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Originally Posted by Osem
Do me a favour.  You only have to see what happened after Merkel's ill judged comments for as much proof as you'll ever get in a situation like this. Do you really think that if Cameron suddenly announced an open door and guaranteed permanent refuge, loads more wouldn't head straight here in order to find a better life? |
Most probably they would but this sudden mass of migration happened before Germany took in a large number of refugees. It's only recently that EU countries have openly spoken about taking in these migrants and that was in response to the developing crisis rather than the spark for it. I think they would still come and attempt to get in illegally in many countries as ultimately the risk of getting caught is still better than the risk of staying in a warzone or oppressive police state.
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The very fact that Australia has to a large extent solved what was a growing problem there by doing the opposite and being much tougher only adds to the argument IMHO. It didn't stop the boats on day one, week one or month one - it took time, but slowly as the word got around that migrants would be stopped from getting to the mainland and taken to some island in the middle of nowhere the numbers fell massively.
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We're not talking of a conventional migration problem though which is what Australia has faced. Most of their immigrants come from the UK or Eastern Asia (China, India, Pakistan etc). None of these countries are quite experiencing the exodus that we're seeing from Syria, Eritrea and Libya. The numbers we're dealing with in Europe at the moment are vastly more than Australia faced.
Australia may provide a useful example in the case of how to deal with a conventional idea of what excessive migration is, hundreds of thousands for example, but we are dealing with a full blown crisis in the millions. Syria alone accounts for around 4 million refugees. Australia faced high numbers of migrants, Europe is facing the disintegration of several states at once.
I disagree with the idea of just refusing to take them for two reasons. One is that I think that migrants will come irrespective of the legality or ease of obtaining citizenship given the collapse of their home nations and secondly it doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the large amounts of people already here.
That said I don't know what the solution is. We witnessing the collapse of nations so maybe attempting to stabilise them might help but how would we do that?