Non-profit groups that have encouraged the migration of Africans and Middle Easterners to Europe for a decade or more are now demanding the governments of Greece and France do more to protect migrants as the virus crisis deepens.
Why?
Because as one official at Catholic Charities Caritas said: “[W]e need to protect our volunteers and staff.”
What! So governments need to send in government workers instead of their ‘volunteers!’
Here is the invasion of Europe news from The Guardian:
NGOs raise alarm as coronavirus strips support from EU refugees
Governments across Europe are facing calls to urgently put into place measures to protect refugees and migrants – in particular lone children – as the coronavirus epidemic sees volunteer numbers plungeand many vital support services close.
On Tuesday, groups working with refugees and unaccompanied children in France and Greece implored the authorities in both countries to provide urgent help to refugees and unaccompanied minors, whom they say have been effectively abandoned by the authorities. [Abandoned by authorities? Sounds like abandoned by the NGOs!—ed]
NYC based International Rescue Committee (led by moneybags Miliband) is one group that is demanding Greece and France do more. They said in a statement this week: “The physical health and safety of our staff, our clients, and our communities is the International Rescue Committee’s top priority globally.” “Clients” are refugees. Community does not mean your town, it means their community of migrants and volunteers.
In France, a group of 24 organisations sent a letter to the French government and the mayors of Calais and Grande-Synthe imploring them to provide urgent interventions to refugees and migrants in northern France.
In the letter, the organisations, which include Médecins du Monde and Refugee Rights Europe, say:
“The situation of exiled people is unspeakable: lack of accommodation, cold, humidity, stress, fatigue, crowding together in light tents, daily expulsion from places of life, deplorable sanitary conditions.”
The groups say that, in the absence of any other protection measures, the state should provide accommodation and basic food distribution as well as access to hot water and soap to try to stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus among the migrant community.
[….]
The groups, including the IRC [International Rescue Committee], Human Rights Watch, and the Danish Refugee Council among others, also called for a raft of protective measures including an end to deportations and pressing forward with relocation and family reunion programmes for unaccompanied minors across Europe.
[….]
One charity in northern France told the Guardian they are losing desperately needed volunteers as the epidemic takes hold across the continent.
No kidding! When the s*** hits the fan, the fair-weather do-gooders beg for government help!
From time to time over the years, I’ve told you about “processing countries” which are locations around the world where refugees are gathered and as the word says, are processed into the US. It doesn’t mean that all those processed are the nationality of the country that is doing the processing.
Indeed when you look at the map of processing locations from theRefugee Processing Center(below), you will see Malaysia, Thailand and Turkey are high on the list, but in those cases they are locations where refugees of various nationalities are being selected for movement to your towns and cities.
However, in the case of Ukraine, they are mostly (if not all) Ukrainians. Don’t ask me what the deal is and why we are moving supposedly persecuted Ukrainians to America, but we are.
Every day I look for any news about whether the US State Department is taking any action to either delay refugee arrivals or at least to test refugees for coronavirus exposureand am not seeing it.
That said, I did see that the Ukrainian government has announced that as of March 17th, Ukraine’s borders (both in and out) will close even as the country only has a handful of cases so far, so presumably that will bring refugee arrivals from Ukraine (presently among the largest numbers we are getting) to a halt.
By the way, the largest number of Ukrainian refugees arriving in the US are going to Washington, California and New York states with more cases of COVID-19 than the whole country of Ukraine.
Keep an eye out! If you see news about delays in refugee arrivals due to the virus crisis let me know!
Editor’s note: As RRW approaches its 13th birthday, there are over 10,000 posts archived here at Refugee Resettlement Watch. Unfortunately, it is just me here with no staff and so it has become virtually impossible to answer all of the basic questions that come into my e-mail inbox or to RRW’s facebook page every day. I don’t want to appear rude—I simply haven’t enough hours in the day.
Please take time tovisit RRW(don’t just read posts in your e-mail) and use the search window in the right hand sidebar and see if you can find the information you need. Also see my series that I wrote in recent months entitled Knowledge is Powerwhich explains some basic principles of how Refugee Resettlement is carried out in the US.
And, lastly, I don’t write that much every day, so if you made a habit of reading my posts here on a daily basis, you would eventually catch on to what is happening because I do link back to previous posts as much as possible. LOL! Thank you for helping me not go crazy!
Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) wants Greece and the European Union to find places elsewhere for 40,000 asylum seekers as they fear Coronavirus will run wild in the camps.
But, it is everywhere in Europe so where the heck are they supposed to go? Europe is naturally trying to save its own people first.
MSF urges Greece to evacuate migrant camps due to coronavirus risk
ATHENS (Reuters) – Medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has urged Greece to immediately evacuate migrants from overcrowded camps on its islands due to a high risk of the coronavirus spreading swiftly among people living in squalid conditions.
Moria camp on Lesbos has 15,000 residents.
Greece reported its first fatality from the virus on Thursday, in the town of Patra on the mainland. It has confirmed 117 cases of coronavirus so far, including one on the island of Lesbos, where the notorious Moria camp is located.
“The evacuation of the camps on the Greek islands is now more urgent than ever,” the charity said.
“We need to be realistic: It would be impossible to contain an outbreak in such camp settings,” it said, adding that it had not yet seen a credible emergency plan in case of an outbreak.
More than 40,000 asylum-seekers are living in camps, which are operating far beyond their capacity on five Greek islands.
Now get this….
MSF did not specify where it thought the Greek authorities should transfer the migrants but said both Greece and the European Union should act swiftly to avert a disaster.
Of course there is no place to move them especially as each European country is now closing its borders to one and all. Coronavirus sure is setting back the borderless world goals of the globalists.
Editor’s note: As RRW approaches its 13th birthday, there are over 10,000 posts archived here at Refugee Resettlement Watch. Unfortunately, it is just me here with no staff and so it has become virtually impossible to answer all of the basic questions that come into my e-mail inbox or to RRW’s facebook page every day. I don’t want to appear rude—I simply haven’t enough hours in the day.
Please take time to visit RRW (don’t just read posts in your e-mail) and use the search window in the right hand sidebar and see if you can find the information you need. Also see my series that I wrote in recent months entitled Knowledge is Powerwhich explains some basic principles of how Refugee Resettlement is carried out in the US.
And, lastly, I don’t write that much every day, so if you made a habit of reading my posts here on a daily basis, you would eventually catch on to what is happening because I do link back to previous posts as much as possible. LOL! Thank you for helping me not go crazy!
According to a report at The New Humanitarian, moving populations of people in conflict zones and where governments are weak are particularly vulnerable to a critical health crisis like the coronavirus.
Pakistan has closed its border with Iran
Of course, The New Humanitarian is most concerned with the refugees themselves and less concerned with the citizens of the countries where the migrants may end up.
Countries that seal their borders may be able to ward off the worst of a potential crisis.
I just told you in my previous post this morning, that Turkey is opening borders to allow ‘refugees’ to move through to Europe.
I wonder, is the US screening refugees and asylum seekers especially those from hotspots like China and Iran?
How the coronavirus outbreak could hit refugees and migrants
A surge in coronavirus cases outside China has raised concerns the outbreak could be particularly devastating for vulnerable refugee and migrant populations in countries hobbled by conflict.
Over the last week, cases of the illness known as Covid-19 have escalated dramatically in Iran, and new infections linked to the cluster have emerged in more than half a dozen other countries in the region including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.
At least 12 million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) live between Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey – countries linked to Iran by either frequent travel, irregular migration routes, shared borders, or all three. Iran itself hosts nearly one million refugees, mostly from neighbouring Afghanistan, and an estimated 1.5 to two million undocumented people.
The effects of armed conflict “fragment the public health system and the infrastructure that enables governments to actively perform surveillance of diseases”, said Dr. Mohammed Jawad, a researcher at Imperial College London who studies the impact of conflict on public health.
Dr. Adam Coutts, a public health specialist at Cambridge University who focuses on the Middle East, said refugees are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus or other diseases, due to ”high geographical mobility, instability, living in overcrowded conditions, lack of sanitation and WASH (waters, sanitation and hygiene) facilities, and lack of access to decent healthcare or vaccination programmes in host communities”.
But refugee populations are often left out of disaster and epidemic preparedness planning at the best of times. And simply reaching marginalised refugees and migrants with information is also a challenge.
Politicians in Italy and Greece have already started using the spectre of asylum seekers and migrants carrying the virus across international borders to drum up support for hardline migration policies. But public health experts believe the real risk is to refugee and migrant communities themselves, who face instability, sporadic access to healthcare, and now the growing threat of stigmatisation.
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If Europe doesn’t have it bad enough already, it looks like a new wave of migrants from Syria is on the way to the west. And, they aren’t all Syrians!
In 2016 the Turkish government, in a deal with the EU, agreed to not permit border crossings into Europe, but it looks like that agreement is now out the window.
At a time when the whole world is focused on the movement of sick people, here is an example of how vulnerable every country that doesn’t seal its borders is to the transmission of deadly pathogens.
Turkey will not stop refugees ‘who want to go to Europe’
No caption to indicate where or when the photo was taken but note the two on the left in face masks.
Hundreds of Europe-bound migrants have begun heading to northwest Turkey towards Bulgaria and Greece. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party said the refugees began their journey after a Syrian attack in Idlib.
Turkey is “no longer able to hold refugees” following a Syrian attack that killed 33 troops in Idlib, Omer Celik, a spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP party, said on Friday.
The announcement comes as some 300 migrants walk through northwest Turkey towards its borders with Greece and Bulgaria on Friday, according to DHA news agency.
“As a result of the attack, the (refugees) in Turkey are heading towards Europe, and those on Syrian territory are heading towards Turkey,” Celik told CNN Türk shortly after midnight Friday morning. “Our refugee policy is the same as before, but we are now in a situation where we can no longer hold them.”
Demiroren news agency said the group of migrants, including women and children, embarked on their journey from Turkey’s Edirne province toward borders with Bulgaria and Greece — two European Union nations — at around midnight. Syrians, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis and Moroccans were among those in the group.
[….]
According to EU figures, Greece saw more than 60,000 asylum seekers arrive from Turkey on the shores of its Aegean islands in 2019, and it expects more than 100,000 more in 2020.
Note to PayPal donors! I want to thank all of you who send me donations for my work via PayPal. I very much appreciate your thoughtfulness. However, PayPal is making changes to their terms of service and I’ve decided to opt out beginning on March 10, 2020.
Note to PayPal donors! I want to thank all of you who send me donations for my work via PayPal. I very much appreciate your thoughtfulness. However, PayPal is making changes to their terms of service and I’ve decided to opt-out beginning on March 10, 2020.