Western Europe always portrays asylum seekers as “gold diggers” who are just trying to escape poverty and find an easy life. It doesn’t say so out loud, but refugee policy in every country is based on this assumption. As Western governments don’t want to admit that most of the world’s conflicts are created by them for their own purposes, as in Syria, promoting such a view is necessary to disguise the humanitarian consequences of their actions.
But only a tiny proportion of people claiming they are fleeing persecution ever make it to Western Europe or North America. The need for refugee resettlement in Europe will rise sharply in 2015, according to UNHCR, but this is largely accounted for by the conflict in Ukraine and the huge outflow from Syria affecting all regions of the world.
Over 90 per cent of the world’s asylum seekers live in countries as poor, or poorer, than those they have left. These countries nevertheless manage to provide basic support precisely because their own populations know what poverty is like, and this is the crux of the issue.
In poor countries governments need to be seen caring about people, genuinely or not, to ensure their own survival. If it is thought that they give too much to refugees and too little to their own citizens this creates problems, but it is very rare that most refugees become better off than most locals. Taking care of people gives dubious governments composed of elites remote from the population a human face, a very valuable commodity in a world of regime change imposed from without and turmoil fomented within.
But Western countries do not have to address these problems to the same extent. They assume that everyone can play a part in their success. Therefore Western governments are more focused on providing opportunities for people to get on the gravy train than improving the lives of people who need basic subsistence before they can better themselves.
All this has created a situation where giving refugees housing and welfare support is perceived as giving them special privileges. It is assumed that everyone else has to work and compete to get homes and money, but refugees don’t. This perception is promoted and exploited by governments for entirely selfish reasons. In a democracy, you can’t blame voters for your problems because they will vote against you for doing so. Pick on those who can’t vote, and enough people will be satisfied to keep you in power for longer.
Now the West has caused so many problems in Syria, after refusing to address the many existing ones for so long, that Western countries will have to take in the same numbers of refugees Third World countries are used to dealing with. But it isn’t just this which is causing them problems. The current wave of desperate migrants has shown the Western refugee con up for what it is – and its governments seem to have no idea how to deal with this unexpected backlash.
Who the public are
For the reasons stated above, being anti-immigrant has long been seen as a vote winner. When governments talk about clamping down on immigration they suggest that they are responding to public opinion, and the press which has helped manufacture anti-immigrant feeling reports this as fact.
In reality however the public is not objecting to refugees themselves. People see their friends stranded for years on waiting lists, unable to get a home, while foreigners seem to be automatically housed. Former servicemen are given very little support, and left to live in night shelters and beg on the streets, while refugees get benefits and don’t have to work, or so it is said.
If governments effectively addressed these problems, there would be far less objection to refugees also being supported. Indeed, there is likely to be solidarity between people in the same circumstances, as is usually the case. The argument that the refugees are using up all the resources would be even less convincing if the indigenous population understood how refugees are being used as a means of denying those resources to everyone else.
Much to the surprise of Western governments, this is what is now happening. The initial response to the mass migration of Syrian refugees was to talk about limiting how many should be allowed to settle in the West, another attempt to win votes based on public fear. But images of dead children being washed ashore after going to extreme lengths to try and get out of Syria have suddenly resonated with a public which feels they, too, have been abandoned as not as human as others..
When historically liberal Iceland said it would accept only 50 Syrian refugees 12,000 Icelanders offered to house them. Western cities are now falling over themselves, as a matter of civic pride, to become ‘cities of sanctuary’ because their own people are marching through the streets carrying homemade signs saying “Refugees Welcome”.
Far right demonstrations against immigrants, which attracted hundreds or thousands of people a few weeks ago, are now being called off because no one is turning up. Popular actors, who once would not dare mention demonised refugees for fear of losing popularity, are taking up collections for them in theatres and getting a big positive response.
Western governments can’t hide behind public opinion any more. All they can do is catch up with it, and make resources available. But if they do so the public will say, “Why didn’t you do this before?” Then a lot of truths will come out of the woodwork, and the reason why we didn’t hear them. No one wants to be part of a government which has to admit it has deliberately abused its own citizens by using someone else’s citizens against them.
Hidden in plain sight
One of the usual arguments against accepting refugees is that there is nowhere to put them. With every wave of migration we hear before any refugees arrive that there is no room for the tiny proportion of them who claim asylum in the West. Then accommodation always magically appears, and people are moved out of camps and resettled until they become established and support themselves.
This doesn’t happen because free accommodation has suddenly been discovered. Models of successful resettlement do exist, and are used when they need to be, but are not made widely known precisely because they are successful.
One such model is in the Swedish town of Södertälje. This old industrial centre outside Stockholm is best known as the home of Scania trucks and the place where tennis legend Bjorn Borg grew up. It is also famous within Sweden and beyond for having a large Middle East Christian Minority population, largely from Syria and Iraq. Indeed it has a number of non-Chalcedonian Orthodox churches, be they Syrian Jacobite or Assyrian Nestorian or Chaldean.
There is always accommodation available in Södertälje, as Sweden’s love of regulation produces grey markets in every area, including sub-letting, which are not strictly legal but tolerated as the inevitable by-product of excessive bureaucracy. Syrian and Iraqi refugees live throughout the town, although there are inevitably concentrations in some areas, and are employed everywhere, in shops, public services, the police, education and the legal profession.
The usual problems refugee settlement brings with it are overcrowding and exploitative crime. Refugees generally commit much less opportunistic or serious crime, but more drug dealing, car theft and prostitution take place in their areas of settlement because these are organised by others preying on those refugees.
Consequently if any town takes in refugees it is often more interested in what they might do than removing the reasons they do it. But Södertälje has no such problems. Too many people live in most of the town’s apartments, but they are spacious enough for this not to be a problem and part of clean, well-maintained social housing. Crime exists but isn’t visible, and has no obvious effect on life in the town.
Long term residents say that the only problem they see is the occasional summer drunk, none of whom are Syrian or Iraqi refugees. They stoutly defend their town, even if they move away because the schools have to concentrate on getting immigrant children up to speed with Swedish in the initial stages.
Södertälje has two professional soccer teams. One is called Syrianska and the other Assyryska, and as their names imply they began as public parks teams founded by immigrants from Syria in the 1970s. Both are now cosmopolitan clubs who have played at the top level of the Swedish league.
Many top level soccer clubs around the world were founded by immigrants from countries were the game was better established. It is highly unusual for clubs founded by immigrants from countries where the game was less established to achieve such eminence in less than 40 years. The success of Assyryska and Syrianska is the direct result of a model of refugee resettlement known about, available and replicable, which suddenly disappears from official view when the time comes to do the same again.
Ancestral memory
Those fleeing the horrendous situation in Syria are not trying to change the world. Saving their lives is their primary consideration. But at this particular wave of migration is increasingly being seen for what it is, and is exposing the lies Western governments have propagated and lived off for so long. If this goes on, it will have profound consequences for not only the survival of those governments but the well-being of those who really lie behind them.
The signs are that the Western European public, which has been told for so long what its opinion is, will succeed in forcing Western governments accept that the reality is different. If that happens, those governments will have to make humanitarian concerns paramount, rather than short-sighted initiatives which punish the poor for the sake of economic growth which never seems to make those poor richer.
Then people will see that they have the power to control how governments behave, whether or not they live in democracies. Having done it once, they will do it again when the vast majority have the same issue. Corporations and foreign powers which can get what they want through exerting their influence exploit that at every opportunity. They know that, if the common people of any state can achieve the same, they will exploit that situation in exactly the same way, and steal this power from their hands.
How do they know this? There is a large organisation you’ve heard of, which was established by refugees and is still run by them and for them, in their own way, to serve their own interests. This has become the biggest and richest such organisation in the world. It is called the United States of America.
That’s why the USA and its friends are still desperate to criminalise Syria’s refugees. They don’t want another New World, which most people prefer, sweeping away what is now the old one they have come to represent.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
