As I understand it, about 40-50% of those going to Germany are from the Western Balkans (former Yugoslavia and Albania), not from outside Europe. I suspect some are from places like Ukraine as well.

But including those, Germany does expect to see up to 800,000 people arrive this year. I saw this today, a view of German opinion:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... sures-show

Firstly, that's still people from outside the EU. Secondly, doesn't that tell you something anyway ? Nearly half of the claims they expect to have to deal with are from non-Syrians,and that's only this year. Care to speculate as to how many will be coming next year ?

As it stands, over half of all asylum claims made in the UK are only done either at the point of discovery (when people are encountered by the police or immigration officials when they're working illegally) or at the very last minute when somebody is on the verge of being removed and they want to frustrate that. Needless to say these claims have a very low pass rate indeed, since they're all utterly spurious. I'd imagine that most of the 200000 the Germans had to deal with last year were of a similar nature. Can you imagine what's going to happen now ? The pressures on the poor beleaguered immigration officials in Germany will be enormous. They'll be hastily training up inexperienced temps to deal with the workload and waiving all bar the most rudimentary of checks that they may previously have carried out so they can process more applications. Word of this will spread like wildfire and before they know it people will be descending on Germany from all across the developing world to take their chances on an asylum claim, especially since they'll know that the prospects of being removed again if their claim is refused are so slender. It's going to completely destroy the credibility of the asylum system.

danivon wrote:
I wonder how many people fleeing pogroms and fascism in Europe to get to America were not fully legal when they entered?

I imagine this is meant to be rhetorical and provocative. As I understand it, not many until 1921 when the quota laws were enacted. Even after that, wouldn't it be hard to sneak into the US from Europe during the time of pogroms and fascism?

Rayjay

As I understand it, not many until 1921 when the quota laws were enacted. Even after that, wouldn't it be hard to sneak into the US from Europe during the time of pogroms and fascism?

Yes.
Just ask the survivors of the St. Louis .

In 1939, the annual combined German-Austrian immigration quota was 27,370 and was quickly filled. In fact, there was a waiting list of at least several years. US officials could only have granted visas to the St. Louis passengers by denying them to the thousands of German Jews placed further up on the waiting list. Public opinion in the United States, although ostensibly sympathetic to the plight of refugees and critical of Hitler's policies, continued to favor immigration restrictions. The Great Depression had left millions of people in the United States unemployed and fearful of competition for the scarce few jobs available. It also fueled antisemitism, xenophobia, nativism, and isolationism. A Fortune Magazine poll at the time indicated that 83 percent of Americans opposed relaxing restrictions on immigration. President Roosevelt could have issued an executive order to admit the St. Louis refugees, but this general hostility to immigrants, the gains of isolationist Republicans in the Congressional elections of 1938, and Roosevelt's consideration of running for an unprecedented third term as president were among the political considerations that militated against taking this extraordinary step in an unpopular cause

.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php ... d=10005267

There are parallels between the plight of Jews in Germany and Poland and refugees from Syria and ISIS occupied Iraq. And there appear to be parallels in the way the world is reacting. And parallels in the domestic political situation in many of the countries that shapes how governments are reacting.
I guess when we say never again ... we narrowly define what that means rather than generously apply it to all victims of war and oppression.
Against this we have the powerful image of a child dead on a beach. And yet that one image seems to be having an enormous effect.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php ... d=10005520

The facts of the Aylan Kurdi case are now coming in btw. Here's what his Aunt in Canada has to say:

“The situation is that Abdullah does not have any teeth,” she said.

“So I been trying to help him fix his teeth. But is gonna cost me 14,000 and up to do it …

“Actually my dad, he come up with the idea, he said to me, ‘I think if they go to Europe for his case and for our future, I think he should do that, and then we’ll see if he can fix his teeth’.

“And that’s what I did three weeks ago.”

His sister couldn't afford to send him enough money to get quality dental treatment in Turkey so she sent him what she could, which was enough to pay people smugglers to take him to Greece so he could claim free dental work. He'd actually been living safely in Turkey for 3 years and had a job.

So yes, tragic as this case may be for the people concerned, I hardly think it justifies the policy response that people are using it to call for.

Sassenach wrote:Firstly, that's still people from outside the EU.

Yes, but it is people from Europe.

Secondly, doesn't that tell you something anyway ? Nearly half of the claims they expect to have to deal with are from non-Syrians,and that's only this year. Care to speculate as to how many will be coming next year ?

Not really. We have a particular crisis in Syria, which could be resolved or could get worse.

As it stands, over half of all asylum claims made in the UK are only done either at the point of discovery (when people are encountered by the police or immigration officials when they're working illegally) or at the very last minute when somebody is on the verge of being removed and they want to frustrate that. Needless to say these claims have a very low pass rate indeed, since they're all utterly spurious. I'd imagine that most of the 200000 the Germans had to deal with last year were of a similar nature. Can you imagine what's going to happen now ? The pressures on the poor beleaguered immigration officials in Germany will be enormous. They'll be hastily training up inexperienced temps to deal with the workload and waiving all bar the most rudimentary of checks that they may previously have carried out so they can process more applications. Word of this will spread like wildfire and before they know it people will be descending on Germany from all across the developing world to take their chances on an asylum claim, especially since they'll know that the prospects of being removed again if their claim is refused are so slender. It's going to completely destroy the credibility of the asylum system.

Like I say, maybe they are better organised than we are.

Ray Jay wrote:

danivon wrote:
I wonder how many people fleeing pogroms and fascism in Europe to get to America were not fully legal when they entered?

I imagine this is meant to be rhetorical and provocative.

That is one imagination you have.

It's meant to be a comparison.

As I understand it, not many until 1921 when the quota laws were enacted. Even after that, wouldn't it be hard to sneak into the US from Europe during the time of pogroms and fascism?

well an ocean does make it harder to get across anyway, but I can think of a few ways - work passage on a cargo ship and slip away at a US port. Get to Canada or Mexico and go through a land border. Buy false documents. Come in on a less restricted visa and then overstay.

I would be glad if Jews and others fleeing Europe got to the US rather than stay and perish, even if they broke a few laws to do so.

And quotas were in fact a response to pressure to restrict immigration and keep certain types out. Had they been higher, or not passed in the first place, then more legal refugees would have made it out.

Like I say, maybe they are better organised than we are.

That's a remarkably facetious comment Dan. You clearly have no idea how difficult it is to properly assess an asylum application. Simply establishing somebody's nationality is tricky. Asylum claimants have to be interviewed by staff with appropriate language skills, which are usually in fairly short supply, and then a judgement needs to be made which can stand up to legal challenge. Given that everybody who crosses the German border is now going to claim to be Syrian they're going to have to find an awful lot of fluent Arabic speakers who are sufficiently familiar with the language to differentiate between Syrian Arabic and other kinds. Or rather they won't, because it's quite obvious that they're not going to bother trying. What they will have to do is try to remove those who are not Syrians and who can easily be identified as such. This is problematic though, since most of them will have been waved through Hungary and Austria without being registered and so can't simply be removed to one of those countries in line with Dublin III. As such they'll have to go through the full rigmarole of interviews followed by assessment of evidence and decision, which is then followed by appeals and judicial reviews before they eventually simply abscond and work in the black economy. It's an incredibly lengthy process which is underpinned by human rights legislation and can't simply be bypassed. If they try to do things correctly then it'll lead to outright gridlock in the German courts. This is why I think it's going to be a rubber stamp exercise. By the correct definition of a refugee none of these people actually qualify, but you can be sure that the Germans aren't going to try and refuse them all.

In my professional opinion there isn't any way that the Germans can process so many asylum claims without playing fast and loose with the integrity of the system.

Well, maybe I don't care enough about the "system".

Seems a major "push" factor is the the WFP, UNHCR and other organisations which are providing aid to refugee camps are running out of money and cutting rations.

Germany taking in 800,000 refugees is quite something. That's a lot of people!

sass

The facts of the Aylan Kurdi case are now coming in btw. Here's what his Aunt in Canada has to say

The closest I could get to a "source" for this quote was "a reporter".
I think you are being fed a line of BS here Sass. This woman has been repeatedly interviewed in Canadian media and her story has been consistent and never said anything about the mans' dental needs.
In every media reports she claims she wired him $5,000 for passage money.And based on their Odyssey from Damascus I doubt that his dental needs were a priority .

Abdullah and Rehenna Kurdi had lived in the Syrian capital Damascus, but amid mounting hostilities they sought refuge in Aleppo around the time of Alan’s birth.
They arrived just in time for the government-held city to be stormed by rebels. With the metropolis soon beset by looting, urban warfare and barrel bombs flattening entire neighbourhoods, the Kurdis fled again to the border city of Kobane
Once more, their move was tragically ill-timed. They had barely arrived before 10,000 Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant (ISIL) fighters surrounded the city, kicking off a bloody six-month standoff that would capture the world’s attention.
Short stints back in Damascus and Aleppo reportedly followed, before the family decided to try their luck across the border in Turkey.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/the-s ... his-family

I guess I don't get why it is so important that asylum be properly done. I mean so what when you're facing a humanitarian crisis. Papers please, must have your papers....
Ironically enough, that seems to be a Germanic kind of thinking...

Ray Jay wrote:Germany taking in 800,000 refugees is quite something. That's a lot of people!

Yes it is. But is dwarfed by the numbers moving during and after WWII. The UNRRA (set up by the allies and which later became the UNHCR) dealt with about 11 million non-Germans who were displaced into occupied Germany at the end of the war.

I guess I don't get why it is so important that asylum be properly done. I mean so what when you're facing a humanitarian crisis. Papers please, must have your papers....

It matters because if the public come to the view that asylum claims are not being assessed in any meaningful fashion then they'll lose confidence in the very notion of taking in refugees. We can't afford for the line between people genuinely fleeing for their lives and those who are simply looking for a more prosperous lifestyle to become more blurred than it already is. The short term rush of compassion that's taken root in Germany is not likely to last very long once it becomes widely understood that alongside Syrians they've also allowed hundreds of thousands of economic migrants from other countries to enter (with the prospect of ever more to come) who are not receiving anything more than the most cursory of checks. The rate they're going there are going to be enormous administrative backlogs and this is going to result in most of the bogus claimants remaining in Germany for a very long time, and in most cases never going home. People will not put up with that for long. In the UK we spent £700k a day on feeding and housing asylum seekers last year, and we had a much smaller number of them than Germany is planning to accept. They're going to have to set aside billions of euros for this purpose, which in my opinion is money that would be far better spent at source providing aid to the refugees in neighbouring countries.

Again, I'll reiterate that most asylum seekers are never removed. The legal barriers on top of the practical difficulties in finding illegal migrants, getting them documented and then managing to detain them for long enough to effect removal are daunting and it results in few removals actually taking place. At some point it's going to dawn on ordinary working Germans that they've just invited a million or more people into the country who all need to be fed and housed by the taxpayer and 80% of whom are young men who will provide competition in the jobs market for low-paid workers. In a few years these people will bring their wives, children and parents across to join them, significantly increasing the strain on infrastructure, healthcare and schools and leading to the creation of Syrian ghettos in most major German cities. Very few of them will ever go home. It's a recipe for social unrest. Far right political parties are currently polling in second place in France, Sweden and Denmark, and they're on the rise in other countries....

I'd also like to pose the question of what happens when the Syrian civil war does come to an end. It's not going to go on forever after all. At that point Syria will need all of the young, dynamic citizens it can get to move back home and begin rebuilding the country. Generally those who are moving through Europe are exactly the sort of people that Syria will need in order to rebuild, but history suggests that once settled in Germany they will never return.

RJ posted figures saying that net migration to the US was 5 million in 2012. Let me clarify that what I was talking about was net migration from Mexico which has been close to zero the past several years. The source I used did extensive polling of Mexicans living in the US about where they were born to derive its estimates from. If you have different numbers for Mexican immigration I would be happy to look at them, RJ. Otherwise, from what I can tell there is pretty much a consensus that net Mexican immigration has been pretty close to zero since the Financial Crisis. And Mexican immigration drives the immigration debate

Do I support illegal immigration? No , but it's going to happen and frankly I think that people that are so desperate to get here are probably a net contributor to society. What is more problematic is family reunification through legal immigration where we get middle-aged to elderly immigrants who tend to shortly go on public assistance. Illegals have to work to survive. That is why Mexican immigration is slow because there are not enough jobs. Do you really think RJ that if 11 million illegals were in some magical fashion to be immediately deported that the US would be better off?

As far as what to do about illegals, we're certainly not going to deport 11 million people. I favor the current approach of aggressive deportation of immigrants who have committed violent crimes (whether deportation of immigrants--particularly permanent residents---who have committed somewhat minor crimes but are of a type that qualify them for deportation is warranted is a topic for another day). Overall, I favor nudges to keep illegal immigration at a level we can deal with. That means sufficient border controls, focusing on the above-mentioned deportation of dangerous illegals who have committed violent crimes, and also if illegal immigration levels get too high periodic crackdowns on hiring of illegals.

As for RJ's and Archdukes's reaction to my comments, I would agree that my xenophobe comment was too overbroad . But we're talking about a situation where Mexican illegal immigration is at a low ebb. And Trump has gained a lot of popularity with his comments about building a wall and that Mexico is sending us its dregs. Why are Republicans who don't live in border states like Arizona, Texas and California so concerned about this issue? In my opinion, those who have principled, non-prejudicial reasons for reducing immigration are sharing a space with those who have xenophobic reasons for opposing immigration. And IMHO the energy driving this debate is not coming from the non-nativists.

Remember , net immigration from Mexico is flat but this is still a big issue. Hispanics have turned against the Republican Party because they see prejudice there not just principled opposition to illegal immigration (which a majority of Hispanics living here also oppose). So, yes, I should not have included all opposers of reducing immigration knowing or unknowing nativists but I think there is reason to point out that prejudice is providing the juice for this debate.

A friend of mine went back to Louisiana recently and he was amazed how many Confederate flags were flying. He heard the N-word being used by white people. He got directions from a middle-aged black man and got lost and when he talked to this white woman she said he was trying to set you up to be robbed. Are we not allowed to argue that people who fly the Confederate flag are probably prejudiced because there are some who do so and are not prejudiced?

I get the argument that people should not be allowed to shut down debate by labeling the other side as being prejudiced. But we're talking about immigration still being a big issue when there is flat immigration from Mexico. We're talking about Trump getting 25% of Republican support saying he wants to build a wall and Mexico is sending us its worst. We're talking about Republicans who don't live in an area with a large number of immigrants being strongly opposed to illegal immigration when it doesn't directly concern them. Are we not allowed to argue that prejudice is fueling the energy behind this debate because some might feel they are being unfairly labeled?