Yesterday in Berlin....Chancellor Merkel had a chance to meet up with the Premier of Tunisia (Chahed). Chief topic? The news media won't go into big details but the Chancellor wanted more openness by Tunisia to take back thousands of failed-visa applicants who sit currently in Germany. You might want to note this as part of the picture.....there's the crowd who currently have failed visa-applications, and the crowd yet to come....who will eventually fail on their visa-application.
The Tunisia Premier? Well....he's not that open to the idea.
You need to put yourself into his shoes.
Here is a country in north Africa....approximately 10.9 million people....about the size of Hessen and Bavaria together. The economy was growing to some degree over the past forty years.....helped greatly by tourism (golf courses and resorts along the Med), and then hit a stumbling block at the beginning of 2015 with various terror acts. If you go back to 2009....they had a minimum of 390,000 Tunisians who were employed within tourism, and it was a fair chunk of the national economy (minimum of 5-to-7 percent).
Added to their problems which were kinda noted two decades ago already....was corruption. It's hard not to find part of the government or the commercial sector....which doesn't have itself tied to corruption.
If you are 15 years old and a Tunisian kid....you likely have a fairly negative view of the future ahead of you. Things aren't working that well, and jobs are a problem.
Toss in radical Islam and the potential weekly threats......the locals are fairly happy when the young radical kids leave Tunisia for Europe. When some idiot European political figure comes calling to ask you to take the wild kid back.....well....you just don't have much enthusiasm to do it.
So you can understand not only the Premier's attitude, but the general attitude by the public in Tunisia. It wouldn't matter if we were only talking about a hundred of these punks....or a thousand....it's all the same....they need to go elsewhere....NOT back to Tunisia.
The Germans....ever clever and intellectual....are stuck in a Twilight-Zone-like situation. Thousands of young Tunisian guys who saw nothing in their homeland, and they've made into Germany but failed the visa-application. No one wants them. Every single day.....the group faces some ISIS-recruiter or determined Islamic guy who wants to flip them over to terrorism.
Maybe there is some amount of money that Germany can pull out of some pocket and entice the Tunisian political folks to take some of these punks back....but then you have to think in your mind....what exactly will stop the flow because there are more kids in Tunisia reaching maturity shortly, and they will jump to the raft-business and make their way into Germany. Just how big a pocket of money does Germany have.....and when will the public suddenly wake up and figure out this lose-lose-lose game?
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