Refugee situation / EU response - rolling news

interesting but maybe a pipe dream?

http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-billionare-offers-buy-med-island-refugees-154413262.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory&soc_trk=fb

yeah i think cameron is not smart enough to win this one.

I agree but that's not exactly what I meant, more that what we've seen so far is the tip of the iceberg - this is going to go on for a long time, sadly.

yeah, that's also true.

It will flip between Syria (which governments will sympathise with, because they have been forced to) and then economic migrants from Calais and the like where you can't build fences that are high enough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/world/treatment-of-migrants-evokes-memories-of-europes-darkest-hour.html

In Hungary, hundreds of migrants surrounded by armed police officers were tricked into boarding a train with promises of freedom, only to be taken to a “reception” camp. In the Czech Republic, the police hustled more than 200 migrants off a train and wrote identification numbers on their hands with indelible markers, stopping only when someone pointed out that this was more than a little like the tattoos the Nazis put on concentration camp inmates. ...

Parliament is expected to pass a second raft of refugee laws by next week, giving greater authority to the police and the military, including the right to enter any home to search for migrants who might be hiding there.

i'd maintained steely composure up until now but seeing that image of the kids watching tom & jerry and thinking of it in relation to the others has done me in

For australians and others looking to contribute

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-04/asylum-seekers-how-to-help/6749062

http://i.imgur.com/l76WUOx.jpg

Seems legit.

Parliament is expected to pass a second raft of refugee laws by next week, giving greater authority to the police and the military, including the right to enter any home to search for migrants who might be hiding there.

???

Is it just me or is this shocking?

It's hard to get shocked at anything these cnuts would do.

govt has already told landlords in a few "pilot" areas that they're not supposed to rent to undocumented people, in effect making landlords an (unpaid) arm of UKVI; the landlords obviously have no clue which paperwork is legit so they have (predictably) responded by requiring BRITISH passports of anyone renting from them. probably breaking EU law in doing so, of course. but who can blame them? how can they know their EEA-4s from their whatever elses?

quote above is about the Hungarian parliament.

ha i can't tell the difference these days :/

UK govt is now talking about diverting cash from the UK aid budget to helping refugees, which is a handy smokescreen for chipping away at something most of your MPs don't believe should exist in the first place.

Big hearted Britain

That's why Cameron is our PM - 20K over five years.

UK Parliament is also proposing to deport Syrian orphans once they reach 18, which sounds legally dubious to say the least.

Waiting for the proposal to send 7 year old Syrian orphans up chimneys.

The petty, impractical small-mindedness of politicians around immigration is just astonishing

UK Parliament is also proposing to deport Syrian orphans once they reach 18, which sounds legally dubious to say the least.

They'd struggle to deport them if Syria is still "unsafe" but hundreds of Afghan kids get deported at 18 every year at the moment. They're deported after years out of their home country and with no obvious support network to go back to.

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/07/16/600-unaccompanied-child-asylum-seekers-deported-uk-afghanistan/

The petty, impractical small-mindedness of politicians around immigration is just astonishing

Sadly it's not just politicians. Civil servants and bureaucrats at every single level of the process seem more than happy to apply the letter and the heartless spirit of the law with zeal.

(Home office quote:) We take our international responsibility in cases involving children seriously and their welfare is at the heart of every decision made.

Hilarious.

Not necessarily to do w/politicians or civil servants - people here (all classes) just.don't.want more foreigners under any circumstances. Cameron is looking at the polls and nodding.

link?

Haven't you heard, we live on a TINY ISLAND.

There is the yougov one from above, and many have anecdotes (some in the thread) (I have one myself but I won't type out what was said) of encounters with people that don't give a damn.

It's hard to give that Yougov poll much credit - people can hardly be trusted to say whether we should admit higher or lower numbers than we currently do, when that figure itself is the most obscured and mis-reported in this whole issue. The poll itself massages the figures for the most sensational headlines: "Of the people who can put a number on how many Syrian refugees Britain should take, 50% say it should be zero." - but 734 of the 1579 question say they can't or don't want to give such a number! In the same poll 36% - the largest percentage - say we should admit more Syrian refugess than we are currently, only 14% say we shouldn't let any in. Still a dispiriting figure but nowhere near 50%.

Agree ppl in general can be more divided on the question.

However in the poll yesterday for Newsnight (and I think in the one above) it said something similar: largest % for more but the majority were happy with the current (low) figure or less which combined beats the largest % Unfortunately enough ppl have said immigration is a worry (usually tied to scarcity of jobs etc) and are now voting for UKIP in numbers, these aren't enough to convert to seats but that's more to do with the voting system. LOL @ that.

Allied w/the history of the treatment of immigrants over the years and the resentment over 'multiculturalism' and the like then I am prepared to believe that most people aren't going to budge.

people can hardly be trusted to say whether we should admit higher or lower numbers than we currently do

^ this is the line politicians should take in general over many of these things. Its about leardership and standing up for something like beliefs. LOL @ that.

but the majority were happy with the current (low) figure or less which combined beats the largest %

the majority - an even larger majority - are also happy with the current figure or higher! agree w/ your last point but the morass of disinformation at all levels is infuriating.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/04/the-arab-worlds-wealthiest-nations-are-doing-next-to-nothing-for-syrias-refugees/

Like European countries, Saudi Arabia and its neighbors also have fears over new arrivals taking jobs from citizens, and may also invoke concerns about security and terrorism. But the current gulf aid outlay for Syrian refugees, which amounts to collective donations under $1 billion (the United States has given four times that sum), seems short — and is made all the more galling when you consider the vast sums Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. poured into this year's war effort in Yemen

...

The Arabic hashtag #Welcoming_Syria's_refugees_is_a_Gulf_duty was tweeted more than 33,000 times in the past week, according to the BBC

Not sure those figures are entirely accurate. Kuwait alone has given over $1bn, iirc, and Saudi, Qatar and the UAE are all in the top ten donor countries. Kuwait has given 26 times more money than France this year. Obvs a lot more they could be doing to resettle refugees though.

“In the end, it is not right for us to accept a people that are different from us. We don’t want people who suffer from internal stress and trauma in our country."
- Kuwaiti official Fahad Al Shalami

I was slow at catching up with my current events and just recently found out that that 800,000 figure is actually 40% asylum-seekers from the Balkans.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/top-german-immigration-official-on-influx-of-syrian-refugees-a-1050685.html

Manfred Schmidt: That's difficult to say. Whether we have similarly high numbers next year will depend on if we succeed in lowering the influx from Balkans countries like Serbia and Albania. People who come from this region are almost never recognized as refugees or as being eligible for asylum. But they also represent around 40 percent of all current asylum-seekers in Germany.

The 800k figure is a projection for the year based on the expected increase in Syrian refugees. The 40% figure is of the 200k who applied in the year to August but it doesn't follow that the same proportion will be from the Western Balkans for the rest of the year.

Why are there so many people coming from the Balkans at this point in time?

political instability in most of the non-EU Balkan countries plus unresolved tensions caused by the wars in the former Yugoslavia plus established traditions of emigration to western Europe

The whole region has been unsettled this year but a lot of the push from Kosovo and Albania has been economic - Germany has traditionally not see Kosovo as a safe country so wouldn't deport people back there, though this has changed in the last few weeks.

The majority of people from Serbia who go to Germany are Roma who argue that racism and endemic poverty give cause for claims of refuge, though the German and Serbian governments disagree. I would guess that the increase in number of refugees making the same passage makes it easier for others to go too - if they were being waved through checkpoints, etc.

Big hearted Britain

― Fields of Fat Henry (Tom D.), Monday, September 7, 2015 12:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh tom, why the hell did i read the comments to your link?

In Germany, for instance, a rapidly aging population is becoming increasingly aware of the need to welcome foreigners.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/08/this-map-helps-explain-why-some-european-countries-reject-refugees-and-others-love-them/

The article talks about demographics, economies, and morals/ethics...

A call for communism to sort this out once and for all:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n18/slavoj-zizek/the-non-existence-of-norway

The greatest hypocrites are those who call for open borders. They know very well this will never happen

But dreaming of communism is just fine.

Got the govt's response to the '“Accept more asylum seekers' petition today. The take-home message:

Those who have already reached Europe are no longer in immediate danger and the European countries in which they arrive have a duty to provide adequate protection and support to refugees within their territory.

It is not inherently racist or proto-fascist for host populations to talk of protecting their ‘way of life’

It's a bit early for me - can't quite think of an example where doing this wasn't either of those things...

This has always been used by idiots. I never really understood that notion anyway.

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?

I don't know anyone who thinks like this. Maybe I don't read the correct loony-left blogs but this seems like a total non problem.

Who fucking asked Zizek anyway?

(Is a question that can be applied to many issues, I find)

The LRB, I assume, but cosign nonetheless.

Right wing populists the Swedish Democrats, who may now become the biggest party, are exploiting people’s worries about the end of the welfare state. The leader tweeted “The election is a choice between mass immigration and welfare. You choose.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/26/scandinavia-far-right-stolen-left-ground-welfare

I don't know anyone who thinks like this. Maybe I don't read the correct loony-left blogs but this seems like a total non problem.

That line seemed to be conflating several things - what the right-wing seem to think an effect of multiculturalism was, and then the international left's distrust/hatred of liberals. xp