Dear Mutti (a wishful-thinking letter)

Last updated on: September 15, 2015 at 9:48 am by Jane the Actuary

Dear Mutti (a wishful-thinking letter) 2015-09-15T09:48:29-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Dear Mutti,

From all appearances, neither you nor your top advisors, have any clue about how to handle the massive inflow of asylum-seekers. Everyone seems to just be muddling through, with no end in sight, except to the extent that Hungary saves the day by blocking refugee/migrants from entering the EU in the first place.

What is the end result you want to achieve? Working backwards, what do you need to do to achieve that end result?

Obama’s end result? Not really a model to follow — he pulled US forces out of Iraq after a half-assed effort to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement, then boasted that he had kept his campaign promise. Frankly, his goals are all about him, and his Post-Presidency, whether it’s golfing, or being in high demand as a speech-giver, or being the recipient of adulation at his museum.

What is your end result?

Your government expects 800,000 asylum-seekers to arrive in Germany during 2015. Maybe the number’s grown even higher by now. Maybe half are Syrian, or claim to be (potentially using false documents). Your ability to screen claimants to assess the legitimacy of their claims is severely strained, and it’s not at all clear to me whether you have the ability to actually remove the ineligibles from Germany.

And, with respect to the Syrians, the arrivals are only a small fraction of the total who have fled Syria. The vast majority of refugees are in refugee camps, with nearly 2 million in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon, 600,000 in Jordan, 250,000 in Iraq, and 130,000 in Egypt — here’s a map with some statistics from the UN.

Do you expect the Syrians to one day be repatriated back to Syria? There’s precedent, as the vast majority of Afghan refugees were repatriated in the decade after the Taliban were removed from power, though many remain in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. On the other hand, recent history also serves up the example of the refugees from Indochina, nearly all of whom were resettled, over 2.5 million from 1975 to 1997, half arriving in the U.S., and 1% in Germany.

But if you want to ultimately repatriate, you can’t half-ass the job of dislodging ISIS and restoring peace. Now, from my metaphorical armchair, I don’t have a heck of a lot of insight into the actual ongoing military operations. A google search — coalition against isis countries list — revealed squat, or rather, outdated information from Fall 2014, in the first page of hits. There are reports that the US is refusing to strike at training bases, e.g., this article from the Washington Free Beacon, with the rationale that they want to avoid collateral damage, which doesn’t seem credible. And where is Germany? If you want to solve the crisis, you can’t be a bystander in this.

And, yes, I know, Putin isn’t making it any easier, lending support to Assad. The notion that the West can both dislodge Assad and ISIS both, and replace the whole thing with a kum ba yah-singing liberal democracy’s not particularly realistic; at this point, perhaps the best we can hope for is for Assad to agree to a power-sharing agreement.

But in the interim, the refugee camps along Syria’s borders need a lot more in the way of funding. Reports are that you’re planning on spending $6.6 billion on these new arrivals in Germany. Surely this money would go a lot further if spent on the camps overseas. Heck, what if you “repatriated” refugees to overseas refugee camps, perhaps in the employee of the organizations running the camps? (Oh, I know, it can’t be done based on existing norms, but still . . .)

With respect to Syrians in Germany: here’s what bugs me. Young Jewish men who left Germany for America as refugees in the 1930s (yes, the US could have accepted many more, but there were some), returned with Allied troops, playing a valuable role as translators as the Allies began to take German territory. In principle, the Syrians arriving in Germany and the EU generally, nearly all young men, ought to play that role, and be integrated into combat forces. Why aren’t they? Why aren’t they pleading for the chance to fight back, and to rescue their mothers and sisters (unless they’re all safe in refugee camps)? The Kurds are, from all reports. Yes, I know you can’t just single out refugees for conscription, but unwillingness to fight would certainly signal that they may well not be legitimate refugees.

And also with respect the Syrians in Germany — you’ve announced that you have firm intentions of doing a heck of a lot better job integrating these people into German society than you all did with the Turks in the past. Those are nice words, and good intentions, but very hard to actually put into practice, at least, not unless you’re a lot choosier about who you let stay. Let the Christians (who have really no chance of returning without persecution in any case) stay, and let the formerly-middle class, educated families stay, sure — those for whom the headscarf had long ago been abandoned, where the women were educated and employed, where Islam was practiced with as much indifference as most Germans practice Christianity. But it’s wishful thinking to imagine that a villager who expects his wife to be subservient and covered can be “converted” into having Western cultural attitudes and properly integrate into Germany. People are not fungible. You can’t simply drop them in Germany and create Good Germans out of them at the drop of a hat. I know you’ve got that pesky matter of a populace that refuses to reproduce itself, but if you transform Germany into the Mideast culturally, you’re destroying your country’s future, just to reach a goal of keeping 80 million people resident there.

Oh, and please get this sorted out by next summer, would’ja? We’ve got tickets to Munich for our summer vacation.

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