OPINION:
Germany has a troubled history of ethnic relations, to put it mildly, and Angela Merkel first rejected taking in refugees from the Syrian civil war which has taken more than a quarter of a million lives. Then, no doubt considering how that looked, she put out the welcome map. Soon she was celebrated as “Mama Merkel” in the refugee camps.
But once more, against the backdrop of 550,000 refugees arriving in Europe this year with the threat of passing a million if present levels continue, Germany appears to be closing the door. Mama Merkel has been unable to persuade her European Union partners to take in a share of the wave. She is worried that one of the most important achievements of the European Union, its common labor market, might be threatened. The German states are complaining they have reached their capacity of compassion. Violence has broken out among the migrants, further complicating compassion.
With all the unprecedented movement, rumor and speculation, it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on. Large numbers of the arrivals are neither Syrian nor refugees fleeing violence. Many are from lands further east, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and Eritrea. There’s an increasing number from across the Mediterranean, including Africans escaping the terrors of Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorists in West Africa.
Many of the arrivals are not refugees from persecution and the threat of death but economic migrants looking for a better life. What better way to begin a better life than to take advantage of the generous social welfare benefits of the EU states, particularly in Germany. The rapidly declining German birth rate guarantees a need for immigrants to stock the labor pool. But as with the Turkish gastarbeiter in Germany in the 1960s, and France with its North African immigrant no-go slums, fitting these people into the European way of life, alien to nearly all the refugees, will not be easy.
Many of the Muslim migrants carry their culture in a suitcase. They have no interest in becoming European. There are fears that many of the young men in the newly arrived may be, or have been, followers of one of the many Muslim terrorist groups tearing the region apart.
Even given the American experience of successfully accepting and absorbing Europeans for 200 years, might there be reminders here for the United States? America refused to take in European refugees, particularly Jews, in the 1930s, and who many died in the Holocaust might have lived to prosper here.
But over the past four decades legal immigration to America has quadrupled. The United States now admits a million new permanent residents every year — 500,000 foreign students, 70,000 asylum seekers and refugees, 700,000 foreign workers, and 200,000 relatives of foreign workers. Many more stay, whether as original temporary visitors, lifetime immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, foreign students, or recipients of the “visa waiver program.”
The U.S. government cannot effectively track these legal foreign visitors, much less the illegals who overstay their visas, or the flow over poorly guarded borders and airports. The United States has authorized 10,000 new Syrian refugees and President Obama proposes to raise that to 100,000 refugees. Mr. Obama does not, however, accept responsibility for how his policies in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and with the new nuclear deal with Iran, have contributed to the chaos.
Europe is learning that acts have consequences, and so do acts not taken. Everyone pays the price.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.