France’s solution to EU migrant crisis: more bombings?

Ramin Mazaheri, Paris

France’s solution to the EU migrant crisis is apparently another bombing campaign, but at least they plan to get the UN’s permission this time: President Francois Hollande will seek a resolution permitting the EU to destroy the boats used by traffickers taking people from North Africa to Europe.

With leftists like France, who needs conservatives?

It’s not yet clear what form this destruction will take – Rafale air raids, the mining of ports or maybe something less dramatic.

We must be forgiven if we assume the worst, but Hollande is clearly no fan of peaceful dinners at a cafe: He’s gone to war in Mali and the Central African Republic, came within hours of bombing Damascus, deployed 10,000 soldiers on French streets for months, and that’s not even the full list.

Sadly, if recent history is any judge, France’s latest push for violence will prove just as ineffective in resolving the current crisis.

The Mediterranean has become a maritime graveyard, with some 1,300 people drowning this month – migrant workers, refugees, women, children –as they sought passage to Europe.

The global shock forced an emergency meeting in Brussels but, as they increasingly do, the EU decided on a military-only solution.

Their plan of boat destructions, increased patrols and battleship deployments essentially treats refugees and migrants as if they were dangerous pirates. Calling migrant ship captains “modern-day slave traders” totally overblown, as though ferrying people from one place to another and then letting them free is equivalent to running a prostitution ring or 18th-century cotton plantation.

It’s a bad response based on not only a lack of compassion, but a lack of responsibility. No one expects Europe to take an exceptional moral stance, but accepting these refugees would be the just and natural outcome of the belligerent foreign policies of many EU-member nations: a fair “effect” to their “cause”.

Mediterranean deaths have skyrocketed a stunning 500% since 2011, which was when the West hijacked and then derailed the Arab Uprising via the bombing of Libya and the backing of radical militants in both Libya and Syria.

Result: Mediterranean refugees currently hail from Syria three times more often than any other country. Italy reported that in 90% of cases the port of origin for Mediterranean migrants is Libya, as a once stable-nation has become totally lawless.

But while US-allied Western Europe is content to start wars, destabilize countries and let such conditions be created, they have been totally unwilling to clean up their own mess: France accepted just 500 Syrian refugees in 2014, and the same is planned for this year. The United Kingdom has accepted just 90 Syrians as of February.

Of course, there’s no discussion in the West of accepting Libyan refugees, because according to NATO and their unquestioning media backers Libya has been “liberated”.

Look at the Mediterranean migrant numbers from this year and you’ll see that many do hail from sub-Saharan African countries which have not endured Western military interventions - places like Gambia and Senegal. But you’ll also find countries which have, like Mali, as well as perpetual European target Afghanistan.

Scratch the surface on other significant countries of origin, like Somalia and Eritrea, and you’ll see that Europe has played a major role in the recent troubles that caused them to become places to flee.

For the Europeans along the Mediterranean, suffering from years of economic austerity with no end in sight (and no results, either), banning these migrants is a pretty easy sell.

That’s the second tragedy of the EU’s response: the failure to appreciate the positive economic impact of immigration.

Migrants obviously make their home country richer by sending money back home, but studies repeatedly show that migrants make their host nation wealthier as well.

What about crime? Studies show no correlation of increased crime with increased immigration, in fact some show the opposite. After all, immigrants - legal or otherwise - rarely want to jeopardize their situation by interacting with cops.

Many rightfully consider open borders a human right. I immigrated after all – maybe you did too, or your parents? But if that’s too much for you to handle, try this: Studies repeatedly estimate that installing totally open borders would increase the global gross domestic product (GDP) by between 50 and 150 percent.

It’s too bad that all of these facts and well-researched studies are so level-headed that they have no chance to sell more newspapers or draw more viewers. And there’s no law requiring voters to be informed before depositing their ballot.

So “Fortress Europe” will stand, for now, but it would be very helpful if they weren’t so offensive. 

RM/KA

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