Migration to the EU

Everyone has seen the disturbing scenes of the "boat people" crossing the Mediterranean to try to find a new life in Europe. Hundreds of thousands have crossed from Africa and the Middle East and hundreds of thousands more are on the way.

I agree with Matteo Renzi that Europe must respond in a united way and that all countries of the EU should play their part by accepting a fair share of asylum speakers. He has also proposed that economic migrants should be repatriated and unfortunately for those who are not regarded as candidates for asylum this is a harsh reality. The world is organised by nation states and all states  regulate who is allowed to settle and who is not. A nation state also must also regulate the activities of people who have not entered the state "legally". The scenes at Calais yesterday were disturbing.

The situation regarding the boat people will only get worse. The UN estimates that there are sixty million displaced people in the world as the result of wars, famine and poverty. Western Europe has a responsibility to help these people and treat them humanely. For centuries, Western European nations including the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and Spain have colonised Africa and the Middle East. Our nations have destabilised and in some cases enslaved the local population. We have organised the mass movement of people  as economic migrants.

We have imposed ourselves upon the indigenous people of Africa and the Middle East as economic migrants ourselves. We have also imposed wars upon the people that we have colonised. The First and Second World Wars were classic examples from the twentieth century. In the twenty first century we have invaded Iraq and Libya without thinking what would happen in the future.

We have quite possibly organised adverse climate change by pouring industrial quantities of carbon di-oxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The consequences of climate change could be worse for the people of Africa and the Middle East than war.

Western Europe has a responsibility to help and it is little wonder that millions of people are on the move towards Europe. The migrants  believe that they should be helped and they also believe that we have a moral duty to help them; their case is strong.

We  are rich enough as a European society to allow  a good number of economic migrants settle. We must  be realistic about this however. Eventually the number could become so great that it threatens the economic viability of Europe itself; but this will not happen for a long time. A seriously weakened and disorganised Europe will not be able to provide the aid necessary to help potential migrants stay in their own country. Europe will not be able to meet its moral obligation to offset the effects of climate change and war.

Britain must play its full part to assist the EU to solve the problems of mass migration. We are not being forced to do anything by the European Commission and we are exercising our right not to accept the migrants despite the pleas of the European Commission. This is a rather ironic position as many "euro  sceptics " aver that the European Commission tells us what to do - they don't. Britain should act because it has a moral obligation to do so. All Europeans have an obligation because we have benefited, most certainly, from the past subjugation of African and Middle Eastern states.


It is not good enough to say that it is someone else's problem.


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/mediterranean-migrant-crisis-not-italy-but-europe



http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/15/we-will-hurt-eu-if-migrant-crisis-is-not-fixed-says-italian-pm-matteo-renzi