When I heard your report on his baiting of Congresswoman Salazar, I found myself thinking that besides the usual ethnonationalism, Tucker may be trying out one of the arguments the far-right will likely use against Ukrainian refugees: They are just like an invading army! They are part of Russia’s military strategy against the West!
The Temporary Protection Directive-A Tool Now Used for the First Time
The current refugee crisis is huge, and EU governments are starting to scramble to deal with it. (Irene Brickner and Thomas Mayer, Flüchtlinge aus der Ukraine: So wäre es zu schaffen Standard 19.03.2022) The EU's European Commission during the first week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine already invoked a special legal facility created based on the experience of the 1990s Balkan Wars, the Temporary Protection Directive. This is the first time it has been used.
Legal regimes matter, even though the EU and individual countries have been willing at times since the 2015-16 refugee crisis to violate international law on refugees. The Schengen Area is a group of 26 European countries who have agreed that the country of entry will be responsible for verifying the legitimacy of their the travel documents of people arriving, after which under normal conditions (e.g., no pandemic!) the person will be free to travel unrestricted to any of the other Schengen countries.
There is another set of rules, the Dublin Regulation, aka, the "Dublin System," which requires that application for asylum be processing by the country of arrival. In the case of the refugees of 2015-16 and the several years before, that means Italy and especially Greece was the EU country on whom the proportionally biggest burden fell. Applicants for asylum are normally required to remain in the country until their asylum application has been decided.
But the Dublin Regulation/Dublin System rules do not currently apply to Ukrainian citizens in the EU. On February 24 when the Russian invasion was launched, Ukrainian citizens already had the legal authorization (that Americans also have) to travel and remain in the EU for up to three months without a visa. That is the case for the two Schengen Area countries that border on Ukraine (Hungary and Poland) and the two non-Schengen EU countries (Rumania and Slovakia).
The Temporary Protection Directive that is now in force means that Ukrainians can stay in the EU for at least a year (which the EU Commission can extend to three years) without applying for asylum status. They can travel freely within the Schengen zone and they can also work legally in the EU.
There are always nuances in the law, which demagogues can and often do use to agitate against refugees. The three months vias-provision still applies to people who left Ukraine before February 24. Formally they do not fall under the Temporary Protection Directive protections. The EU Commission guidelines currently include this: "Encouraging Member States to consider extending temporary protection to persons who strictly-speaking would not fall under the scope of application of the Decision but who need protection such as those who fled Ukraine not long before 24 February 2022." Ukraine: Commission proposes temporary protection for people fleeing war in Ukraine and guidelines for border checks EU Commission press release 03/18/2022
Invoking the Directive was a good move by the EU that maybe, perhaps, possibly be a useful application of lessons from 2015-16 by the EU officials. This provides at least a window of opportunity to do things like airlifting refugees out of countries like Moldova and Poland to other EU countries. And more of the EU countries at the moment open to receiving significant numbers of Ukrainian refugees than was the case in 2015-16. The "Dublin System" reflex could kick in at any time and the far right will try to promote that. So getting out in front of that is a sensible move by the EU Commission.
There is already a hint of that in the air. As Brickner and Thomas Mayer reports (my translation): "On Friday [03/18/2022], the Czech government made people sit up and take notice with skepticism: it was at the limit with 270,000 refugees. What will happen when five or six million people arrive in the EU?"
The size of the current refugee crisis is staggering. I rely heavily on the immigration expert Gerald Knaus who heads the European Stability Initiative think tank devoted to refugee issues. He’s considered the architect of the landmark EU-Turkey deal of refugees in 2016, on which he worked closely with Angela Merkel’s government. So he’s familiar with the devilishly complicated politics of refugees in the EU.
He also tends to be conservative in his estimates. He criticizes the UN refugee agency for not distinguishing clearly enough among types of refugees (refugees currently in flight, longtime refugees in other countries, internal refugees) in the statistics they publish. So when he’s now estimating that the war in Ukraine will produce up to 10 million refugees, I hope the EU policymakers are really paying attention!
He is currently arguing for an urgent, major airlift of refugees to various EU countries. A bare beginning is taking place in evacuating refugees from Moldova. Here is the estimate from the UN Refugee Agency as of 03/18/2022, the end of the third week of the war on Ukrainian refugees.
Gerald Knaus on Austrian public TV ORF this week pointed out the obvious math: the EU is getting a million refugees per week. He expects it to continue for at least the next couple of weeks. And he’s now even saying that a full 10 million could arrive in a matter of a few more weeks. It’s already the biggest refugee crisis Europe has faced since the end of the Second World War. (That situation became the source of a major part of current international law on refugees.)
The EU failed a significant test in 2020
Poland actually used a version of the refugees-as-invaders argument in 2020 when Belarus flew in refugees from Afghanistan and the Middle East and sent them across the Polish border as asylum-seekers, which they were. Poland’s reaction was to engage in “pushbacks” of the refugees arriving on Polish territory to ask for asylum, which is flat-out illegal in international law. Poland argued that Belarus was using the refugees as “hybrid warfare” against them.
Much to their own discredit, the EU actually endorsed Poland’s illegal action. And that at a time when the EU was sanctioning Poland for refusing to abide by binding EU legal provisions.
That was an incredible sign of weakness on the part of Poland and the EU. And there we were talking about a few thousand refugees, some number of whom died unnecessarily as a result of Poland’s criminal handling of the situation. I saw this as a remarkable reminder of how vulnerable and weak the EU still is in responding to a refugee crisis. I wouldn’t be surprised in light of subsequent events if that was an action encouraged by Russia to get a measure of how the EU would respond to a new refugee crisis.
Obviously, the EU now has more than a few thousand refugees coming from Ukraine. The far-right European groups and parties are only now starting to agitate against the refugees, but they are starting. The two far-right Presidential candidates in France are currently doing so.
And they will almost certainly use the “invading army/hybrid warfare” angle, because that was a successful one during and after the 2015-16 refugee crisis. There, they could draw on decades of War-on-Terror Islamophobia to say, “they are terrorists coming to kill us all!” It will take a little extra effort to make that one stick on Ukrainian refugees. But they will try. And dirtbags like Tucker Carlson will be more than happy to help them.
How much the Russians may have calculated the refugee crisis as a part of their invasion, it’s important for people to remember that Ukrainian refugees are not an invading army. I would hope that even the corporate media will be careful about adopting the “hybrid war” framing for the refugees.
The European far right is priming their xenophobic agitation
Two of Austria’s best investigative reporters who are very familiar with far-right politics, Barbara Tóth and Nina Horaczek of the left-of-center Vienna weekly Falter, recently wrote about how the far-right is morphing their antivaxxer COVID narrative into one that says the COVID “hoax” was just one stage in the Great Replacement conspiracy, and now the war in Ukraine was provoked by George Soros and other “globalists” and God-knows-who-else. This is all part of “World War III” which is already underway in the thinking of that dark corner of the political world. (Das russische Virus 08.08.2022 )
This narrative that turns the Ukrainian immigrants into “invaders” involves a gigantic piece of gaslighting: Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, Ukraine attacked Russia, and now the Ukrainians are attacking the West with a big Jewish plot involving refugees. But since the hardcore xenophobes and the COVID antivaxxer conspiracists are heavily overlapping groups, there are lots of people who may not see that as obviously ridiculous, crazy though it is.
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