Tuesday, June 19, 2018

The Migration Topic in Today's German News

ARD, the German public TV network, came out with a short piece today....talking over a point that some pro-asylum folks have long suggested.....creating migration and refugee facilities beyond the EU border.

The basic concept is that you'd have some point where ships remove rescued folks and those 'guests' are taken into some type of shelter (beyond the description there, nothing exists).

So after you arrive at such a destination....then you'd fill out paperwork.  Then you'd get declared one of two categories....economic migrant, or official refugee.  One would proceed on in some fashion, and the other would not.

You can imagine how the questions would be worded, and various people standing there would have a paper-script and say the exact phrase, and then they'd announce that during the ship movement....they lost their identity card or passport.

The speed of this bureaucratic processing?  No one gets into this detail.  I can't imagine you being able to handle more than twenty of these reviews per day, by one single 'judge'.  Maybe the EU folks think they will move on quickly but if you had 1,000 folks landing daily.....you'd have to have some type of robust review process set up and operating at a brisk pace.

Where would such a place be?  Presently unknown.  Someone did suggest a number of months ago that it'd be suitable to operate this in northern Africa....but you'd probably have to pay someone or some country to do this, and it'd be into the billions per year deal....like Erdogan got for the no-smuggling deal.  It's not impossible, but it's another two or three billion of tax revenue required to fix Germany's problem. 

The word I'd personally use here in this whole story is 'skeptical'.  I don't buy into the ease of which you'd build these camps and operate them.  I certainly don't think the refugees will allow you to turn them down or return them to Northern Africa.  And all this would do is create a new smuggling route....maybe even going out of the Med and toward the UK beaches.

But the real intellectual side of this....is that it can be 'fixed'.  As long as you can talk about this in some lab experiment way.....folks will continue down this path.  If at any point, you just had some German leadership occur where virtually all visas are dismissed unless you do it via your home-country German consulate....then you'd change the whole game overnight.  But so far.....no German leader wants to promote the idea of denying visas.  

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