Refugee Crisis: You Don’t Solve an Unsolvable Problem, You Manage It

The daily realities of the refugee crisis are not being felt in the same way across Europe. For the vast majority of Europeans, it is a phenomenon that minimally affects their everyday lives, they are thus responding not to real experiences, but to their media coverage and the political reactions they spark. For populist forces all over Europe — as we have recently seen in France, evidenced by the recent electoral success of the National Front — it is an election bonanza; a superb vote winner, giving them a chance to toy with one of the deepest political fears of the electorate, the fear of the “other”.

However, in some countries and regions, the refugee crisis is a real life situation. When you are living or working in the center of Athens, just a few blocks from Victoria Square, the refugees and the immigrants are not theoretical constructs.

A few weeks ago I visited the Athens Commercial Airport. My youngest daughter had just moved (or should I say migrated) to London, and I was trying to send some of her personal belongings to her new home. While I was waiting, I looked around at all of the other boxes and parcels that were about to travel. Among the various products for export, there was a number of large, rectangular boxes which I could not categorize. I also noticed three well dressed men that had appeared nearby, and had started boiling something in a small pot. It was bizarre, I thought, it looked like they were preparing Turkish coffee. I moved closer to see what was going on. That was when I realized that they were Iraqi diplomats; they were not boiling coffee but hot wax, to seal the coffins of refugees that have drowned during the last few days with their official government seal.

Our newest export from Europe to Iraq was dead bodies of women and children, who had been looking for a normal life in Europe. But who is accountable for these horrifying exports?

A good friend of mine recently compared the Greek borders with a block of swiss cheese. Our land borders have a fence, similar to the ones now being erected in various parts in Europe, but it is the thousands of miles of Greek coasts in the islands or the mainland that have become the new road to Europe for people that choose the very real risk of death, rather than the life they are currently living.

What do you do when someone is ready to die in order to cross your border? Do you let them drown or do you rescue them? Do you welcome them or do you consider them illegal? Do you hit them or do you give them water?

I will not try to answer these very real questions for a simple reason. There is no acceptable answer.

The moral answer, based on the universal criteria for human dignity and values, is different from the political answer, which is based on what the affluent societies of the West are ready to accept. And this is not a conclusion that is limited to Europe alone. It stands for any other case of mass migration. Even the mighty US, with all their military and economic power and a long history of accepting immigrants, have failed to seal their borders or to provide an effective “solution” to the problem.

Why is that? For the very simple reason that the refugee/immigrant problem has no solution. It’s a problem that you have to manage but cannot resolve, at least not at the current phase of human development.

At present, by design, our social solidarity and responsibility for the weak and the needy ends at our borders. Beyond these we talk about development assistance, not solidarity. This proves that the basis for redistribution of wealth through our social policies is neither the unacceptability of inequality, nor the moral necessity of solidarity, but instead, the need to keep the social peace within our own societies.

This is the fundamental difficulty of this problem; that the political reality in this case has no moral basis and the moral necessity no political backing.

But if we cannot resolve this problem, the next best thing we can do is try to manage it in a humane way, within the limitations posed by the European electorates.

What is the Greek experience on the issue? For us the phenomenon of economic migrants is not new. Since 1991, we have had a huge influx of migrants, originally mainly from other Balkan countries but in later stages from Asia and Africa as well. Today, more than 1.5 million immigrants are living in Greece, most of them are relatively recent arrivals (they came within the last 10–15 years). These immigrants make up close to 15% of the total population in Greece and are an integral part of the Greek economy and society. In fact, they used to be even more, but many of them left during the long years of the Greek crisis.

They still do most of “the three D’s of work” (Difficult, Dirty, Dangerous) in the country, but a large number of them has managed to move on to owning their own shops, property, businesses etc. Their children go to our schools and all of them use the public health system. There are tensions and difficulties sometimes, but nothing the Greek society cannot manage. In the same way as we will manage the 50.000 refugees that has been set as our quota, according to recent EU decisions.

In reality, we are suffering more from the unorthodox handling of the refugee problem than from the refugees themselves. As an example, during the last few weeks, our railroad connection to the North stopped, because of clashes between immigrants that were being stopped at the borders by our northern neighbor, and refugees that were being allowed to pass. Multinational companies like Hewlett-Packard are even considering leaving Greece as a result of these issues. Also, during the past summer, most of our islands to the East have been dealt a serious blow to their tourist season.

Why have we not been able to manage this issue more effectively? To a large extent, as a result of the fact that there has been no coherent, organized policy to manage the issue at the European level, during the last two years.

We (still) have no real policy on Syria. No real policy on the accumulation of millions of refugees and economic immigrants in Turkey, right across from our European borders. Until recently there was no policy on how to proactively handle the refugee problem in Turkey, rather than at the coasts of the Aegean Islands.

The best way to deal with the refugee/migration issue is to be proactive. To act in a timely manner and do so as closely to the source of the problem as you can possibly do, rather than simply being reactive, acting too late and with a huge human and economic toll.

Our effort to manage this issue ought to be multifaceted. Militarily, the threat of ISIS will have to be entirely destroyed for some of the refugees to be able to return home. We thus need to help Turkey — in spite its shortcomings — to integrate a large number of these immigrants within its own society, where for religious and cultural reasons this process is likely to be easier, smoother. We also need more and especially more efficient development assistance in the source countries. But more than anything else, we need to remain calm and humane. This by itself will be extremely important to relieve tensions within European societies.

A million refugees in a continent of 500 million is not the end of the world, as some right wing extremists want us to believe. As the terror attacks in Paris have proved, the danger of inflaming the large immigrant communities — especially Muslim — by irresponsible, dumb rhetoric, giving rise to a new face of racism, is by far a larger threat than any jihadists ISIS manages to send our way through the southern route.

Are these policies and the change of attitude that I am proposing, going to solve the problem? Of course not. As I have already explained the problem is unsolvable. As long as there is war and underdevelopment, refugees and economic immigrants will flee their homes and they will attempt to cross our borders. We should in fact welcome the fact; their coming means that we are still — in spite our serious troubles — a unique island of peace and prosperity, in a world that is still turbulent and to a large extent economically and politically underdeveloped.

It is when someone is forced to abandon his land and country wherein the bigger problem lies, not in having to accept others into his homeland.

Based on a speech I recently gave at the EU Refugee Crisis conference of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Belgrade.