Few if any British people have not been moved by the sight of young children trudging along railway tracks and rough roads in Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary with their parents aiming to reach Sweden and Germany. But as numbers of migrants coming from Syria to Turkey rises beyond a million in a few months this year, it is essential that what now has the dimensions of a two-pronged invasion of Europe from Turkey and from Libya be brought to a halt as quickly as possible.

Prime Minister Cameron is absolutely right both practically and morally to allow only children from the refugee camps on the borders of Syria with Turkey and Syria with Lebanon to enter the United Kingdom as refugees. The figure of 20,000 over four years has been mentioned which has been assumed by commentators to include any identifiable parents.

Constructing Safe-Havens

In this context, Horatio’s proposal (August 20^th) to establish a series of protected save-havens around the Syrian borders and Libyan coast in the form eventually of self-sustaining small towns constructed from mobile home type prefabricated kits erected by the British Army (and others) is right on the nail. Apart from their immediate short-term relief of the homeless, they would also give all those fit young males we see on every TV clip of the migrant streams, something positive to do. Given the absolute failure of the Libyan and Syrian States, these small towns would be the nuclei of new secular states, protected from the start by NATO forces until able to survive on their own.

Europe’s urgent need to restore its borders

Why have the migrant streams focussed on Greece in the last few months? The pressure from Libya towards Italy hasn’t gone away[1]. A report (from HMS Bulwark via the Guardian newspaper of 6^th June) estimates that about 450,000-500,000 migrants mainly from North and East African moslem countries are waiting to make the perilous crossing from Libya to the Italian islands of Sicily and Lampedusa. The answer to the question lies in Germany.

Since the founding of the Bundesrepublik in 1952, Germany has taken only two independent initiatives outside the European Union and both have been disastrous:

(1) The out-of-the-blue decision to recognise Croatia’s break from Yugoslavia, which precipitated the full-scale civil wars in Croatia itself (1991-95), Bosnia (1992-95), Kosovo (1998-99), Macedonia (2001). Of the six former provinces of Yugoslavia, only Slovenia and Montenegro escaped serious death and destruction.

(2) Germany’s decision on August 25^th to admit all migrants coming to Germany’s borders if they claimed to be Syrian refugees (which all will of course). This opening of their borders actually formalised what had been clear since the start of the summer that Germany was in flagrant breach of the 1990 Dublin Convention on asylum-seekers, incorporated into the 2007 Lisbon Treaty and solemnly signed by the German Chancellor at the time. This protocol stipulates that refugees must apply for asylum in the first EU country they arrive in. Hungary’s government was just applying EU law when it refused to let the refugees through to Austria and Slovakia without proper asylum papers (nobody wants to go to Slovakia).

Britain can learn the lesson, once again, that if Germany (or France) decides an EU rule doesn’t suit them, well they just ignore it.

The practical effect of the Schengen (abolition of internal borders) Agreement

This Agreement was signed originally in 1985 by five EU states, and latterly by 26 of the present 28 member countries. Britain and Ireland are the two exceptions.

The intention of course back in 1985 was to make the EU (EC then) more of a single country, like the United States of America. This is the unremitting goal of the European political establishment. Schengen was, and is seen, as a key practical expression of the freedom of movement principle reiterated in every EU/EC/EEC Treaty document. Germany was the keenest country on this and caused Britain trouble in the 1990s by objecting to passport controls on EU nationals at UK borders. The main practical effect however is the fact that once anyone of any original non-EU nationality steps into the 26 country EU Schengen space, they can legally and practically go anywhere without check if they have either registered as an asylum-seeker, or obtained a visa from any one of the 26 Schengen countries, or have become a citizen of any EU country.

The Dublin convention was designed to control third world movement into the EU. Now, owing to Germany’s rule-breaking, Germany itself has become the target of quite literally millions of migrants and would-be migrants from Africa, the Middle East and more generally an unfathomable proportion of the three billion people in what has been termed the immigrant-sending countries (see post of August 12^th).

EU’s exploitation of the Immigrant Crisis

Following its settled practice of always using a problem to advance its own supranational goals, the EU is now using a combination of threats and bribes to make EU Schengen countries take what its Commission sees as a “fair share” of the never-ending refugee stream – initially 160,000 – but soon, inevitably to be 500,000 rising to one million unless it physically blocks entry to Greece and Italy. Here both countries need enhanced help from those countries with suitable naval ships, notably Britain and France.

Britain’s contribution to relieving the migration crisis

Britain already has had HMS Bulwark, a modern assault/dock vessel, on more or less permanent duty rescuing people in the sea struggling to get from Libya to Italy. To-date about 4,000 have been rescued from the sea, but in the absence of the safe-haven towns, all that happened is that the rescued people have been transported in safety to Italy which is what they were aiming for in the first place. Indeed the suspicion is growing that a high proportion of would-be migrants are deliberately sinking their vessels near to the Libyan coast in order to get on to a naval vessel such as Bulwark or its replacement on station HMS Enterprise. It is clearly really urgent that safe-haven enterprise towns are established – as soon as possible – with the collaboration of such Libyan authorities as exist, with Britain and Egypt taking the lead in Cyrenaica and Italy and France in Tripolitania, as suggested in our post of August 12^th.

Besides this project – which must be a long-term one (say ten years plus) Britain has, over the last three years, paid around £900 million in aid to sustain some 250,000 people in camps in Syria itself. This is over £1,000 per person per year. Nobody appears to know if value for money has been obtained, but clearly it is time that this level of support should be systematically redirected towards the self-help enterprise project.

How can the migrant-sending countries help themselves more: birth control should be an absolute condition for receiving any but immediate life-saving assistance.

In 1951, Syria had a population of 3.75 million people[2]. In the last year (2011) before massive refugee streams got going, the Syrian population reached 21 million, an increase of 5.6 times. This is about the same rate of increase as recorded for the Middle East, Africa and South-East Asian countries (MEASEA) excluding China, Japan and Korea. There is no way that the world or the countries concerned can sustain such a rate of increase – 2.9% per annum or about ten times the average rate of increase of the combined populations in Northern Europe, North America and Australasia (NENAA). If these rates of increase persist for another 50 years, the combined (immigrant-sending) MEASEA populations will be 12 times that of the (immigrant-receiving) NENAA countries , who will practically be unable thereby to help them anyway.

This is the measure of the reality behind the immigrant crisis. The only true morality for the aid agencies and the shouters is to recognise this reality and make all government and NGO aid, except the most immediate life-saving help, conditional on adopting effective birth control, aiming at an average of not more than two children per mother (gross fertility rate of 2.0). This slowing of world population increase over the next 50 years is vital and would also be a tremendous liberation for literally thousands of millions of women in the Third World.

End Notes

[1] Any more than the pressure at Calais has.

[2] Source: Whittaker’s Almanac for 1953, 2012.

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