Europe-Middle East-Africa Refugee Crisis General Thread

[Hydera]

Some rumors about the swedish government giving free train rides up north to the Finnish border to force them to Finland.

What a bunch of assholes. Follow merkel with similar open border statements and then quietly reverse it by doing this stunt against a neighbor country when the influx is more than expected.

But then again we have Mexico who have been doing this for decades while our presidents have been refusing to respond.

[Hydera]

Why would refugees want to go to Finland instead of Sweden?

Finland is a developed country. But other than that their going to go back to Sweden once they realize how hard it is to learn Finnish. Finnish is quite brutal to learn by non-native speakers and its just as hard as tonal languages.  Swedish is at least much less harder to learn.

[Hydera]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

I can't tell if your being serious....

Anyways I hope Kerry just mis-spoke and meant to say 10,000. None at all would of been better.

[Hydera]

Kerry announced today that the U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017.


Based on the wording of the article, I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be a running total (i.e. the total number we will accept over 2015 - 2017 will be 100,000) or if we're supposed to add those numbers together (i.e. 10,000 in 2015 + 85,000 in 2016 + 100,000 in 2017 = 195,000 over 2015 - 2017).


Which is fantastic news The number of immigrants the U.S. accepted in 2013 fell below the 1 million mark for the first time in like 30 years or something; we need to get that number back up

I can't tell if your being serious....

Anyways I hope Kerry just mis-spoke and meant to say 10,000. None at all would of been better.

I'm being very serious. Accepting more is a very good thing.

Doesn't matter. It's way too low in relation to the mess the US created in the Middle-East in the last decades.

The US should take in 1 million refugees each year, not 100.000 - and do their fair share.

So if we're doing this "proportionately", why stop at the last few decades? Let's go back over the past 150 years to see how much Europe has f-ed up the Middle East and world at large

Let's not. There is a big difference between direct responsibility caused by recent intervention and the indirect effect of actions taken a hundred years ago. Among other things Americans alive today voted for the politicians responsible for these actions. Whereas modern Europeans can hardly be responsible for what the ancestors of some of us did (you are making the classical "Europe is a country" fallacy here).

In addition the two European countries with the major responsibility in this - Britain and France - are not the ones taking most of the refugees and neither of them had universal suffrage when they committed the worst mistakes.

Besides the idea that the world would be so much better without European imperialism is questionable. In addition to the damage it also stabilized and organized many areas, promoted trade, brought Western medicine and infrastructure, eradicated Arabic slavery in Africa etc. It is a complex calculus whether things would have been better for the average person in Africa and Asia without it and varies a lot by region. Other cultures build equally cruel or crueler empires and destroyed each others civilization with great vindictiveness.

The current Middle Eastern borders were a huge mistake, but it would have been hard and conflictual to adjust clan based Arab societies to modernity anyway. It is not as if countries like Ethiopia or Thailand has been without problems despite not being colonized (well, at least only for a short while for Ethiopia).

Imperialism

Imperialism with it was a holy  up, introduced Western medicine and resulted in the overpopulation problem in 3rd world countries.

And created aribtary borders between hostile ethnic groups.

But neither of that was done by the US.

And most of the Syrian "rebels" and islamist groups are funded not by the US but by the Gulf arab states. Their involvement in Syria is much much more than what the US did. A lot of funding+weapons given to islamist groups in syria like Al-Nusra and Sham front and ETC was from the Gulf arab states.

Perhaps the gulf arab states accept all of the syrians.

[Hydera]

Wow, Germans are really pushing the whole "fleeing the same terror we are experiencing now" narrative. Couple of weeks ago Assad was still behind the crisis, now it's all of a sudden ISIS. Moreover what sort of terror are they escaping when they cross from Slovenia into Austria?

most people are fleeing both daesh and al-assad. i have no idea how this is not incredibly obvious to you.

ISIS appeared a few years after the Syrian civil war started where most of the influx to turkey was around 2011-2013.

ISIS went from being based mainly in Anbar region in iraq to crossing over to syria and taking most of the Deir es Zor to Jarablus.

Besides the areas that have intense ISIS conflict(Raqqa governate, Hasakah governate, Deir ez Zor) had 20% of the population prior to the conflict.

So its safe that most of them were not fleeing ISIS but the battles between the rebel groups and Assad's military.

[Hydera]

Wow, Germans are really pushing the whole "fleeing the same terror we are experiencing now" narrative. Couple of weeks ago Assad was still behind the crisis, now it's all of a sudden ISIS. Moreover what sort of terror are they escaping when they cross from Slovenia into Austria?

most people are fleeing both daesh and al-assad. i have no idea how this is not incredibly obvious to you.

ISIS appeared a few years after the Syrian civil war started where most of the influx to turkey was around 2011-2013.

ISIS went from being based mainly in Anbar region in iraq to crossing over to syria and taking most of the Deir es Zor to Jarablus.

Besides the areas that have intense ISIS conflict(Raqqa governate, Hasakah governate, Deir ez Zor) had 20% of the population prior to the conflict.

So its safe that most of them were not fleeing ISIS but the battles between the rebel groups and Assad's military.

As for the refugees in Turkey they're mostly from north western Syria, which was mostly under "FSA" control in 2011-2013, and the government only really began to reconquer it in early 2014

Forgot to mention that ISIS's takeover of the Euphrates river area of Syria begun in early 2014.  The claim that syrians are "fleeing ISIS" even though ISIS only conquered an area where just 20% of the syrian population resided pre-war.  would mean a super large portion of syrians claiming to be fleeing ISIS would not pass the BS test.