The Missing 10,000

Over the last couple of days.....various European news sources (German, French, Brit, etc) have talked up this new item which Europol (the police agency of the EU) dug up in terms of statistics.

Ten-thousand (10,000) migrant children have disappeared in Europe since their registered arrival.   This has all occurred within the past two years.

Five thousand of the group.....are suggested to be German-registered....and missing.

Elements of crime? Kidnapping?  Use for exploitation?

I sat and watched this simply noted by the German state-run news last night.....barely noting it.  If ten thousand total kids were missing from around Europe in two years....it'd be a national emergency.  If five-thousand just alone in Germany were missing....it'd be a national emergency.

Curiously, you don't see posters up and any real cop effort.....nor Muslim parents crying junior missing or their dear "Mandy" who just walked off.

So I sat and pondered today over this story.

I've come to this belief.....the ten-thousand kids never really did exist in the first place.

I know.....that sounds stupid, but allow me to explain.

You are Hamad....a single guy leaving Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan, and discover through sources already in Germany that things go better if you have a family or kids.  You got better living accommodations (you don't have to share a room with four guys who are single)......if you claim dependents.

So you sit and think over this, and a cousin offers to let you "borrow" one or two of his kids.  Maybe he got here in Germany four months ago.....maybe a year ago.

You swing this deal.  You get his son who is eight or nine years old and you show up to register with your 'family'.  The wife is dead.....so you tell the naive German guy who pats you on the back and notes it's hard to raise a family without a wife.

So, they process your paperwork and you note you.....your son.....and then they work up living arrangements.  Rather than share some place with five guys....you and your "son" live in a one-room place in an old military barracks area.

Days and weeks pass, and eventually....you put your 'son' on a train and return him to his actual parents.   They are happy.  You are happy.  Meanwhile, the Germans sit and naively go and pay you for your family and ensure your living situation is a family-quarters deal....and not a single-guy deal.

Were all of the 10,000 that way?  No.  My hunch is that a number of the kids who were fifteen or sixteen years old.....got pretty negative over Dad's frustrations and life with the family, so they found a friend, and just left.

But the bulk of these.....maybe out of the 5,000 missing in Germany....my humble guess is that 4,000 of them are fake kids and weren't really existing (already registered in the network somewhere else).

You would think that the Germans would do some special identification and really work to ensure this doesn't occur.  But the reality is that this wasn't exactly a rocket-science type project and they were just worried about problem A, B and C.  The idea of fake kids?  I'm pretty sure that the intellectuals on state-run TV would just stand there in shock when analyzing this issue and then realize how badly this was managed.

I am reminded years ago while in the US military, and I met "Sarge".  Sarge had returned from South Korea with a wife, and moved off-base and had a great housing allowance.  Along about the fourth year on that base.....it kinda came out that no one had met Mrs. Sarge.....ever.  There was a marriage certificate from his base in South Korea, but there just wasn't any real evidence of Mrs. Sarge existing there in Arizona.

Eventually, the commander asked Sarge to bring Mrs Sarge to the base.  He kinda refused and said she was visiting relatives.  When would she return?  Unknown said Sarge.  This went back and forth for a year, until investigators came to find that Mrs. Sarge had legally divorced Sarge back a couple of weeks after getting the green-card in the US.  No one was even sure that Mrs Sarge ever lived a single day in Arizona (our base location).

I think these 10,000 missing kids kinda fall into the same category.  They simply ensure a certain benefits package and a marginal process fails to work properly.