Failing the challenge
The following is an excerpt from an editorial this week in the Guardian: In not quite two weeks Europe has moved from a moment of compassion and empathy with Syrian and other migrants striving to reach our shores back toward a reassertion of the fortress mentality that aims to stop them, sort them and return them, save for a proportion deemed to have a real claim on our hospitality. The reasons are both reprehensible and understandable.
Europeans pity the people on the move and fear them — or, rather, fear the consequences of their arrival in such numbers. The balance between those two emotions varies wildly from week to week and from country to country. After little Alan Kurdi was found dead on a Turkish beach, Germany took the extraordinary step of casting aside regulations and opening its doors to the refugees who were, literally in some cases, tramping toward its borders.
The numbers coming rose, but what was more worrying was the suddenly clear prospect that many millions might come. By Sunday, the Germans, overwhelmed by practical problems of reception, had reimposed border controls, they say on a temporary basis. Other countries followed suit.
It is easy to say Europe has failed to develop a coherent way of dealing with migrants, but this is hardly surprising. Countries have different attitudes, as do the migrants themselves. Indeed their preferences are critical, which is why Germany’s increasingly demands for burden-sharing are less reasonable than they seem at first sight.
If past experience is a guide, migrants resent being sent hither and thither, and quickly find ways to go to the places they wanted to go to in the first instance . That is why the debate about burden-sharing is to a considerable extent a non-debate. It might be instituted, but it would not work unless there was compulsion.
The difficult conclusion must be that neither burden-sharing nor diplomacy will end this crisis, that migrants will continue to come in very substantial numbers, and Europe will continue to blunder along. We are in desperate need of a solution, but we have not found it yet. Campbell R. Harvey Martin E. Thall Elaine B. Berger Daniel A. Jauernig Alnasir Samji David Holland Paul Weiss Phyllis Yaffe Linda Hughes Dorothy Strachan Daryl Aitken