Too bad that this decision is at least ten years too late. But maybe just in time. Perhaps one of the primary driving forces that saw the UK vote to get out of the European Union was a desire to control their own borders.
And, when I say it might be just in time, when I saw this news from Gatestonethis morning all I could think of was what the heck is Europe going to do if the Coronavirus spreads to Africa—will panic set in and will millions (more) try to make it to Europe where medical treatment would surely be better?
The case involved Africans breaking into Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish territory that joins Morocco.
Spain: European Court Approves Summary Deportations of Illegal Migrants
In a landmark decision that will have potentially seismic implications for immigration policy in Europe, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Spain acted lawfully when it summarily deported two migrants who illegally tried to enter Spanish territory.
Attempting to set foot on European soil, African migrants have been for years rushing the border fence between Morocco and Spanish territory.
The Strasbourg-based court — which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, and whose rulings are binding on all 27 member states of the European Union — ruled that in order for migrants to benefit from certain human rights protections, such as access to lawyers, interpreters and the right to remain in Europe, they must first enter European territory in a legal, as opposed to an illegal, manner.
The ruling, which effectively authorizes European governments summarily to deport illegal migrants immediately at the border, transfers some decision-making powers on immigration back to European nation states.
The ruling is being viewed as a major victory for those who believe that sovereign nation states have the right to decide who is and is not allowed to enter their territory.
I’ve been thinking about this in recent days so this is a good time to mention it. What happens if (when) the Coronavirus reaches Africa (beyond Egypt), will panic set in? Will there be a rush to find better medical care?
See where it is this week (and notice that it is not contained to only cold places of the world, since it is hot in Australia at the moment).
Although it’s becoming a bit overused, there is no better phrase than ‘demography is destiny’ and Mark Steyn’s now famous book, ‘America Alone’, published twelve years ago next month, nailed it.
Taking a little break from wandering through the weeds of the US Refugee Admissions Program severely curtailed by President Trump’s policies that include a significant reduction in refugee admissions to the US, we see that the Migration Policy Institute(a leftwing Washington DC think tank) has opined that Europe will be picking up the slack left by the US under the Trump administration.
If Europe does indeed pick up that slack it will only hasten the basic premise of Steyn’s ‘America Alone’.
Can you see the day a few decades into the future when westerners will try to flee to America to escape the demographic hodge-podge (and economic decline) being created in the heart of the birthplace of western civilization? I can.
The Future of Refugee Resettlement: Made in Europe?
Europe’s refugee resettlement programs are at an inflection point. Since 2017, more than 40 percent of all refugees resettled globally through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have found new homes in Europe, a sharp uptick from the 8 percent share the continent represented a decade ago.This is the result both of the dramatic growth of resettlement capacity in Europe—places have more than doubled since 2014 as countries such as Croatia and Slovenia have begun resettlement operations—alongside the dramatic shrinking of the U.S. resettlement program under the Trump administration. Beyond the numbers, Europe has increasingly become the center of gravity for innovation in resettlement. Today, new ideas for how to grow and strengthen resettlement are born in Europe.
These developments mark a potentially important shift in agenda-setting power from what have been the “Big Three” resettlement programs (the United States, Canada, and Australia). As national and EU leaders consider a new European migration agenda this spring, they face a choice: to claim a leadership role in shaping the global resettlement space, or to fall into this position by default. [Have at it Europe, set the agenda and leave the US alone—ed]
There is talk of “innovation” to get more migrants placed in Europe including using the Canadian model of private sponsorship that recently came under fire in a piece published in a Canadian policy magazine entitled: ‘The Cracks in our admired private refugee sponsorship program.’
It would be wise for European policy makers to see what is going wrong with the Canadian model before they pronounce it the greatest thing since sliced bread! And watch for the private sponsorship theory to become a flavor of the month here too.
MPI continues:
A New European Stamp on Resettlement?
While Europe’s innovative turn was driven primarily by internal needs, with less attention to how these actions will influence the resettlement space beyond its borders, it may offer much needed and timely inspiration at the global level.
As resettlement countries globally seek to fulfill the commitments of UNHCR’s three-year resettlement strategy, adopted in June 2019 under the Global Compact for Refugees, resettlement programs must learn and evolve. They will need to prove themselves able to extend their processing and reception capacities to welcome greater numbers of refugees without sacrificing the quality of support they provide.
The US did not sign the Global Compact for Refugees, see here at the Center for Immigration Studies. However, if any Dem wins the White House in November expect to see the US jump on lickety-split.
And they must find ways to address legitimate questions and concerns on the part of communities resettling refugees regarding how newcomers will be integrated. More than ever, it is European resettlement countries that are proving themselves to have the creativity and adaptability to address these challenges. As the availability of resettlement spaces on the global level continues to dwindle, due in large part to the deep cuts to resettlement commitments made by the United States, this energy and creativity will be needed more than ever.
[….]
Resettlement programs in Europe have advanced rapidly over the last decade. European countries now occupy a significant share of resettlement space globally and have developed a robust and innovative resettlement infrastructure.These programs have a great deal to offer in support of resettlement on the international level—if European leaders are willing and able to seize the opportunity.
Read it all here. And, kiss (much of) Europe as we knew it, good bye.
Can you see the consternation at the United Nations some day when it comes to white Europeans asking the UN to help them get into the US as refugees!
Warning shots fired as migrants rush Serbia’s border with Hungary
HORGOS, Serbia (Reuters) – A Hungarian security officer fired three warning shots early on Tuesday after about 60 migrants tried to force their way through a checkpoint on the border with Serbia, and Serbian police said later they had arrested 37 people for trying to cross the frontier illegally.
No one was wounded in the incident, which took place at the Roszke/Horgos border crossing, Hungarian police spokeswoman Szilvia Szabo said.
Hungarian police said the group tried to enter the European Union member state at the crossing at about 0430 GMT, prompting the security officer on site to fire the warning shots.
There are thousands of migrants stuck in Serbia, with more than 6,000 migrants living in government-operated camps.
On Tuesday, in the village of Horgos, on the Serbian side of the border crossing, a group of about two dozen migrants from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Morocco said they were beaten up by Hungarian police and sent back to Serbia.
[….]
The crossing was the scene of a large-scale riot at the peak of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, when police clashed with hundreds trying to break through the frontier into the EU.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban subsequently ordered a steel fence erected along Hungary’s border, curbing arrivals.
But migrant traffic started increasing again late last year and there are currently several hundred attempted illegal crossings per week.
See all of my ‘Invasion of Europe’ posts going back nearly ten years. Orban came under political fire for referring to the “great replacement” at a conference in Hungarylast fall.
The use of the politically verboten words “invasion” and “great replacement” brought a legal judgement against a French author here, just last week.
That is one of the latest Leftwing media attacks on the President, but when I saw this headline (below) my reaction was WOW! that would be great!
Trump praised Orban in the White House in May—for saving Christians from migrants (sniffed) EuroNews. https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/13/watch-live-viktor-orban-holds-talks-with-donald-trump-at-white-house
Trump’s Dream Is to Become America’s Viktor Orbán
But, before I get to the news (a change of pace from the daily dribble of reports about weak-kneed Republican governors who have no hope of ever being brave leaders like Viktor Orban, or Donald Trump)—-Happy New Year!
And, thanks to all of you who have come back to the newly reconstructed Refugee Resettlement Watchafter efforts by the Leftists to delete my work from the internet failed earlier this year. Also, I very much appreciate letters and e-mails expressing support even if I don’t always have time to answer, and many thanks for donations that have come my way.
This morning I wanted to chuckle a little and so had saved for today thisNew York Mag story from the day after Christmas by political commentator Jonathan Chait famous for having gotten it hilariously wrong about a possible Trump presidency in 2016.
Chait said smugly in February of 2016 that liberals should welcome Trump’s candidacy, a story that was smacked down hereas one of the ten stories of the 2010s that should never have been published:
Chait’s immensely confident take on why the Democrats should support a Trump nomination is a humiliating crystallization of the wrongheaded thinking that propelled him to the White House: he asserts that Trump would easily lose (wrong), that he might force the Republicans to rebuild their party (wrong), that his presidency would do less harm than a conventional Republican (wrong) and might even do some good (WRONG!!!), that Trump’s presidency might end up like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California governorship (wrong, and based on nothing besides “they were both celebrities”).
In addition to wanting a break from dreary domestic refugee policy, I wanted to get back to a bit of news on one of my favorite topics—the Invasion of Europe.
Here is the ever astute Jonathan Chait (pretending to get inside Trump’s head) opining on how Trump wants to be an AUTHORITARIAN like Hungary’s Orban, or so Chait says of Orban.
AUTHORITARIAN must be a word selected as a Progressive talking point for 2020!
And, in case you don’t get it after the first or second time the word AUTHORITARIAN is offered, Chait uses the word ten times in its various forms to make his point.
For several years, Hungary has been the name American liberal intellectuals have given to their worst domestic nightmares.Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán, has fashioned an apparently permanent majority for his conservative Fidesz Party by wielding the levers of the state to marginalize the social, political, and legal power of his opposition. American conservatives are now becoming fascinated in equal measure with Orbán’s Hungary. The liberal nightmare of an authoritarian America is becoming the conservative dream.
Orban has been working to keep Soros hard Left political agitators out of Hungary. BTW, have you noticed that the Left is now suggesting that attacks on Soros’ globalist political machinations are somehow displays of antisemitism.
Orbán’s attacks on liberal democracy long predate Donald Trump’s candidacy. Five years ago, Orbán delivered a famous speech denouncing liberal democracy (“liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex, and violence”) and promising an alternative. To the extent American conservatives paid Orbán any attention then, it was to denounce him, perhaps while throwing in a swipe at the Obama administration for failing to confront him forcefully enough. The Republican Party’s growing defense of Orbán is a window through which we can glimpse its slow descent into authoritarianism. [Ha! I doubt the Republican Party is defending Orban!—ed]
Orbán’s political style, combining hyperbolic denunciations of Muslim immigrants with anti-Semitic tropes targeting George Soros as puppeteer, anticipated Trump’s by several years. He has won a place in the president’s circle of trust. Orbán, along with Vladimir Putin, reportedly helped persuade Trump to distrust Ukraine’s reformist president. Connie Mack IV, a former Republican member of Congress and a paid lobbyist for Orbán, participated in a whisper campaign undermining hawkish Russia adviser Fiona Hill as a tool of Soros.
You get the drift of where this is going, read it yourself.
He wraps with this paragraph suggesting that any of us who are concerned about immigration and its impact on western civilization are really just hankering for AUTHORITARIAN control.
Even so, the appearance of Orbánism on the American right is yet another sign that the most dangerous undercurrents of the Trump era are not particular to one buffoonish septuagenarian reality television star. Trump has brought out a strain of authoritarianism on the right that will survive his presidency. Whether or not Trump succeeds in his transparent goal of becoming America’s Orbán, he will not be the last to try. [There is no one on the horizon who will come close to trying, sadly—ed]
If you are as much an Orban fan as I am, read it all (for a laugh!).
Now, here is the primary reason for Orban’s popularity, something that Chait barely mentions (from Politico in 2015):
Orbán says migrants threaten ‘Christian’ Europe
….and Western Civilization!
Interesting that in Chait’s polemic there is only a tiny mention of why Orban is so popular at home and admired by many here, and that is his dogged defense of his borders, his people, and his fight for western civilization and a Christian Europe.
So if indeed President Trump wants to be more like Orban, he needs to work a little bit harder in 2020.
See my complete file on the Invasion of Europe by clicking here. And, go here, for my previous posts on my hero—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
I’m getting dragged down by all the awful news of governors one after another (even some Republicans) jumping on the bandwagon to oppose the President and to support importing more poverty to America.
One reader suggested that the media interview in a homeless camp in say LA and ask the homeless (on camera) how they feel about Third Worlders coming to the city and immediately given housing, food, medical care. We can dream!
Of course I have a lot more to say in the days and week ahead about the President’s refugee reform efforts and how no matter how many citizens speak up in favor of reform and slowing the flow, Open Borders Inc. is better funded and more organized and it’s not because of any power naive humanitarian voters have, it is about the almighty dollar.
Can you say, George Soros, Paul Singer, Michael Bloomberg, Chambers of Commerce, global corporations, campaign donations (to Democrats and Republicans), and nine phony-baloney so-called charities. USRefugee resettlement is driven by, yes, those seeking a borderless world and those getting rich on the backs of refugee pawns.
Sorry, I told you I was going to give you a little laugh this fine December morning!
Swedish town to integrate refugees by housing them with pensioners
The first residents have moved into a new housing scheme that mixes seniors, young people and foreigners who came to Sweden as unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. They are required to socialize with each other.
The first time the young immigrant men met their future Swedish neighbors, it was Kristin Ohman (photo above) who made contact.
Here is Human Rights Watch reporting that most of the unaccompanied ‘children’ who came to Sweden in 2015 were teenage boys from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Eritrea, Iraq and Ethiopia.
“They were standing alone so I came over to meet them and I gave them some flowers,” the 74-year-old smiles, as she remembers the gathering of the 70 people hand-picked to live in her new apartment building. “They seemed a bit shy, but they were all very positive.”
[….]
Dragana Curovic (left), an integration specialist, shows off the arts and crafts room in the mixed living housing complex.
The “SällBo” project in the Swedish city of Helsingborg aims to combat loneliness among the elderly at the same time as helping former child refugees integrate by housing them side-by-side in the same building. There are 31 flats for retired people and 20 for 18- to 25-year-olds, ten of which are reserved for people who arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied child asylum-seekers.
The project’s name combines the word “sällskap,” meaning company or togetherness, with “bo,” meaning to live, and under their contract, residents commit to socialize with each other for at least two hours a week, helped along by a live-in social coordinator.
“It’s not only the first in Sweden,” says Dragana Curovic, an integration specialist at Helsingborgshem, the city’s municipal housing company. “Our constellation is unique anywhere in the world.”
Curovic and her colleague hatched the idea for their integration project two years later, when considering whether to convert two floors back into assisted housing for the elderly and leave the bottom level for young immigrants. In the end, they decided it would be better to mix the groups together.
“We thought, ‘okay, we have this house, and we have these needs, and we know that there are a lot of lonely people. Why don’t we do an integration project, where there are different kinds of people?'”
[….]
Her hope is that by meeting and working together with elderly Swedes, the young men will improve their cultural understanding and absorb practical skills they would normally have learnt from their parents.Former child asylum-seekers face a lot of stigma in Sweden, so Curovic hopes the project will also help them understand that not everyone in Sweden views them with suspicion.
Europe’s refugee resettlement programs are at an inflection point. Since 2017, more than 40 percent of all refugees resettled globally through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have found new homes in Europe, a sharp uptick from the 8 percent share the continent represented a decade ago.This is the result both of the dramatic growth of resettlement capacity in Europe—places have more than doubled since 2014 as countries such as Croatia and Slovenia have begun resettlement operations—alongside the dramatic shrinking of the U.S. resettlement program under the Trump administration. Beyond the numbers, Europe has increasingly become the center of gravity for innovation in resettlement. Today, new ideas for how to grow and strengthen resettlement are born in Europe.
Here is the ever astute Jonathan Chait (pretending to get inside Trump’s head) opining on how Trump wants to be an AUTHORITARIAN like Hungary’s Orban, or so Chait says of Orban.
