NY Times: A Migration Juggernaut Is Headed for Europe

[Binkie The Clown]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/business/international/europe-must-plan-for-immigration-juggernaut.html

European leaders probably don’t want to hear this now, as they frantically try to close their borders to stop hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants and asylum seekers escaping hunger and violence in Africa and the Middle East. But they are dealing with the unstoppable force of demography.

---SNIP---

Over the next several decades, millions of people are likely to leave these regions, forced out by war, lack of opportunity and conflicts over resources set in motion by climate change. Rich Europe is inevitably going to be a prime destination of choice.

In my humble opinion, once climate change really gets going there will be millions of climate refuges from every equatorial region, including the Americas. People will have to move north to survive, and it's only going to get worse and worse.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

1. Wouldn't going south be the better option? nt

[Kelvin Mace]

2. To be appalingly cynical about it

I think their plan is to hold them off long enough for disease, famine, and internecine warfare to whittle down the populations. And they are prepared to help those forces along if they aren't up to the task.

[closeupready]

3. A welfare state needs population growth to make ends meet.

A smart approach, from a long-term fiscal point of view, would be one that effectively assimilates newcomers and their offspring.

[LittleBlue]

4. I feel the same way. You had Eritreans showing up as refugees in Italy

Go find Eritrea on a map. It's nowhere near Libya or Syria.

The vast majority of people coming to Europe were safe in Turkey. They are economic immigrants. Europe will be overrun if it doesn't formulate a tougher, more cohesive immigration policy.

Europe and the US can only artificially inflate their economies with immigration for so long until they run out of natural resources to sustain so many people. This is a disaster for Europe.

[leveymg]

5. Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Libya were colonized by Italy. France ruled Syria. It's not just

geography, it's history that determines these things. Most of those fleeing these countries are refugees from post-colonial states that have failed, either completely, or going in that direction. Handled humanely, this is an opportunity for Europe to create more diverse societies for themselves and to take some pressure off regions that are in ecological and political crisis.

You really should learn some more history, and geography, and development economics, and . . .

[LittleBlue]

6. Ummmmm Ethiopia resisted colonialism bro

http://www.academia.edu/9202106/Ethiopias_Colonial_Legacy_the_Country_that_Resisted_Imperialism


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Adwa

They did fight a war against Italy and for about five years suffered an occupation from 1936 to 1941, but they were unique in successfully resisting colonialism. It is so intellectually lazy when Westerners just assume that every African country fell to colonialism without understanding the histories of each individual nation and tribe.

You really should learn some more history, and geography, and development economics, and . . .

[leveymg]

9. The Abyssinian empire included northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Historically, what we now call Ethiopia and Eritrea were colonized and occupied during most of the latter part of the 19th Century, first by the British and then by the Italians who were sent packing from some of southern Ethiopia in 1896. They returned some 40 years later and were finally expelled during World War Two, at which time much of the region became a British protectorate until the mid-1960s. Most of neighboring Somalia, meanwhile, remained an Italian colony until the 1940s. Ethiopian Empire Wiki:

In 1868, following the imprisonment of several missionaries and representatives of the British government, Britain launched a punitive expedition into Ethiopia. The campaign was a success for Britain and the ruler of Ethiopia committed suicide. The 1880s were marked by the Scramble for Africa. Italy, seeking a colonial presence in Africa, invaded Ethiopia and following a successful conquest of some coastal regions, forced the Treaty of Wuchale upon Shewa (an autonomous kingdom within the Ethiopian Empire), creating the colony of Eritrea.

Due to significant differences between the Italian and Amharic translations of the Treaty of Wuchale, Italy believed they had subsumed Ethiopia as a client state. Ethiopia repudiated the treaty in 1893. Insulted, Italy declared war on Ethiopia in 1895.

. . .

In 1935 Italian soldiers commanded by Marshal Emilio De Bono invaded Ethiopia in what is known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. The war lasted seven months before an Italian victory was declared. The invasion was condemned by the League of Nations, though not much was done to end the hostility.

During the conflict, Italy used mustard gas, ignoring the Geneva Protocol that it had signed seven years earlier. The Italian military dropped mustard gas in bombs, sprayed it from airplanes, and spread it in powdered form on the ground. 150,000 chemical casualties were reported, mostly from mustard gas. In the aftermath of the war Italy annexed Ethiopia, uniting it with Italy's other colonies in eastern Africa to form the new colony of Italian East Africa, and Vittorio Emanuele III adopted the title Emperor of Abyssinia.

On 10 June 1940, Italy declared war on the United Kingdom and France, as France was in the process of being conquered by Germany at the time and Benito Mussolini wished to expand Italy's colonial holdings. An Italian invasion of British Somaliland in August 1940 was successful, but the war turned against Italy afterward. Haile Selassie returned to Ethiopia from England to help rally the resistance. The British began their own invasion in January 1941, and the last organized Italian resistance in Italian East Africa surrendered in November 1941. The British restored Ethiopia's independence.

[LittleBlue]

12. Duh I know the history. Yes, the Abyssinian empire included lands that today are many nations

That doesn't change the fact that you lumped in modern Ethiopia lazily with the other modern countries that were colonized.

Ethiopians consider their resistance a form of pride. They were not colonized.

I know the history of historical Italian Somaliland, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the other nations in that region. Don't call me ignorant of history when you lump all Horn of Africa people together.

[leveymg]

13. In driving around this Ethiopian cul d' sac, you've still not addressed the point that was made.

You mentioned Eritrea, which was certainly an Italian (and a British) colony for a long time. You seemed to imply that Eritreans had no ties to distant Italy and the UK. As I hope we can now agree, that really isn't so.

My point is that most of these refugee-sending countries have historical ties with the European nations to which refugees and "economic migrants" are headed. Italy, along with many European countries and the UK, certainly does have a duty -- legal, historical, equitable and humanitarian -- to take in significantly larger numbers of refugees (and immigrants, although the UN Convention on Refugees doesn't address them) and to provide much greater levels of assistance to the afflicted ex-colonial regions that once made them rich.

If you want to argue, Bro, argue the point. Enough of the Duh.

BTW: What is the basis of your knowledge of East Africa?

[closeupready]

14. Liberia has an even weaker colonial history to the US, than

Eritrea does to Italy. Yet, look at how Liberian names and language reflect American culture.

But I suspect the person with whom your tangling is not here to persuade or to be persuaded.

[leveymg]

15. You're right about Liberia. We certainly need to do more in West Africa.

Anti-immigrant bias has no place at DU. Besides, the guy's statement was simply wrong.

[nichomachus]

7. Economic immigrants

Kind of like the people who settled the "New World." Half the people on the Mayflower came here for economic opportunity. The other half came to establish a theocratic state.

They had a warrant that allowed them to settle in Virginia, but not the Bay Colony. So they were the first undocumented immigrants.

[LittleBlue]

8. Times have changed

When the Mayflower set sail, the world population was roughly 700 million.

It has nothing to do with fairness. It's the reality that these countries don't use birth control, and they can produce a nearly inexhaustible number of refugees. If Europe doesn't stop the waves of economic migration, this flow of refugees will literally never end.

[Kotya]

10. It'll end when Europe, fed up, votes in far-right wing governments

who promise to put a stop to it.

We're already starting to see right wing parties all across Europe get footholds, riding mostly on an anti-immigration backlash.

[LittleBlue]

11. Exactly

[leveymg]

16. That's been going on since the 1840s, when Irish migration was considered a subhuman wave

Anti-immigrant discrimination also met the arriving Russians and Slavs, particular the Jews, from the 1880s until the end of World War Two.

We've seen before what happens when nativists and RW bigots are allowed to take control over policy. Not again.

[pampango]

18. Far-right governments will "solve" the refugee problem? Should the left seek a "far-right" solution?

To prevent the election of far-right governments the left should adopt far-right refugee "solutions"?

Most Europeans don't trust the far right. They are a minority party in every country except Hungary. Their support has been growing for years since long before the refugee crisis. But they are still a minority. Let's not adopt their policies as a misguided tactic to keep them from winning elections.

[Kotya]

19. I don't have a say in the matter. I don't vote in European elections.

What policies concerning immigration should the left adopt to keep the far-right from winning elections over the issue?

[Igel]

17. Then call them what they are.

That's most of the problem.

People fleeing war-torn areas with just the shirt on their back get emotional brownie points. They're war refugees.

Those who have lived in an area and decide to cross multiple borders because they can profit from it don't. They're economic migrants.

They get different treatments, and should. Taking in one is a humanitarian obligation; the other is only accepted when either there's an invasion you're powerless and lack the will to stop or when it suits the host country.

The media knows the difference. And they intentionally (IMHO) confuse the two because, well, the idea of a non-German Germany appeals to them. Look at the press the Germans got during the Greek mess. Same for Slovakia, Hungary, and other "indigenous" and fairly homogeneous areas. It's like they're evil and sinful, morally tainted, for not being diverse. (Of course, if you're an approved community, this is necessary for survival. Some ethnicities deserve to exist, some don't, I guess.)

Mst of these refugees are fleeing the Assad/ISIS/Nusra conflict that's ravaging and destroying the cities of Turkey and Greece, Serbia and Macedonia and Lebanon. Many fled cities destroyed after they left; some left destroyed cities not because of danger but because of economic conditions.

[Comrade Grumpy]

20. I guess all those Syrian refugees should just spend their lives in tent camps in the desert.

My fellow humans make me sick sometimes.

[branford]

21. Do you believe those Syrians (or anyone else) have a

actual right to transit through safe countries and then choose which countries they wish to immigrate?

As we've had this discussion before elsewhere on DU, you know full well that refugees who "asylum shop," and fail to declare once they're in a safe country, normally cannot maintain asylum in their chosen destination country because, at that point, they're little more than economic migrants.

Respectfully, your posts generally seem advocate an effective worldwide open borders policy (or something quite close), and attempt to justify and enforce it through moral blackmail (e.g., claims about lack of humanity of your opponents, etc.). You are certainly free to hold such beliefs, but they definitely are not standard or default positions of the Democratic Party or even most left of center political parties in more liberal Europe, nor consistent with otherwise fairly liberal international laws concerning true refugees and migrants.