In Germany, political pressure to do more for migrants has been building for months. That is partly because of the country's tragic history; after neo-Nazis attacked refugee centres this year 2015, there was a nationwide backlash. "This can make us proud," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, praising the ordinary Germans who joyfully welcomed refugees in train stations across the country. German political analyst Josef Joffe told Politico "It is a true miracle".
The European Union (EU) forecasts that without increased immigration, Germany's population will decline by about 20 per cent by 2080, from 82 million to 66 million. So, when Merkel's government announced this that it was willing to accept 500,000 refugees a year, she was courting public opinion. So it is also partly because Germans face a shrinking population and a labour shortage. The Germans are looking for new workers far from worrying about immigrants taking jobs.
The United States (US) and other EU countries are not following suit. Even though their people, like the Germans, have seen the same pictures in media of dead children and desperate migrants. The habit of worrying and laws of normal politics about uncontrolled immigration, especially from Muslim countries, have not been suspended elsewhere. For example, the British Prime Minister David Cameron said his country would take 20,000 refugees over the next five years. France also made a similarly modest offer. The US administration said on September 15, 2015 that it was considering "steps that we can take to help those countries that are bearing the brunt of this burden" - not much of a commitment.
Gideon Rachman wrote in London's Financial Times on September 15, 2015, "The refugee crisis is asking Europeans to live up to their values in ways that are likely to be costly (and) inconvenient. It would be heart warming to believe that the crowds that turned out to welcome Syrian refugees arriving at Munich station show that Europe will respect its commitments in full. It would also be dangerously naive". His assessment fits the US as well. Though more than 4.0 million Syrian refugees outside their troubled home country and millions more displaced in Syria, all the numbers except Germany's are drops in the bucket. But accepting refugees is not the only way to help people in distress.
The biggest humanitarian problem is not the thousands of migrants streaming through the European railway stations. It is the tens of millions still stuck in the Middle East, whether in their home countries or in refugee camps close by. Some of the same countries that are refusing to increase immigration are falling amazingly short when it comes to providing them with shelter, food, and clothing.
The funding deficits have forced the United Nations (UN) to cut food rations in its camps in Jordan and Turkey. This is one of the reasons as to why so many Syrian refugees are on the move. The UN's humanitarian aid chief said that his agencies had received only one-third of the funding they need for Syrian relief in 2015 - US$2.4 billion of their US$7.4 billion budget. Stephen O'Brien, the UN's undersecretary-general, warned that the "Funding shortfalls in Syria can be the difference between life and death. The World Food Program has already scaled back food aid by one-fifth." The fund cuts are also harming education and healthcare for Syrian children.
In Brussels, ministers from the 28-nation EU bloc agreed to share responsibility for 40,000 people seeking refuge in overwhelmed Italy and Greece and spoke hopefully of reaching eventual agreement - possibly in October 2015, or possibly by the end of 2015 - on which nations would take 120,000 more. As governments across Europe debated as to how to share the burden of housing hundreds of thousands seeking refuge and whether the continent's hard-won policy of passport-free travel could survive the unrelenting flow of immigrants, Hungary deployed a boxcar bristling with razor wire to close a key border crossing and warned of a new era of swift deportations on September 14, 2015.
But slow deliberations of EU appeared disconnected from the rapidly shifting situation on the most besieged borders of Europe. Austria, Slovakia and even the Netherlands joined Germany in reintroducing border controls for the first time in a generation. Their bid is to record the arrivals of thousands daily from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The checks, involving police on trains and on border roads, snarled traffic and slowed the speed and volume of migrants reaching Germany. Germany had received more than 60,000 newcomers since throwing opens its borders in September 05, 2015 to people trying to reach the EU heavyweight via Hungary, the Balkans and Greece.
Reflecting German unease at the sheer volume and lack of commitment from EU partners to share the load those borders have grown tighter again since September 13, 2015. Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn of Luxembourg, which holds the EU presidency, said, "If we don't find a solution, then this chaos will be the result". He added, referring to the 1985 agreement that gradually removed passport checks on most European borders, that Germany's decision to deploy police on borders and trains could trigger "a domino effect and then we can forget Schengen".
Asselborn said, listing some of the countries that have rejected Germany's call for all EU members to accept minimum quotas for accepting people as refugees, that "Even a little country like Luxembourg is able to accept a few hundred people who are not of Christian religion, who have another skin colour, and this should also work in big countries like Poland or the Czech Republic or Slovakia". Asselborn suggested that intolerance of foreigners lay behind some countries' refusal to commit.
Hungary's rightwing government shut the main land route for migrants into EU on September 15, 2015 taking measures into its own hands to halt Europe's influx of refugees. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, is one of the continent's loudest opponents of mass immigration. He says he is acting to save Europe's "Christian values" by blocking the main overland route used by mainly Muslim refugees. They travel through the Balkans and cross his country mainly to reach Germany and Sweden.
Hungary, a key link in the migrant chain, emphasised its determination to house as few asylum seekers as possible. Mr. Orban warned that people walking into his country from non-EU member Serbia faced a new regime of swift rejection and deportation. New laws effective from September 15, 2015 also made it a criminal offence, punishable by prison term or deportation, to damage Hungary's newly erected border defenses. These include a 13-foot (4-meter) fence and, at a rail line that long served as the most popular crossing point, a boxcar on the line toughened with a seven-layer coil of razor wire. Hungary, underscoring the air of heightened security, ordered low-altitude airspace on the border reserved for police surveillance helicopters, while officers on horseback patrolled parts of the nearly 110-mile (175-kilometer) border. After the closure of Hungary route to EU, the migrants have taken the Croatian route to enter Europe from the northern side.
However, more than half of the money to help Syrian refugees this year 2015, the UN figures revealed, has come from only three countries viz. the United States, Britain and Kuwait. Others, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have given far less. For example, from Saudi Arabia donated US$18 million against more than US$1.1 billion from the United States. It is unrealistic to expect many countries to go the way of Germany and throw open the doors to unrestricted immigration from the troubled Middle East. But it is not unrealistic to demand that they do more for refugees stranded in under-funded camps, and for the countries around Syria that have given them shelter. That is the first place rich countries ought to step and speed up since they are responsible for the crisis.
The writer is a retired Professor of Economics, BCS General Education Cadre.
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