Cutting through the “Refugee” Hysteria

During the past week the media has omitted mention of pertinent factors quite deliberately.  Communist China showed off its military to remember the end of the Japanese war effort.   The media left one to assume that these Chinese had defeated Japan.   The USA defeated Japan and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Army was the most successful opponent of the Japanese within China.   The communists under Chairman Mao were scarcely more than a rabble.  They had more impact on civilians than Japanese.  Memory of these facts gained little attention.

So it is also with the recent migration issues in Europe.   The contextual factors that matter in shaping pubic opinion have not been outlined by the media although they are well known.   The reason for this deliberate silence, awaiting signs of the politically correct stance to take, informs the following notes.

1. Who is a refugee and who is an economic migrant?   The acquirement of privileges  depends upon an answer to this question.  Commonsense answers and not media and German usage should apply.   A person becomes a refugee at the very first place at which he or she finds shelter and protection when fleeing from a situation that threatens this person’s life.    Even if his sojourn is brief.     Should this refugee seek to leave this shelter he abandons the status of a refugee.   He moves from the status of a refugee to that of other migrants, perhaps an economic migrant (in the 17C there were religious emigrants from England).   Once safety is first reached a refugee can make a decision that now he is safe there are other options available for future life.   In this he is utterly no different from a migrant escaping a famine or simply trying to achieve a more rewarding existence.  Thus Syrians who choose to leave Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan, where they have refuge, and travel to Europe by so doing acquire the status of economic migrants.   The media and Germany choose to overlooks this critical semantic.   They decide who is a refugee by identifying his place of origin.  They ignore whether he started his journey to Europe from a place of safety outside his place or country of origin.
2. Let us confront the reality that the Islamic faith of any migrant imposes a burden for any European country.   France has notably failed to assimilate Muslims.   Admitting more Muslim migrants will compound this difficulty.   This is true in Britainand elsewhere.   Eighty per cent of Muslims in the UK have attested in a poll that being a citizen of the UK is subordinate in importance to their religion.  Disloyalty and security issues arise.    Non Muslim migrants avoid this problem.
3. The UK and the Netherlands like to see themselves as multicultural societies.   With the present ethnic mixture comes considerable integration.   Sadly this will become a passing reality in the UK that is now a host to 8 million people not born in the country.   Globally, since the 1960s academics have recorded situations where people from different backgrounds move towards parity in numbers.   The almost invariable consequence is tension, conflict, and broken heads.   It is now happening in Ulster where the Catholics are outbreeding the Protestants.   Thus in-migration just builds problems of civil cohesion.    The invasion of Europe that is now occurring lowers civic unity and encourages the perseverance of extremist nationalist politics.
4. Many in-migrants, perhaps most, from Syria have been involved on all sides of the civil war.  Many have been combatants.    They want to avoid documentation until they have disguised their identities.    One day some will be prosecuted for war crimes in Syria because of poor documentation and identity checks due to the excitement over this issue generated by the encouragement of the immigration of undocumented Syrians to Germany.

5. The politicians who talk about the past movement of people within Europe as a reason why the first wave of the new invasion should be accommodated have got it wrong.   If we’ve done it once why cannot it be done again?

These politicians have overlooked the fact that these shifts in population involved people who derived from mainly Christian backgrounds and accepted the subordination of religion to the affairs of states.   The migrants, in other words, were cousins.   What of the Jews?   They do not proselytize.   They accommodate themselves to their hosts.   Many rapidly drift away from Judaism.    This is quite a contrast to the insular Muslim who tenaciously cling to their belief and ways of ordering their lives.

6. There has been mention that the interwar exodus from German lands was an undocumented tide.   The USA and Canada rarely admitted immigrants who at the point of entry did not possess valid documents.   These must be issued by Embassies in Europe.   The overwhelming number of the 600,00 inter-war in-migrants to the UK bore documents of entitlement to entry issued by British Embassies in Europe.
7. Queen  Angela Merkel  2 or 3 weekends ago declared that Germany at the time had 400,000 would be recent migrants.   She declared that Syrians, even without documentation, would be preferred because they were refugees.   Her spokesman let it be known that each Syrian would receive a monthly subsistence allowance of 365 Euros, free housing and medical attention.  Now the number has risen to 800,000.   It will require 10 bn euro a year to look after them.   And think what this will do to unemployment figures.   In such a way the invasion was encouraged and became a German Problem in August 2015.    Now the Germans are frightened and seek to deflect responsibility.  With the aid of France and Brussels they are desperate to declare this is now an European Problem.
8. The Pope in Rome believes that man is born with a quiver full of rights.   The victors of war in the 1940s shared this belief that has informed the heart of refugee policies ever since.   But recorded history show that rights are man made and situational.   Hence the different degrees, statuses and fortunes of men.   A reality that has been pushed aside since the 1940s.   This limited and provisional view of the rights of man is the only one that I relevant to this present Century.    Authoritarian regimes are many.   By reason of their nature they encourage dissidence.   In turn this creates refugees.  For every democratic regime there is a matching authoritarian government.   Hence the numbers of potential dissidents and refugees might amount to 30 to 40 percent of global population.   It is beyond the resources of the democratic regimes to provide havens for all these possible dissidents.   Just think of the size of possible dissidence in modern China.  The application of the 1940s beliefs and outlook about refugees cannot cope with the sheer scale of authoritarian regimes.  The United Nations and the European Union should close their institutions devoted to 1940s refugee missions.    They are not entitled to judge the varying responses to refugee pressures by democratic nations who interpret the world through the eyes of their elector citizens.
9. Finally, let us remember 17C England.    In the parishes the fear contained in this nursery rhyme summed up the migration debate.

“Hark Hark the dogs do bark

The beggars are coming to town

Some in rags and some in jags

And one in velvet gown”

(A jag was a slit in a gown.)

In 1601, an Act for the Relief of the Poor was succeeded in 1662 by an Act of Settlement.   Our first national policy for the poor was contained in these Acts.  Each parish became responsible for its own poor. A poor person had to have a  “settlement” in a particular parish in order to be entitled to remain within its boundary.   When a person was unemployed, after 40 days in a parish, he would be chucked out unless he could prove that he was born in the parish.   Then these unemployed beggars would migrate to parishes where they might be treated more leniently.   Beggars banded together and menaced parishes.  Such parishes demanded better protection, improvement in the pooling of responsibility across parishes (how modern!).   This is what the 1662 Act bestowed upon them. — P. Dilaveri