Thread: The global refugee system is morally bankrupt – and could finish the West

The global refugee system is morally bankrupt – and could finish the West



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Sherelle Jacobs
Mon, August 14, 2023 at 3:24 PM EDT

A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent



It is tempting to dismiss the global refugee crisis as an “unsolvable” issue – a politically toxic but oddly immutable permacrisis that will continue to foam and seethe in dynamic equilibrium through endless political cycles. In fact, it is arguably escalating into a super-catastrophic risk to Western liberal democracy, on a par with Putin’s Russia, the rise of China and global pandemics.

For if there is a single volcanic problem that threatens to erupt into a populist uprising that reduces the European liberal tradition to ash, then it is the “unsolvable” issue of illegal immigration. It’s strange, then, that politicians on neither Left nor Right have come up with anything that remotely resembles a serious solution.

On the one hand, liberals continue to stick their thumbs in their ears, as they pompously spout 1950s refugee law and lecture on the need for “compassion” in a “global world”. Even more disturbingly, the ruling class still hasn’t got the memo that liberal democracies are existentially threatened by the rise of simple-wicked problems.

Simple-wicked problems are so explosive because, on the one hand, solving them appears scandalously simple. Stop the boats. Send them back to France. Crush the smuggling rings. Leave the ECHR. Take back control.

On the other hand, solving simple-wicked problems is frustratingly complicated. Yet, instead of rising to the challenge, elites have, over the years, left these problems to fester in the “unsolvable” section of their in-trays. Until the recent economic downturn, they were hopeful they could take the sting out of anti-immigrant populism through distracting redistributive policies rather than coming up with a proper plan to stop the boats.

This, in turn, heightened suspicion that there is a conspiracy against democracy, with the ruling class refusing to carry out popular and seemingly straightforward policies because they offend cosmopolitan sensibilities.

Now some Conservatives, having finally woken up to the fact that the situation is politically unsustainable, are making a simple-wicked problem even more wicked by flipping wildly from lazy pessimism to born-again utopianism, preaching to those who are desperate to believe them that the situation can be magically remedied overnight, perhaps by sending immigrants to Rwanda.

Yet as it stands, even if the UK withdrew from the ECHR and implemented its Rwanda plan, those crossing the Channel would only have a small chance of being sent to the African country – hardly a deterrent.

The fact that nobody has a compelling plan is all the more disturbing given that the refugee crisis is reaching a turning point. Today, the West faces unprecedented flows of migrants. Covid’s legacy is set to be a lost decade for international development, with tens of millions plunged back into extreme poverty.

Meanwhile, the uptick of violence across Africa and the Middle East – an ongoing trend since the drying up of Cold War military funding – is getting worse.

The emergence of new regional hegemons was supposed to help keep a lid on things. Nigeria, for example, was expected to grow into a stabilising power, helping to consign African military coups and civil wars to the past. Instead, Abuja’s bare-bones military has become bogged down with the country’s own endless peripheral conflagrations, which frequently spill over into neighbouring countries.

It was also hoped that in the wake of America’s distancing from the Middle East, the Gulf States would step up. But they have continued to flagrantly shirk their responsibilities towards Muslim refugees, while also proving powerless to prevent counter-hegemonic powers like Iran from fuelling proxy conflicts.

Needless to say, as the developing world becomes more unstable, the West is becoming more tantalising. Thanks to the internet it has become easier to not only see how people live in wealthier countries, but also connect with traffickers who aggressively advertise their services on social media. Then, having reached one’s destination in Berlin or London, it’s straightforward for a migrant to wire money back home, and in doing so feed one’s whole village.

Fixing the mess won’t be easy. The whole refugee-legal-industrial-complex needs gutting. Yes, the ECHR is an overweening judicial leviathan that seeks to micro-manage individual cases and push a radically expansive interpretation of human rights. But unlike the EU, which in its enthralment to the natural laws of harmonisation is unreformable by design, the ECHR can and should be reined in with some leadership from Britain.

It is also time to bring a sense of reality to the UNHCR – a useless Cold War relic. It should be made to answer for the fact that the Refugee Convention continues to senselessly push a non-refoulement principle that might have made sense when the West was anxious about refugees returning to Communist-controlled areas. But today, in a world where we need the educated and able of developing nations to make their own countries work, it is downright bizarre.

Moreover, it’s time to face up to the uncomfortable fact that the whole international refugee system has become morally deranged. Western resources are being spent on highly mobile and relatively well-educated men who can afford to pay thousands of pounds to people-traffickers, rather than the less fortunate, who are left festering in permanent camps.

Activists pretend that granting citizenship to refugees is a saintly act – overlooking the brain drains that have made it impossible to rebuild and create opportunities in countries from Syria to Albania.

Instead we should be changing international law so that educated migrants are obliged, once conflicts subside, to return to their countries.

All this is barely the start. Western powers must also decide on a reasonably fair international quota system – and stick to it.

Processing needs to happen in a safe territory as close to the originating country of refugees as possible. International law should be changed so that those who try to cut the queue by eloping to Europe are automatically sent back to where they came from. We need a global campaign for Poverty Zero to match the clamour to end climate change. And we need to move from white saviour humanitarianism to tough love developmentalism.

Above all though, elites need to level with voters that illegal immigration is a simple-wicked problem – one that must be solved.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/global-re...192414891.html

Stop funding the military complex machine draining us of billions of dollars and dumping these criminal trespassing illegal aliens and unvetted refugees on our backs to pay for. We do not want any of them!

We give billions for these corrupt countries to buy weapons, while they have no money for food, and we send food too! It is a vicious cycle of corruption.

Terminate and defund refugee, asylum TPS, and illegal alien programs and funding.

Send in Special Forces to take out the despots that keep these people in perpetual misery through war and corruption. Put the rapists down and out of our misery. Send birth control, they will NEVER get out of poverty if they do not stop raping and breeding like animals in a mud puddle. Send them nothing but birth control and Doctor's to perform tubal ligations and vasectomies. Then and only then will these disease infected, raping, violent, breeders get out of poverty on a path to a better life, and not on our soil.

Shut down all immigration for a minimum of 10 years and send 50 million back to their countries. They are destroying us and devouring our resources like locusts, bankrupting us, and pop out kids like a Pez dispenser. It is disgusting!