George Soros Warns Europe: Absorb 500k Refugees Costing $34Bn, Or Risk "Existential Threat"
By Tyler Durden
Authored by George Soros, originally posted at NYBooks.com,
The asylum policy that emerged from last month’s EU-Turkey negotiations – and that has already resulted in the deportation of hundreds of asylum seekers from Greece to Turkey – has four fundamental flaws.
First, the policy is not truly European; it was negotiated with Turkey and imposed on the EU by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Second, it is severely underfunded.
Third, it is not voluntary. It imposes quotas that many member states oppose and requires refugees to take up residence in countries where they don’t want to live, while forcing others who have reached Europe to be sent back.
Finally, it transforms Greece into a de facto holding pen without sufficient facilities for the number of asylum seekers already there.
All these deficiencies can be corrected. The European Commission implicitly acknowledged some of them this week when it announced a new plan to reform Europe’s asylum system. But the Commission’s proposals still rely on compulsory quotas that serve neither refugees nor member states. That will never work.
European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans is inviting an open debate. Here is my contribution.
A humanitarian catastrophe is in the making in Greece. The asylum seekers are desperate. Legitimate refugees must be offered a reasonable chance to reach their destinations in Europe. It is clear that the EU must undergo a paradigm shift. EU leaders need to embrace the idea that effectively addressing the crisis will require “surge” funding, rather than scraping together insufficient funds year after year. Spending a large amount at the outset would allow the EU to respond more effectively to some of the most dangerous consequences of the refugee crisis—including anti-immigrant sentiment in its member states that has fueled support for authoritarian political parties, and despondency among those seeking refuge in Europe who now find themselves marginalized in Middle East host countries or stuck in transit in Greece.
Most of the building blocks for an effective asylum system are available; they only need to be assembled into a comprehensive and coherent policy. Critically, refugees and the countries that contain them in the Middle East must receive enough financial support to make their lives there viable, allowing them to work and to send their children to school. That would help to keep the inflow of refugees to a level that Europe can absorb. This can be accomplished by establishing a firm and reliable target for the number of refugee arrivals: between 300,000 and 500,000 per year. This number is large enough to give refugees the assurance that many of them can eventually seek refuge in Europe, yet small enough to be accommodated by European governments even in the current unfavorable political climate.
There are established techniques for the voluntary balancing of supply and demand in other fields, such as with matching students to schools and junior doctors to hospitals. In this case, people determined to go to a particular destination would have …read more
Source: George Soros Warns Europe: Absorb 500k Refugees Costing $34Bn, Or Risk "Existential Threat"
