The growing Ukrainian refugee crisis in Europe

This is a decent 13-minute English report from Deutsche Welle on Germany's handling so far of Ukrainian refugees, Germany's lessons learned from the 2015 refugee crisis 04/30/2022:

It features comments by Gerald Knaus, an Austrian-born migration expert who was a major figure in developing the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement that provided the immediate resolution of the 2015 refugee crisis referred to in this report. He's the director of the European Stability Initiative (ESI). It's a helpful summary of what kinds of services countries need to provide to refugees. (If anyone is wondering how the *US* performance on this is currently: it's really bad.)

The report has an upbeat tone. So it waits until the end (12:20) to give the quote from Gerald Knaus that I would have put at the beginning:

Let's not forget, we only have [had] this war for seven weeks. After seven weeks in 2015, those who were skeptical [i.e., hostile to refugees] were not very loud. Because the real test will be in four months when there might be two and a half million refugees in Germany - a number that we've never seen before. When we have a shortage of every kindergarten, of schools, then the test will be if German society will show the same empathy as now and I hope it will. And I think we should focus on sustaining this because there hasn't been a refugee crisis like this in Europe since the 1940s. [my emphasis]

It's appropriate that in the clip where he says this, the hair on top of his head is sticking straight up. Because he's been in a Cassandra role since the successful agreement with Turkey in 2016, saying that the EU countries need to really get it together on preparing for refugee crises because there would be more of them. Now there is one. And most EU governments have taken the understandably tempting approach of kicking the can down the road and letting some later officeholders deal with it.

But the "can" is now more like a brick wall. The UN figures as of April 29 estimate 4.8 million Ukrainian refugees in EU countries and Moldova, Poland receiving by far the largest number. These estimates are not precise counts. But the influx of refugees to the EU in 2015 that is remembered as a terrible refugee crisis was 1.1 million. Most of those wound up settling in Germany. The far-right parties - some of them more-or-less openly "Putinist" in their politics - went all-in on xenophobic propaganda. And the center-right and center-left parties did a mostly pitiful job in trying to counter it, to the extent they tried at all. The refugee scare was a big boost to the Brexit campaign.

This is a different situation in some ways. But the math is easy: 4.8 million is a lot bigger than 1.1 million. And we're just now in the third month of the war. Knaus has been estimating that there could be 10 million external refugees this calendar year. The EU countries have around 447 million people, Britain another 67 million. A well-coordinated refugee policy would make even 10 million manageable. In 2015, with Britain still an EU member, way too many political leaders freaked out over 1.1 million.

Knaus also speaks about the current situation in this German interview, Es ist im Interesse Deutschlands, Polen zu helfen NDR 29.04.2022.