Asylum: time to change the rules?
A 14-year-old Afghan boy died in Calais a couple of weeks ago, said Simon Parker on Opendemocracy. He was run over while trying to smuggle himself into a lorry in a desperate bid to join his family in Britain. His death was the 13th at the port this year, and he was just one of millions of children forcibly displaced around the world, from an estimated total of 65 million refugees. These people deserve our sympathy and our protection. Yet in a speech at a UN summit last week, Theresa May framed the mass movement of refugees as just another threat to be countered, alongside war, terrorism and climate change. Ignoring calls for a more equitable sharing of the burden of hosting asylum seekers, the PM “insisted that the burden should be shouldered entirely by the first ‘safe country’ into which a refugee or migrant stepped – and preferably one a long way away from the white cliffs of Dover”.
Many commentators regard this as the right approach, said David Aaronovitch in The Times. They contrast it to what they see as the naive policy of Angela Merkel, who has supposedly apologised for opening Germany’s doors to more than a million refugees. In fact, Merkel hasn’t apologised: she merely expressed regret that her country wasn’t better prepared for the influx. Germany is now getting a handle on the situation. Yes, the anti-immigrant AFD party is doing well, but it’s still only polling at around 16%, while parties that broadly support Merkel’s humane refugee policy are polling at 60%.
The rise of the AFD is nevertheless alarming, said The Spectator. The three-yearold party, which finished ahead of Merkel’s in elections held in her home state last month, is “no German version of UKIP”. In January, its leader called for firearms to be used against migrants trying to enter Germany from Austria; its manifesto calls for a ban on minarets and burkas. Xenophobic street violence is on the rise in Germany and across the continent as a whole – an alarming trend fuelled in large part by the failure of national leaders to control immigration. May was right to point out that “borders serve a purpose”, and that international rules need to be updated to make political asylum harder to claim. The 1951 convention on refugees – granting shelter to anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution at home – was designed for a world before mass travel, agreed Matthew Parris in The Times. Millions have always qualified; the difference is, they now know their rights, and can come. Western nations must stop “gaming the rules” and, instead, change them.