15.03.2016: “Later, this month, [Grandi] will issue an appeal for member states [of the UN] to accept at least 10 percent of Syria’s refugees. That’s 400,000 people who need to be resettled, including about 170,000 whom nations have already promised to take,” UN Refugee Chief: Western Leaders Stir Up ‘Hatred for the Stranger, for the Immigrant’.
10.02.2016: “What does it mean to the people in Calais (or those who are not, but might as well be), if they can so easily be used to evoke fears of invasion, of a swarming terror? Cameron’s underlying logic involves trading on the dehumanized foreigner, a meme for the modern bogeyman, usefully deployed to frighten not children but British voters into good behaviour. And so, the call to the humanitarian and human rights community is not simply to defend law and policies or to deliver assistance, but to counter (the principle of) humanity under attack and the equally powerful banalization of the attack. That is where it starts. That is where it always starts.” Operation Fear, Redux
08.02.2016: three bad ideas: pay Turkey to keep people there; trap people in Greece; and, make life miserable for those who get here, Fear and Loathing of Refugees in Europe
06.02.2016: How to manage the migrant crisis: curbing “push factors” by beefing up aid, using “hotspots,” and halting uncontrolled migrant flows in Europe.
01.02.2016: A way for Europe to remove chaos from the migration crisis, “It is time for the EU to recognize that the mismanaged, chaotic nature of the recent refugee flow is as much — if not more — of a threat than the numbers of refugees itself.”
30.01.2016: On the EU-Turkey deal, “It was one of the most important European foreign-policy initiatives in years, but there was not a sniff of strategy to it,” Value shoppers
28.01.2016: Rights groups criticize Europe refugee resettlement plan, “…top-level politicians may be willing to use mass resettlement as a way of managing the fallout from the European refugee crisis. The plan has been criticized by rights groups because it would go hand in hand with the expulsion, possibly via ferry, of most refugees who land on European shores in the future.”
20.01.2016: “It is now reasonably clear that the Dublin III Regulation has failed, whether that is because of its cynical application by Member States or because of the increase in entrants due to the catastrophe in North Africa. Whatever replaces it must be fair to Member States and fair to the people risking their lives to escape persecution.” Dublin regulation to be scrapped?
“The answer lies in Europe’s dysfunctional asylum policy which, to borrow the phrasing of Refugee Law scholar Cathryn Costello, majors in shifting responsibility for refugees and migrants instead of sharing it.”
“Dutch academic Hein de Haas believes the Left has boxed itself in when it comes to migration by drawing on humanitarian arguments and neglecting practical ones.‘You can’t persuade people to have the same values as you,’ he tells me in a weary tone when we meet in an Oxford bookshop. Instead, he has spent years running the numbers. His analysis tracks migration flows and policy over the past century in 163 countries. And his findings are startling. His work on visa policy shows that border controls have often spurred settlement, not stopped it.” [links in original text]
