With Germany’s imposition over the weekend of border controls, temporarily abrogating the Schengen Agreement and refusing entry to migrants, Europe’s nervous breakdown has come full circle — but anything like recovery is still far off. For two weeks until this weekend, the European Union had shown all the signs of a bipolar condition, zigzagging between gloomy rule-making and enthusiastic compassion and getting neither right.
Having laboriously drawn up agreed rules for the treatment of people applying for asylum as refugees during one of their sober periods, EU leaders in a fit of compassioneering then pilloried those countries enforcing the rules, endorsed those that trashed the rules, and announced the mandatory imposition of new rules that were more or less opposite to the previously agreed ones. Both sets of rules, new and old, shared two characteristics, however. They were unworkable and they were already encouraging massive waves of migration into Europe irrespective of any rules. The consequences are (and will be) more migrant deaths and more social conflict in the countries where migrants settle with or without their consent.
Consider, first, those countries that tried to keep the initial rules, in particular Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Hugarian prime minister Viktor Orban in particular is being pilloried for obeying international law. The relevant law is that migrants must be registered on arrival in their first EU country and allowed to proceed to another country only if they are likely to be accepted. But the migrants refused to be registered because they did not want to risk being returned to Hungary, a relatively poor country with low social benefits, if they were turned away from Western Europe. When Germany indicated that they would be accepted, Hungary let them proceed.
It was Germany that abandoned the EU rules when Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she would welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants, well in excess of the EU agreed figure of less than 40,000. This was hailed by the international media as Germany generously repenting of its past, with Merkel emerging as “the conscience of Europe.” Within a few days, however, Merkel had made clear that other countries would be expected to share the costs of its generosity and take in some of the hundreds of thousands too. And that number will certainly be higher as potential migrants in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa hear of Merkel’s open-handed, borderless “generosity.”
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Merkel’s offer might commit Germany — that’s for the Bundestag and the courts to decide — but she had no standing to compel Denmark or Poland to change its migration laws. So the European Commission’s unknown president, Jean-Claude Juncker, limped up to save her bacon and announced in a “State of the Union” address (a novelty to make it appear that Juncker is something like an American president) that the EU would take in many more migrants than previous targets called for and impose mandatory quotas for their admission on member states. It surprised many otherwise well-informed people that national sovereignty had decayed so far that the Commission president could force nation-states to take in unknown numbers of migrants by diktat. And it remains to be seen if Juncker has the national votes to do this under EU qualified-majority voting rules. Germany and France support him, but Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania are united in opposing him. We shall see.
Even as the EU leaders discuss their plans, the migrants already in Europe have been voting with their feet to outwit and exploit their generosity.
Even if Juncker succeeds, he cannot impose migrant quotas on countries for more than a few days. For the rules of both Schengen (no border controls) and the EU founding treaties (free movement of labor) mean that once a migrant is accepted, he can go anywhere in the EU without hindrance, as the recent case of the Moroccan gunman on the European express train embarrassingly demonstrated. Germany’s imposition of border controls is allowed under EU rules, as a temporary crisis response. But the pressure of arrivals is likely to be a permanent one. And EU leaders and bureaucrats have repeatedly made clear, in response to David Cameron’s requests for a change in the rules, that free movement of labor is an ironclad condition of EU membership. So unless the EU abandons its supranational ambition for ever-closer union, the migrants within its common frontiers can be delayed but not prevented from reaching their destination of choice.
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Indeed, even as the EU leaders discuss their plans, the migrants already in Europe have been voting with their feet to outwit and exploit their generosity. Those in Hungary demand to be admitted into Germany, and nowhere else; those in Denmark (a welfare paradise, as the mainstream media admit in a puzzled way) want to go to Sweden, and nowhere else. Germany and Sweden are their destinations of choice because they are prosperous, provide high welfare benefits, and have governments politically committed to high levels of immigration. The migrants do more than demand admission. As even the cheerleading reports of the mainstream media reluctantly acknowledge from time to time, the migrants surge over physical borders, battle with police, ignore the laws and regulations of countries along the way, and in effect invade the countries of their choice.
#share#And that raises a question: Are the migrants refugees from war and oppression, or are they migrants seeking a better life, whether at work or on welfare? That is not a question we are supposed to ask. Al Jazeera, with support from writers and celebrities on the left, has argued that “migrant” is a racist term and that we should use “refugee” instead. In fact “migrant” is as neutral a term as you can get, covering all categories of people on the move to somewhere else. It is “refugee” that carries with it certain presuppositions — most important that, as people fleeing from war, refugees are entitled to legal rights (under EU and international law) not available to those who simply want to settle in another country. By insisting that it is “racist” to call anyone a migrant, the Al Jazeera celebrities are trying to close down debate on the nature of this mass migration, to ensure that all migrants are treated as refugees, and to nullify all immigration laws. If they were to succeed, they would effectively abolish the rights of nations, large and small, to preserve their own identities, culture, nationhood, and democratic sovereignty. These are human rights of great consequence to most people, but they don’t seem to matter to those global idealists and self-styled citizens of the world.
According to the United Nations, about 72 percent of the migrants are men. That is not the composition of most refugee floods.
At the same time it is transparently clear why the Al Jazeera celebrities insist that it is wrong to question whether any of the migrants are refugees. It is because many of them, maybe a majority, are not refugees. One sign is that, according to the United Nations, about 72 percent are men — and to judge from film reports, young men — with women and children only a quarter of the total. That is not the composition of most refugee floods. Many have destroyed their travel documents to prevent authorities along the way from confirming whether they come from war-ravaged countries. And, not least, their behavior defines them as something different from refugees. As Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament, tweeted: “A refugee is someone who wants to get out of a particular country, not get into a particular country.” People who insist on living in Sweden or Germany fall into the second category.
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The crowds of migrants now besieging railway stations and camping out in squares across Europe and drowning in leaky boats in the Mediterranean are the results of passing utopian EU laws and making seemingly altruistic promises without thinking seriously of the costs and consequences in either case. Juncker’s program amounts to a gambler’s policy of doubling down on Europe’s losses and is likely to invite more waves of migrants into Europe in numbers that most EU countries simply don’t want to accept.
#related#Rejecting that program should be the first step toward a more prudent policy that would include helping genuine refugees to stay in countries near their own, re-imposing border controls inside Europe until the continent’s external borders are secure and properly defended, establishing migrant processing centers outside Europe to determine which migrants should be admitted and on what grounds, transferring European law and policy on migration from Brussels to the nation-states that have to bear the costs of these policies, and pressing for an international conference on migration to ensure that countries outside Europe, notably those in the Gulf and the Middle East, take in their proper share of genuine refugees, as Turkey has more than done. Such policies would help refugees, admit other migrants in numbers judged to be assimilable, and perform other duties of charity. Europe’s present path has been well described (by the Australian columnist Miranda Devine, among others) as one of “pathological altruism,” or doing something seemingly kind that has readily foreseeable bad results. And there can be no moral duty to do that.