Bauschard Debate 9/25/15 5: 06 pm refugees Pre-Release

Can’t Force Resettlement

Resettlement can’t be enforced

Jen Kirby, September 22, 2015, New York Magazine, With Some Opposition, European Leaders Establish Refugee Quotas, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/european-leaders-come-up-with-refugee-quotas.html DOA: 9-23-15

However, the Eastern European countries that protested are included in the proposal, and it's not entirely clear how those that don't want any part of this agreement will be forced to comply. The BBC reports that countries will face a fine of 0.002 percent of GDP, but some, such as Slovakia, have basically said they will reject any and all attempts by the European Union to force them to accept refugees. Hungary — which, despite its opposition, will actually benefit from the plan, as it will eventually relocate more than 54,000 people within its borders — questioned how the EU could enforce such quotas when refugees themselves only want to go to Germany or other, more economically stable member states. 

Forced redistribution irrelevant. Once people are settled they can move where they want

Martin Wolf, September 22, 2015, Financial Times, A refugee crisis that Europe cannot escape, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3967804c-604b-11e5-a28b-50226830d644.html#axzz3mTKajB48 DOA : 9-22-15

In the short run, incomers need to be processed. Germany has stated that it expects to receive 800,000 asylum-seekers, or 1 per cent of the population, this year — the largest number ever recorded in a member of the OECD. But its decision to do so is causing huge stresses inside the EU. Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission president, has proposed that refugees be shared out among the member states. EU ministers did vote on Tuesday to relocate 120,00 people across the continent over the next two years. But members differ greatly in their true willingness to take refugees. In any case, once inside the border-free Schengen area, people cannot be tied down. They will move wherever they expect the best lives. The EU needs a common policy, at least for the Schengen area. The UK and US also need to take more refugees.

Immigration policy in Europe is about individual countries, there is no “European” immigration policy

There is no “European” immigration policy or regime. There is a mish-mash of national policies, a patchwork of systems and criteria which are contradictory, incoherent, fragmented. Italy is very far way from Finland, not only geographically, but when it comes to immigration and asylum. France and Germany have quite different historical approaches to integrating newcomers. Sweden and Denmark are neighbours with a close shared history, but their immigration policies are chalk and cheese. National governments guard these prerogatives jealously. “Europe” in the form of the EU authorities in Brussels has minimal say over policymaking. Almost all power here lies with heads of national governments and interior ministries. Yet, in this crisis, Brussels-bashing has become routine, the cheap and easy option for shameless national leaders acting unilaterally, blocking every suggestion that comes out of Brussels and then blaming it for the ensuing chaos. Orbán proved the point in Brussels last week. “Europe” had failed, its leaders had irresponsibly created this mess, their response was “madness”. He has put up a razor-wire fence on the border with Serbia and announced he was fasttracking legislation to establish a zero-immigration regime within 10 days, with the army deployed on the border. Brussels cannot stop him because these powers are national. If need be, he said, he would put up another fence on the border with Croatia, a barrier between two EU countries. On Friday Brussels shrugged and said it did not like this, but couldn’t do anything about it. The all-powerful busybodies of Brussels are relatively impotent when it comes to immigration. For months the Italians, French, Austrians and Germans have been quietly re-establishing controls on the internal national borders of the open Schengen travel zone, which are supposed to be proscribed. Brussels cannot stop them. A commission spokeswoman said Italian police controls on the border with Austria were not border controls… For more than a year the Germans have been complaining bitterly that people entering Italy and Greece were deliberately not being registered by the national authorities, but simply encouraged to board trains and buses for Germany. Then they shifted and declared unilaterally that Syrians could come anyway. The commission can propose a panoply of measures aimed at creating more joined-up policies. It did so in May and will extend the effort this week. But they are instantly shot down by national police ministries. As its vice-president, Frans Timmermans, said on Friday, “asylum policies in Europe are not aligned”. The European parliament, as ever, has plenty to say about immigration, but absolutely nothing to do because it has no remit over policymaking, which remains overwhelmingly national. The countries of Europe prefer it that way, while blaming Brussels for the ever-worsening state of the union.

Quote

Jay Bookman, September 14, 2015, Atlanta Journal Constitution, ‘Give me your tired, your poor…but not your Muslim refugees,” http://jaybookman.blog.ajc.com/2015/09/14/give-me-your-tired-your-poor-but-not-your-muslim-refugees/ DOA: 9-22-15

Responsible – US and Europe destabilized the region, triggering the refugees

Mehran Arbab, September 9, 2015, Post Gazette, We have a responsibility to admit refugees, http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/letters/2015/09/09/We-have-a-responsibility-to-admit-refugees/stories/201509090093 DOA: 9-22-15

Pictures of refugees coming onshore in Europe tell a horrifying tale of a people until recent years having normal lives in now war-torn lands.

These mothers, fathers and children were not born to be refugees. To protect and to give their children an opportunity for a dignified life, they are crossing dangerous borders on land and sea.

We must respect them for that. They are risking their lives for a slim chance, and that is more than most of us will ever have to do.

It is easy to avoid the fact that in a large part we caused this mass immigration. For ideological and geopolitical reasons we — the United States and Europe — destabilized Iraq, Libya and Syria and allowed the Islamic State group and the like to wreak havoc in a large part of the Middle East and North Africa. In spite of their dictatorial nature, the ruling regimes of these countries had maintained a state of stability.

Through conspiracy and war we prematurely removed that stability, and we now must act responsibly and admit these refugees into our own communities.

Europe deadlocked and facing a backlash

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a visiting professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility., 9-6-15, Huffington Post, Refugee Blues, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/post_10092_b_8097064.html DOA: 9-7-15

The obvious solution would be to offer a legal route for Syrian refugees to settle in Europe so that they didn't have to brave leaky boats and hostile border guards. That solution would require countries to each take their fair share -- including the United States and Canada. President Roosevelt proposed something similar for German Jews. A conference was convened in 1938 at Evian-les-Bains in France to see if agreement could be reached among major nations on admission of Jewish refugees. The conference was a flop. Only the Dominican Republic offered to take serious numbers. With the EU machinery deadlocked, the practical question is whether nations that are relatively sympathetic to the refugee crisis, such as Germany and France, can join with Sweden and create a coalition of the willing, bypassing the EU. This will not be easy. Even before this latest refugee influx, Europe was experiencing a huge backlash against immigrants. Much of Europe had been compassionate in its acceptance of refugees and had also admitted citizens of its former colonies. During the boom years, Europe had welcomed guest workers. By 2008, many countries had immigrant or second-generation immigrant populations approaching 10 percent. High unemployment in the prolonged aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis only increased local resistance. Really bad austerity policy has made an immigration crisis into a political catastrophe. Germany's stance on the refugees is relatively liberal, but its relentless pursuit of austerity has made the crisis worse. This rightwing nativist upsurge has undermined social democratic politics in Europe's most tolerant and advanced societies. Large numbers of local working class voters, frightened of unemployment, have turned to nationalist parties -- fragmenting parliamentary systems and making it impossible for social democrat or labor parties to lead stable majority governments. Rightwing populist parties have been surging in the most progressive nations of Europe. In Denmark, Norway and Finland, where center-right coalitions now govern, the rightwing anti-immigrant parties are now the second largest.

Forcing refugee settlement fails and undermines support for the UK in the EU

Dominic Waghorn, September 23, 2015, Sky News, Refugee Crisis Threatens Support for EU in UK, http://news.sky.com/story/1557489/refugee-crisis-threatens-support-for-eu-in-uk DOA: 9-23-15

Europe has failed to agree on what to do with even a fraction of the hundreds of thousand of refugees pouring into the continent. Instead, a majority of countries have voted against the will of four smaller nations on a quota system distributing just over a hundred thousand migrants. That has set-up today's refugee summit in Brussels in an atmosphere of toxic acrimony. The Czechs say only the future will reveal how big a mistake the move was. The Slovaks say they won't accept it. The majority vote was an act of failure. Only a voluntary system sharing out refugees will work. It will be impossible to force unwilling countries to take refugees if they do not want to. It plays into the hands of the EU's enemies and opponents. Already, Eurosceptic Conservatives and UKIP have said it is proof that EU membership requires loss of control of nations' borders. Last night in Brussels, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond admitted to reporters the refugee crisis was undermining support in the UK for Europe ahead of Britain's referendum on EU membership.  "A sense of chaos and disarray tends to cause public opinion to react negatively," he said.

No Support for Increased Redistribution

Czech government opposes any required distribution of refugees

James Kanter, EU ministers approve plan to distribute refugees, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/world/europe/european-union-ministers-migrants-refugees.html?_r=0, DOA: 9-22-15

But there were early signs of resistance to the plan. “I’m very surprised by this unprecedented decision,” Slovakia’s interior minister, Robert Kalinak, said after the vote. The Czech prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, said his government would “reject any attempt to introduce some permanent mechanism of redistributing refugees.”

European Action Generally Fails

Four key barriers to an effective European response

Stewart Patrick, 9-3-15, World on the Move: Understanding Europe’s Migration Crisis, http://blogs.cfr.org/patrick/2015/09/03/world-on-the-move-understanding-europes-migration-crisis/ DOA: 9-6-15

The pressures of uncontrolled migration are hardly restricted to Europe—as the U.S. presidential campaign has underscored. But the EU’s predicament is particularly acute. The sudden influx of migrants has appeared to catch European governments by surprise, and has exposed fissures among the members of the Union. There at least four reasons why Europe is struggling.

• 
  Europeans often don’t know who is crossing their borders: Are they refugees or economic migrants? Many of the people showing up are asylum seekers who claim the status of refugees—defined under a 1951 UN convention as someone who has fled his or her country because of a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” But until such claims can be definitively evaluated—which can take months—these people are stuck in limbo, suspected of being economic migrants who have chosen to move for better job prospects. Making such judgments is tough, but the decisions matter: refugees are entitled to international protection in an asylum country, whereas economic migrants can be turned away. But what about those who fall in the gray zone? Are people who flee from a country plagued by persecution, discrimination, and also a crumbling economy asylum seekers or migrants? What about those who fled their countries for refugee reasons but continue on in search of better job prospects? Answers to such questions often boil down to a judgement call with grave implications for the person in question.
  

• 
  EU members can’t get on the same page: Complicating matters, EU member states are quarrelling amongst themselves about how to respond. In principle, the EU’s Dublin Regulation stipulates that entry-point states are responsible for housing migrants and examining their asylum applications. But this EU law has placed a heavy strain on Mediterranean nations like Italy and particularly Greece, whose protracted financial crisis has left it ill-equipped to handle a sudden influx of refugees. In what it thought was a constructive move, Germany has suspended the Dublin Regulation and will allow Syrian refugees to apply for asylum even if they first arrived in another country. Berlin has since called for the EU to redistribute asylum seekers amongst member states. The idea of a quota system gained support from European Commission President Jean Claude-Juncker and, recently, European Council President Donald Tusk. But other EU members, including the United Kingdom and Hungary, vehemently insist that immigration policies be decided by individual governments. On Thursday, Hungarian President Viktor Orban blamed Chancellor Angela Merkel for essentially “inviting” migrants to Europe, labeling the crisis a “German Problem.” Such finger-pointing bodes ill for a unified EU front.
  

• 
  Politicians are feeling the heat from right-wing blowback: The rise of right-wing political parties in numerous EU countries (Denmark, Sweden, and France, for example) has fueled popular anti-immigrant sentiments. Violence against refugees and migrants has spiked in Germany, where asylum seekers increased by 132 percent over the same period in 2014. The pressures of populist nationalism have made it more difficult for politicians at the inter-European level to agree on a unified response.
  

• 
  Regulatory incoherence: In 2013, the European Parliament endorsed a Common European Asylum System, which establishes procedures to ensure uniform treatment for all asylum applications. Unfortunately, EU countries have failed to implement and enforce these provisions with any consistency. Complicating matters, there is no agreed list of countries the EU considers to be in conflict, making it hard to determine whether a person is an asylum seeker or a migrant. Nor are there any collective EU centers for asylum seekers to get processed and fed. Each EU nation has its own ways of doing things, exacerbating the sense of regulatory chaos. Europe’s migrant crisis is only the latest and most acute manifestation of a broader international problem: failure to develop and implement common standards and procedures for handling migrant flows, especially in the wake of political and economic turmoil. This is partly inherent in the complexity and sensitivity of migration, compared to other global flows. Hoping to benefit from globalization, governments in recent decades have lowered barriers dramatically for most factors of production, including capital, goods, services, and ideas—and they have negotiated multiple rules to govern the world economy. But the international regulation of migration has lagged, globally and regionally, because the cross-border movement of people is inherently sensitive politically—touching on issues of sovereignty, security, employment, and (not least) national identity. The result is a regulatory vacuum.
  

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