From the BBC,
Migrant crisis: How Europe went from Merkel’s ‘We can do it’ ten years ago to pulling up the drawbridge.
The BBC recalls the good-old-days of 2015,
This was August 2015 and Europe was witnessing the greatest movement in population since the end of the Second World War. More than a million people would arrive in the EU over the next few months driven by violence in Syria, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere.
And now ten years later?
But the high emotions of that summer, when crowds welcomed asylum seekers along the roads north, seem to belong to a very different time.
Alas,
And a decade on, concerns over migration have become a major political issue in many European countries. The causes are complex and vary from country to country, but concerns around security, struggling economies and disillusionment with governing parties have all had a major role in shaping attitudes towards those who arrive who are fleeing war, hunger and economic desperation.
Horrors without end,
It has fuelled the rise of far right parties and seen centre and even left wing parties scramble to impose controls on migration, fearing electoral defeat by populist right-wingers.
What happened in between? Did too many arrivals simply overwhelm the system?
Too much crime perhaps? The BBC reports, in classic chicken/egg confusion,
People born abroad, and their children born in Sweden, are over-represented in crime statistics. But Sweden’s foreign ministry warns against a simplistic analysis of figures. It says low levels of education, unemployment, social segregation and refugee’s war trauma are all causes – not the fact of being a migrant.
Had there been no migrants, there would have been no migrant crime. What happens downrange of that fact is merely rationalization.
The piece continues on for what must be several more pages of text, all an exercise in not noticing.
