The Global Refugee Wave and Migrant Crisis

Thread Hopping: what is it with refugees making the headlines everywhere? The problem has been there for centuries, and yet people seem to have only just discovered that miserable folks come die at their shores. I'm frankly perplexed. What's with the sudden bout of caring?

It's probably the magnitude. I've heard newspapers report that our country's expecting at least 800,000 refugees for this year alone. If the numbers of what the rest of Europe expect are comparable in size, I feel like we're getting a second Migration Period.

edited 4th Sep '15 2:52:39 AM by DrunkenNordmann

It's also a self-reinforcing cycle in the media, I think. Once a piece of news becomes "popular" enough, its popularity starts increasing exponentially. I guess the "refugees" topic just broke that threshold.

edited 4th Sep '15 2:58:34 AM by Cozzer

Looks like the migrants in Budapest had enough. They just packed up and started marching towards Austria on foot. Some Syrian youth have been interviewed, waiting to be reimbursed for their now-useless train tickets; they revealed that once they have the money, they intend to purchase bicycles and leave for the border.

Police is letting them go so far.

The football ultras are up to something. 16 have been arrested last night for arson and more have been seen lurking around the migrant crowd as well.

Wait they actually bought train tickets, and the Hungarians refused to let them board? Can somebody explain this. I just assumed they were hopping onto the the trains without paying.

edited 4th Sep '15 5:35:42 AM by JackOLantern1337

Under an EU treaty (I believe Dublin III) Hungary is obliged to settle the refuges within Hungary itself and not let them proceed on.

Yes, they bought tickets. Then the railway company suspended all international trains outbound to Western Europe.

edited 4th Sep '15 5:58:49 AM by amitakartok

Send them to the U.S. That way Trump will make Mexico build a wall between the U.S and Europe!

No, silly. He will make the Atlantic Ocean spontaneously grow a wall between US and Europe. With sharks. Meanwhile, on the other side, Putin will single-handedly build a wall made of tanks between Russia and Europe.

edited 4th Sep '15 8:03:56 AM by Cozzer

Football ultras attacked the marching refugees, police intervened. Refugees are cheering "Viva police!" Crowd is marching on a highway outside Budapest but getting tired; charity is distributing water.

Several hundred migrants broke out of the camp at Röszke, riot police was deployed. Camp is being emptied now, two buses were seen leaving; one journalist saw a third bus carrying people with bound hands. No one knows where these people were taken or how many of the 2600 refugees in the camp are left.

200-300 migrants broke out of the Bicske camp and made a run for it along the railway.

The numbers appear to spike in the months after the refugee news broke through to the top news.

This of course means that more people read about it and decided to go for it. Despite the deaths, the odds are in their favor of making it onto EU soil.

Though I think very highly of German efficiency, my head hurts in trying to analyze how they'll absorb 1% of their population in refugees in 2015. Especially since I really think the numbers will only go higher in 2016. Even double.

@Silas: Technically, shouldn't Hungary send them back to wherever they originally hit Europe?

(Of course, that'll just piss off Italy worse and empower Five Star...)

Nope, because Dublin III is an EU rule, and Hungary is the first EU country they hit (as they come in via Serbia).

Which by the way, means that should the UK leave the EU, then the French will be under no obligation to do anything to prevent the migrants/refuges in France from crossing to the UK.

Govt offers to give the migrants a lift to the border via buses. Migrants almost euphoric upon hearing this, but some are skeptic that this might be another trick.

I wonder what exactly is gunna happen to the immigrants when they reach the Austrian borders...

I'm almost certain Austria will be way more welcoming towards them than Hungary.

What border? It's Schengen, I'm pretty sure the 'border' consists of a sign by the road that says "welcome to Austria", they could easily cross it by accident.

There was actually a headline in Finland's most popular newspaper about the border wall between Hungary and Serbia. A reporter from the paper had gone over to take a look at the wall, and accidentally walked into Serbia. That's how strong that wall is - you can go right though without even seeing it. (Which is a roundabout way of saying it's just a lie - there is no wall.)

I know Switzerland's border security has suddenly gone way up, considering how lackluster it was before. To the point of not actually having a border guard most of the time.

Aren't the Swiss part of Schengen? If they are then they're not allowed a border, the border has to be nothing but a sign saying "welcome to Switzerland".

Though Schengen does seem to be being violated all over the place at the moment.

I lived in Switzerland for a few years, and border security was practically nonexistant. Isn't it a Schengen country?

Well, we don't have a deluge of refugees right now. Most people aren't coming here.

Austrian chancellor said OK. The migrants can cross the border.

Germany also says OK to receive them.

First buses have arrived to Budapest, 60 are to be expected. That's about 3000 people's worth of capacity. Migrants have started packing and boarding the buses like crazy.

Everyone, cross your fingers because tomorrow will be the day of truth.

edited 4th Sep '15 4:13:02 PM by amitakartok

Yes, it's part of Schengen.

edited 4th Sep '15 4:13:18 PM by Quag15

At the risk of being ignored due to the ongoing Hungarian crisis, but I think that this is the most amazing and informative article on refugee camps and the refugee crisis that I've ever seen: How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp: The emphasis is on Turkey and Syria but there are implications for refugee management world-wide.

"Many of the world’s displaced live in conditions striking for their wretchedness, but what is startling about Kilis is how little it resembles the refugee camp of our imagination. It is orderly, incongruously so. Residents scan a card with their fingerprints for entry, before they pass through metal detectors and run whatever items they’re carrying through an X-ray machine. Inside, it’s stark: 2,053 identical containers spread out in neat rows. No tents. None of the smells — rotting garbage, raw sewage — usually associated with human crush and lack of infrastructure...

...“It’s the nicest refugee camp in the world!” a Polish diplomat staying at my hotel crowed when I mentioned the place to him the next day. Standing with him was an Italian official; he nodded vehemently in agreement. No one I spoke to — not the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, not academics, not even the refugees — denies that the standard of living here is exceptionally high. When I later listed the amenities to a refugee expert, she replied, “I’ve never heard of such a thing...”

...Why would Turkey be so willing to house refugees — and to house them so well at its own expense? Unlike almost all other refugee camps in the world, Kilis is not run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Rather, Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, or AFAD, asked the U.N.H.C.R. for its camp guidelines — minimum distance between tents, and so on — and then designed its own...

...The Turks may have built as good a refugee camp as it is possible to build. But a camp is still a camp. And if a camp becomes a shelter not just for a few months but for years, a substitute — even a deterrent — to a real solution, how much does it matter how nice it is?...

...Like many of the refugees at Kilis, Bakri fled heavy shelling in northern Syria, where government forces have long been in pitched battle with rebel groups, and rebel groups often battle each other. And like many of the refugees, she often finds herself at loose ends. In a camp, no matter how large the family, boredom prevails. Aside from cooking and cleaning, there is little to do...

...Perhaps nothing encapsulates that work so well as the way the Turks supply refugees with food. At Kilis, there are three grocery stores, side by side like a mini strip mall. Every family is given a debit card when they register, and every month, they get a balance of 80 Turkish lira, close to $40, per person for food and $10 per person for sundries. Inside the grocery stores are undulating produce sections, meat counters, dry-goods shelves and refrigerated dairy cases. At the checkout, refugees swipe their cards and show their I Ds...

...Nesrin Semen, a senior program assistant for the World Food Programme, which is helping run the project, told me that this is “a new modality of providing food assistance.” The W.F.P. doesn’t have an office here, as it does in other countries’ refugee camps, but the government invited it in for this pilot program. Semen was here with a team to check on how it was going — well, seemed to be the assessment. “It’s effective,” she began, “it’s cost-effective, it’s faster” — more so than, say, shipping food to storage centers, transporting it to camp distribution centers and having people wait in line to pick up bland rations, as the W.F.P. does in some other countries. “There are no delays; it’s logistically simple,” she continued, adding that “it supports the local economy.” In a survey, the refugees reported that they liked the grocery-store/debit-card system. It requires infrastructure, like electricity and an Internet connection, that not all refugee-camp locations have. But “in the future,” Semen said, “anywhere we can do this, we will...”

...But operating camps this way is expensive. “This has cost them,” Batchelor says. Expenditures at the Kilis camp run to at least $2 million a month. By the end of 2013, the Turkish government had spent $2.5 billion on its Syrian guests, primarily in camps — a figure that has created resentment among Turks...

...Last October, the U.N.H.C.R. had a high-level meeting to discuss how to help the vast number of Syrians who continue to pour into neighboring countries. The first of three standard solutions, voluntary repatriation, was off the table, as it is for millions of refugees. The second, incorporating them fully into the citizenry of their countries of refuge, was, too: For one thing, politicians in Jordan and Lebanon, where Syrian refugees are now estimated to make up about 10 and 20 percent of the populations, respectively, have been complaining about the burden on schools and job markets. That left just a single option: third-country resettlement...

...Urban refugees don’t always have the right to work and can be detained or fined for trying. It can be difficult for them to get health care or schooling for their children. In many ways, they may find themselves living like illegal immigrants, lost between the cracks of refugee policy — and absent from our consciousness. Some 400,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey live outside the camps...

...“More and more refugees in the world in camps are in camps that have been there for a really, really long time,” says Fabos, who now teaches in the International Development and Social Change program at Clark University in Massachusetts. “That wasn’t the original model. Our model was that camps were there just to hold people temporarily until one of these ‘durable solutions’: sending them back home, allowing them to settle where they are — with legal rights — or settle them in a third place...”

...Every day, the World Food Programme alone operates an average of 5,000 trucks, 50 aircraft and 30 ships, as well as trains, river barges, mules, yaks, camels and donkeys. “The problem is when people start living in those situations more than the presumable amount of time that people should be living in those situations. To the U.N.H.C.R., if they live in camp for more than five years, they become an acronym: P.R.S.” — protracted refugee situation — “the majority of encamped refugees are in protracted refugee situations. The state system is more and more unable to accommodate what’s happening on the ground...”

...“Refugee camps have become the mechanism to try to control people,” Fabos says. “They prevent them from interacting with your citizenry. There certainly have been cases where refugee camps are places where exiled political movements will train and collect arms and plan attacks. But it’s also the case that refugee camps don’t provide opportunities for livelihood. The aid is very small compared to the actual needs...”

...At the October meeting, the U.N.H.C.R. proposed a fourth durable solution: more support for host communities — building up Turkey and Jordan and Lebanon in ways that will survive the immediate conflict, creating jobs by improving infrastructure and lessening competition among locals and refugees for resources and employment. So far, this proposal has not been greeted with enthusiasm, even among countries that pump money into the camp system. Among the Turks, there is talk that the government is considering giving all Syrians the right to work, but it hasn’t yet turned out to be anything but another rumor. In mid-2013, the prime minister and the foreign minister started demanding financial assistance from the international community to keep the camps running and asking other countries to take in refugees."

My apologies for the huge wall of text, but I think this one article encapsulates nearly everything you need to know about the refugee crisis, how it is being managed, and how it should be managed better .

My one criticism of the Turkish camp is that they are not employing the refugees. Creating an employment system within the camps would both provide the refugees with productive activities to sustain themselves both economically and psychologically, but could also help defray the expense of maintaining the camp.

edited 4th Sep '15 8:03:21 PM by DeMarquis