syria every day, swelling the population in the refugee camps or joining the thousands of their countrymen who have the means to rent some shabby living quarters and buy enough food to survive or who find shelter with relatives.  Syrian refugees get food aid from the UN’s World Food Programme but donations from member countries have not kept pace with demand and the amount of food aid has been slowly decreasing since last January and more cuts loom in the days ahead.  Each day life in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon or Jordan gets a little more difficult.  The World Food Programme has just announced that they will have to start classifying recipients in terms of how badly they would suffer if food aid were cut off.  The shortage of funding may mean they will have to restrict food aid to individuals and families who would starve without it. 

One major pull factor has been the belief that life in Europe will be better than the camps.  This has been fueled by reports from those who have survived the treacherous journey that Germany is particularly welcoming. 

A second pull factor has been the creation of an overland route to Europe.  The EU crackdown on the Mediterranean routes plus the economics of the sordid business of smuggling desperate and vulnerable people from the Middle East to Europe encouraged the development new routes.  All you need is a long haul truck and driver who meets “clients” somewhere in Turkey,  instead of moving people from Lebanon or Jordan down to North Africa then procuring passage on a boat to cross the Mediterranean. The number of smugglers has increased substantially and the cost of the journey has dropped.  By some accounts the standard rate was $6,000 per person for a trip to Europe in January of this year, while it is now about $1500.  In the same week that the heartbreaking photo of a 3 year old boy who drowned off the coast of Turkey became a social media sensation, a truck with 60 decomposing bodies was discovered in Austria … apparently abandoned by smugglers who were on the verge of being apprehended.

The result was the arrival of thousands of migrants, primarily Syrian but also Afghans and Pakistanis, at the Hungarian border every day beginning in the late spring.  Unable to register and process the wave of migrants, Hungary initially loaded migrants onto buses and trains and expedited their arrival in Austria.  But soon Hungarian authorities tried to stem the flow altogether by building fences and barriers in their borders with Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.  They were quickly forced to relent by pressure from the rest of the EU and the flow of desperate people continues, putting pressure on governments to cope.  Meanwhile thousands of people keep arriving from across the Mediterranean. 

The members of the EU have tried to respond to the administrative, financial and political burdens the migrants have placed on member countries with a package of financial assistance and waiving the requirement that migrants register in the first EU country they enter.  This shifts much of the burden to Austria and Germany, and to a lesser extent France and Sweden.

Germany has shouldered the primary responsibility for housing the migrants and adjudicating their status. Political refugees are entitled to residence permits in Germany and eligible to look for work and accommodations outside settlement camps.  Economic migrants are subject to being returned their home countries.

Some Syrians and many migrants from Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa would like to make it to the United Kingdom where they have relatives or acquaintances from their home countries.  Since they lack formal authorization to enter the UK, a favored strategy is to make it to the city of Calais, the French terminus of the Chunnel, and hop onto one of the many trains ferrying cars and truck on flatbed rail cars under the English Channel.  “The Jungle” is the aptly named informal settlement that houses some 10,000 migrants outside Calais while they wait to try their luck.



Short Term Impacts


  •  For those who survive the perils and rigors of the long trek through the Balkans to Western Europe or the dangerous trip across the Mediterranean in overloaded, often decrepit boats, the major short term impact is that life is markedly better.  Germany may end up housing as many as 800,000 migrants by the end of the year in camps that are cleaner, safer, and with more certain access to food and medical care.

  • For the governments at whose doorsteps the migrants first arrive, particularly Greece, Spain, Hungary and Italy, there is a large financial burden in providing temporary shelter and humanitarian services to a growing number of people.  There is the cost of processing each migrant, examining papers and registering people before they can move on to their desired destination elsewhere in Europe.  And there is the logistical challenge of physically moving people from the entry point across the country. 
  • For governments like Germany who have become the destination of choice for migrants, there are the financial and logistical challenges of taking care of such a large number of people.  (One might even say a staggering number of people: if there really are 800,000 migrants by the end of the year, that will be equal to 1% of the German population.  If that were to happen in the U.S. it would mean about 3.2 million people!)
  • For the European Union as a whole coordinating efforts to deal with the crisis and the impact on local governments has been politically challenging.  Efforts to develop an EU-wide approach have often been stalled by the sharp differences in short term interests among member states.
  • The EU is attempting to negotiate an arrangement with the government of Turkey to expand and improve refugee facilities in Turkey.  The obvious hope is that better living conditions just across the border from Syria will encourage refugees to stay put.  Turkey has tried to strike a hard bargain, asking for not only more financial support but also progress on the long stalled negotiations to join the European Union.
     
  • I think there is relatively little the U.S. can do in this situation.  I think the practical issues, from transporting people to the U.S. to the lack of facilities for housing thousands of people while their status is determined, make it unlikely that we could offer refuge to enough Syrians to make a difference.  In addition, a proposal to bring thousands of refugees to the U.S. in the next few months might well ignite a political firestorm .  The initial reaction to the Obama administration’s announcement of a slight increase in accepting refugees over the next three years included charges by some Republican Presidential contenders that terrorists would lurk among the refugees and put us at risk. 


Longer Term Impacts


  • Helping refugees adapt to life in Germany or elsewhere is an enormous task.  Imagine what kinds of help you might need if you suddenly found yourself in a country where you did not speak the language, were unfamiliar with the culture, were priced out of all but the most rudimentary housing, and could not expect to find any but the most menial job.  And if you had young children ....
  • The longer war rages in Syria, the greater the economic and political strain on host nations.    Europe has far less experience with immigration than the U.S. and arguably less tolerance for diversity.
  • There has been an initial outpouring of support and sympathy from many people in Europe.  German public opinion has been strongly supportive of the government’s leading role in dealing with the crisis.  Individuals from all over Europe have volunteered money and time to help with the crisis.  But the longer the crisis goes on, the more likely it is that people will become increasingly sensitive to the costs of hosting so many refugees.  The anti-immigrant, xenophobic, faintly Fascist appeals of extreme right wing parties will sound more reasonable to a growing number of people (this is already happening in Hungary) and resentment of and discrimination against refugees will become a significant problem. Neo-Nazis in Germany, the National Front in France, and Greece’s New Dawn are a few examples of parties currently far to the right of the mainstream who might be expected to gain support as the problems posed by refugees and migrants continue.
  • There are some people who argue that the great wave of migrants is actually a great benefit for Europe.  The optimistic, perspective points out that Europe has a long term demographic problem.  The birth rate in many countries has fallen below replacement level: populations are growing older and smaller.   There are fewer workers to fill available jobs and shoulder the burden of supporting a growing number of retirees.  In the medium to long run, settling both refugees and economic migrants in Europe would offset the graying of the population and forestall an economic crisis.


The road ahead

The sudden addition of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees to a persistent flow of migrants from Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle East transformed a persistent problem into a highly visible crisis. 

I think the flow of Syrians refugees will slow sharply as winter sets in and travel to Europe gets even more difficult and dangerous.  The flow may not resume at the same level next spring because conditions in the countries bordering Syria will improve, there will be fewer Syrians with the financial means to pay smugglers, and the challenges imposed on Western European economies and political systems by the large number of refugees who have arrived this year will reduce the attractiveness of those countries to new refugees.

I do not think the hardships and disruptions suffered by Syrians who have been forced from their homes will end very soon.  While there is some reason to think that a political process is beginning to emerge that could lead to an end of the worst of the violence in Syria, that is probably many months away and in the meantime the level of violence will probably escalate.  I will try to address those issues in the next blog entry.

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