A turn toward resolving the Belarus-Poland crisis

Christian Jakob in the German paper Jungle World comments on the problem and weakness the EU displayed in the refugee stunt that Belarus pulled this year, Humanitär aus dem Weg räumen 18.11.2021.

It looks like the immediate crisis Belarus manufactured at the Polish border is being resolved now and some lives saved. (Thomas Mayer, Migranten in Belarus: Realpolitik an der Grenze Standard 18.11.2021)

Deutsche Welle reports, Belarus begins repatriation of hundreds of migrants 11/19/2021:



As DW also reports, the problems for the refugees isn't over yet, Humanitarian crisis deepens on Poland-Belarus border 11/20/2021:



It took Germany and France working out an arrangement with Russia and Belarus. The EU as such wasn't capable of resolving it.

The opening paragraph defines the problem, although it's muddled a bit by what seems to be a superficial understanding of the position of immigration expert Gerald Knaus:

Der österreichische Politikberater Gerald Knaus, bekannt als »Erfinder des EU-Türkei-Deals«, gilt vielen als Stimme der Vernunft in den heißlaufenden Asyldebatten. Dass der »Deal« für viele Flüchtlinge vor allem hieß, dass sie seit 2016 Syrien kaum mehr verlassen können, die EU durch die türkische Regierung unter Präsident Recep Tayyip Erdoğan erpressbar bleibt und sich auf den Ägäis-Inseln seither eine ausgewachsene humanitäre Katastrophe abspielt, hat am Urteil über Knaus nichts geändert.

[The Austrian political consultant Gerald Knaus, known as the "inventor of the EU-Turkey deal", is regarded by many as the voice of reason in the hot-running asylum debates. The fact that the "deal" for many refugees meant above all that they have hardly been able to leave Syria since 2016, that the EU remains subject to blackmail by the Turkish government under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and that a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe has been taking place on the Aegean islands since then has not changed Knaus' verdict. (my translation)]

This is a superficial take on Knaus' position. He conceived of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal as something that would only work properly if the EU then implemented a process by which significant numbers of refugees in Turkey have their asylum petitions considered by the EU and the successful ones accepted for residence in the EU.

The EU has not done that in the nearly six years since the EU-Turkey deal was concluded. And Knaus has been one of the most prominent critics of the EU's inaction and violations of law and human rights in its treatment of refugees in the years since. In his book Welche Grenzen brauchen wir? (2020), he discusses the concept behind the EU-Turkey deal and its antecedents. Christian Jakob is right that that there is a humanitarian crisis in the Greek Aegean islands with refugees. But that is not directly an effect of the EU-Turkey deal as such. It's another aspect of the EU's let-ignore-the-problem-and-hope-it-goes-away attitude toward the refugee crisis.

Knaus links on Twitter to Jakob's article and comments in a generous but critical way on it. Knaus calls attention to how widespread the mishandling of immigration issues is in the richer countries:

But the policies to which his criticism boils down are being implemented by any democracy, any country in the world. Currently, all 27 EU countries support Poland's policies. Under Biden, not Trump, just in September, 100,000 were deported from the United States without asylum. In the rest of the world, hardly any state grants asylum.

Like Jacob, a majority in Germany wants a humane policy without deaths. But he doesn't show a way to get there. This is more urgent today than ever.

Jakob, he points out, has advocated for an "open borders" solution.

But as far as it goes, this part of Jakob's critique is on point:

Denn für den westlichen Teil der EU ist die Flüchtlingssituation – wieder einmal – überaus verfahren: Kaum etwas fürchtet man mehr, als dass die Aufnahme der etwa vierstelligen Zahl festsitzender Geflüchteter als »Pull-Faktor«, also als Anreiz für weitere Flüchtlinge, diesen Weg zu nutzen, politisch ausgeschlachtet wird. Genau diese Botschaft aber senden Rechtspopulisten ständig, seit die vom belarussischen Diktator Alexander Lukaschenko produzierten Bilder an der östlichen Außengrenze täglich in den Medien zu sehen sind.

Dass die EU sich damit so erpressbar gemacht hat, ist ihre eigene Schuld. Bis heute hat sie keinen Plan, mit Ankommenden so um­zugehen, dass deren Rechte und die eigenen moralischen Maßstäbe gewahrt werden. Stattdessen hat auch die EU jahrelang die »irregu­läre Migration« als Bedrohung dämonisiert und jetzt auch noch die eskalierende Formulierung vom »hybriden Krieg« übernommen, die von der rechten autoritären Regierung Polens benutzt wird.

[For the western part of the EU, the refugee situation is – once again – extremely complicated: Hardly anything is feared more than that the admission of the approximately four-digit number of refugees as a "pull factor", i.e. as an incentive for more refugees to use this path, will be politically exploited. But this is exactly the message that right-wing populists are constantly sending since the images produced by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko on the eastern external border can be seen daily in the media.

The fact that the EU has thus made itself so blackmailable is its own fault. To this day, it has no plan to deal with arrivals in such a way that their rights and their own moral standards are upheld. Instead, the EU has for years demonized "irregular migration" as a threat and has now adopted the escalating phrase of "hybrid war" used by Poland's right-wing authoritarian government.]

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the most senior Catholic official in Austria, calls both Belaurus' conduct in using refugees this way as well as Poland's response in their brutal treatment of the refugees, "cynical and shameless." (Kardinal Schönborn über Belarus: "zynisch und schamlos" Heute 19.11.2021)

Gerald Knaus is one of the participants in the English podcast, Fortress Europe: Who gets to come in? BBC News 11/20/2021.

It would be nice to think that there would be some kind of meaningful negative repercussions for Poland from the EU for their criminal treatment of the refugees on their border. But I doubt it.

EU long-term challenges on immigration and refugees (Part 3 of 3): Austrian policy

This third and final part has to do with the approach of the current Austrian "turquoise-green" coalition (Christian Democrats and Greens) headed by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) to immigration policy.

The official Aus Verantwortung für Österreich.Regierungsprogramm 2020–2024 of the current government has a section on „Migration und Asyl“ ("Migration and Asylum"). The bulk of it is basically a description of routine government processes related to immigration and asylum puffed up to sound like innovative ideas.

But there are also parts that give an idea of the government’s usage of the immigration issue. (All quotes from the program are my translations from German.)

Protection must be primarily provided as close as possible to the region of origin. .

That means: keep refugees so far away from Austria as possible.

This requires sustained contributions to the reduction of the causes of refugees and migration, such as support in countries of origin, in order to create life prospects on the ground.

This is little more than a bad joke. Austria is not going to mount some massive new development aid project for the Middle East and North Africa. Or to push the EU to do so. Nor will Kurz’ government push for the EU to do it. This is not a topic that regularly appears in major publications or news broadcasts.

And since few people know anything about how development projects in Libya, Sudan, Nigeria, Syria, or Iraq would work or what the actual need is, this proposal even in private discussions at the Stammtisch (The German and Austrian equivalent of what American Republicans call "Real Americans" or elsewhere can rarely go beyond the keep-the-foreigner-out version in the Government Program.

In my experience, when Austrians talk about other countries and the word “corruption” comes up, it means “I don’t know anything else about that country.” So without an active political effort by one or more of the political parties to build support for more foreign aid, that statement like that in the Regierungsprogramm also means: keep refugees so far away from Austria as possible.

In my experience, when Austrians talk about other countries and the word “corruption” comes up, it means “I don’t know anything else about that country.” So without an active political effort by one or more of the political parties to build support for more foreign aid, that statement like that in the Government Program also means: keep refugees so far away from Austria as possible.

Or, in other words, the conversation goes like this: “What’s needed is development aid in the home countries.” “Yes, that’s what really needs to happen. But you have to wonder why these countries are in such bad shape.” “Yeah, it’s because they’re so corrupt. The politicians take the money and stick it in their Swiss bank accounts.” “So more aid won’t help them anyway.”

In any case, meaningful development aid for Libya, Syria, and Iraq requires political stability and an end to military conflicts. Austria is also making little effort to promote peace efforts for the EU in that region.

And in Syria, for instance, the situation is grim (Synaps-Syrien-Team, “Überleben in Syrien” Le Monde diplomatique Deutsch Januar 2020):

Syria is in an economic struggle for survival, destroying all hopes of an early recovery. Yes, the government in Damascus has won militarily, but it faces enormous problems on the economic front. The hollowed-out state must increasingly finance itself through bribes and the plundering of its own citizens. It is not even able to provide people with the basic necessities. In this way, the system can stay afloat, but at the same time the basis for an economic new start is undermined. [my translation from German]

From the Government Program:

In addition, an efficient and human rights-compliant EU external border protection must be ensured and smuggling must be effectively combated. In Austria, it is important to ensure fast and high-quality asylum procedures.

The key phrase here is external border, Greece, and Spain with the chief responsibility for refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. That is, So without an active political effort by one or more of the political parties to build support for more foreign aid, that statement like that in the Government Program also means: keep refugees so far away from Austria as possible.

Because the "fast and high-quality asylum procedures" are pretty much meaningless as long as the government can keep refugees so far away from Austria as possible.

The Government Program also says:

In the future, Austria will cleanly separate the issues of flight and migration. This requires a migration strategy for safe, orderly, regular and qualified migration in the interests of Austria and those affected.

Also basically propaganda. This and the further section “Qualified Immigration” make it sound like the only immigrants Austria might need are a few physicians and maybe a computer scientist or two. That’s not at all the case. And that refugees don’t include qualified people, is certainly not the case. The use of “migrants” instead of immigrants or refugees is typical "turquoise" (Christian Democratic ÖVP) and blue (far right FPÖ) vocabulary. The idea is that they are just wandering hordes and obscures the difference between voluntary immigrants and refugees.

Those who are stopped at the EU's external border when they enter illegally will be cared for and returned to their country of origin or transit (or safe third country) in compliance with international law and the Geneva Convention on Refugees.

Austria is not on the external border of the EU, so this is ideological posturing. The part about “in compliance with international law and the Geneva Convention on Refugees“ is fluff. This is already regulated by the international laws cited.

And distributing refugees among EU countries for processing in either routine times or crisis periods like 2015-16? They are against it:

Mechanisms for the distribution of migrants/asylum seekers within the EU have failed. Austria therefore does not take any initiatives towards distribution rules.

The new Interior Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) emphasized the point (Österreich nimmt seine Teilnahme am EU-Umsiedelungsprogramm ("Resettlement") nicht wieder auf. Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 23.01.2020):

"We will report to the EU Commission that we are not taking any people," a spokeswoman for Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (VP) said. As of 2015, Austria had taken in a total of 1900 refugees, all from Syria, through three humanitarian reception programmes. The former turquoise-blue federal government suspended the resettlement program in early 2017. ...

"Resettlement" means that refugees in crisis areas are selected for resettlement by international organisations such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Brussels wants to bring a total of more than 30,000 refugees from crisis countries to the EU via resettlement. [my transation from German]

Austria’s new EU Minister Karoline Edtstadler reinforces that position (Edtstadler in Migrationsfrage gegen "Drüberfahren" über EU-Staaten Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 14.01.2020):

It is not about "going through countries," Edtstadler said Monday night in [the ORF television program] ZiB2. Instead, each EU Member State should make a contribution, for example by strengthening external border protection.

When asked by moderator Armin Wolf what the difference was between the previous and the present coalition government on this issue, the EU minister did not respond directly. She pointed out that Austria has a very high burden in having a high proportion of asylum procedures. Edtstadler confirmed that foreign minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP) did not want to participate in the resettlement programme

Der Foreign Minister takes a hard line, as well (Außenminister Schallenberg: Kein Beitritt Österreichs zu UN-Migrationspakt Standard 12.01.2020):

Austria will not join the UN migration pact, even under turquoise-green. "Austria's line on this issue will remain completely unchanged," Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP) said in an interview with APA. ...

"I think this is the completely wrong way to go, which only promotes the business of smugglers," Schallenberg said of the EU Commission's demand to take in refugees rescued in the Mediterranean. Schallenberg also does not think much of a resumption of the United Nations resettlement programme. ...

"I am not happy with these statements," Green MEP [Member of Parliament] Ewa Ernst-Dziedzic told STANDARD. Schallenberg's stipulations do not correspond to her party's positions. However, the government's programme includes "commitments to human rights and multilateralism," which distinguishes it from the former turquoise-blue coalition pact.

Chancellor Kurz himself used a meeting of the Visegrad Group (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic) to reinforce his anti-immigrant position (Kurz und die Visegrad-Staaten: Nur beim Migrationskurs im Gleichschritt Oberösterreichische Nachricten 17.01.2020):

At least on migration [immigration] policy, there is still agreement between Austria and its eastern neighbours. Kurz, like the Visegrad Group, remains close to the credo of "tight borders" and its "no" to EU-wide distribution quotas for refugees, although on this point his new partners, the Greens, think differently. To which Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban paid a final compliment: "Austria is the natural partner of the Visegrad states."

But at Davos this year, Kurz concentrated on trashing the idea of a green economy.


Kurz warned about how green ideas would bring on a “failed” collectivism – presumably referring to Communist-style state-socialism - "suffering, hunger, and unbelievable misery." (Kurz warnt in Davos vor Comeback des Kollektivismus Standard 24.01.2020; my translation from German)

But he notably avoided emphasizing immigration issues. And he certainly didn’t advocate a fair revision of the Dublin System!

Part 1: https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2020/01/eu-long-term-challenges-on-immigration.html
Part 2: https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2020/02/eu-long-term-challenges-on-immigration.html
Part 3: https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2020/02/eu-long-term-challenges-on-immigration_5.html

Venezuelan refugees in Colombia

Bloomberg Businessweek has a report on immigration, How Governments Use Immigration to Boost Their Economies 10/30/2019, that includes a section on refugees from Venezuela to Colombia:

Colombia, which shares a 1,400-mile border with Venezuela, has been hit hardest by the refugee crisis, receiving 1.6 million Venezuelan migrants, who now make up about 3% of the population, up from virtually none five years ago.

The Colombian government estimates it’s paid $1.5 billion - a figure equal to 0.5% of gross domestic product - to care for the exiles. A refugee fund set up by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Islamic Development Bank approved a $31.5 million grant for Colombia in April. Meanwhile, international donors have pledged $340 million in humanitarian aid to help Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and elsewhere. However, those figures pale next to the more than $23 billion that countries and multilateral organizations committed to help Syrians fleeing their war-torn country in the first five years of the exodus, according to UN data. [my emphasis]

A significant number of refugees from Venezuela to Colombia are Colombians who had gone to live in Venezuela in more prosperous times when oil prices were high and boosting Venezuela's petrostate economy. But they are nevertheless part of a large influx of people who hadn't been living in Venezuela.

The Trump Administration is willing to impose sanctions to hammer the Venezuelan economy and undermine the current government of Nicolás Maduro, which it currently doesn't even recognize as the official government, although the "government" it does recognize there is largely a PR stunt.

But providing adequate assistance to Colombia to deal with the refugee problem to which the US has significantly contributed doesn't seem to be on the political radar screen of either party in the US.

But then, the Trump policy toward refugees in the US is appalling in so many ways, even criminally brutal.

It's also an important and valid criticism of the Obama Administration as well as Trump's that they were willing to take only a limited number of Syrian refugees from the Syrian civil war and also African refugees, many of which are now trying to make their way on the dangerousl refugee track to Europe after the destruction of the Libyan government by the US-French-British military intervention in 2011.

And thanks to the EU' own unwillingness to develop a realistic common policy for ansorbing refugees, refugee issues are now a growing contrast on EU and NATO foreign policy. Turkey currently is holding over three and a half million Syrian refugees and Turkey's willingness to hold them in exchange for payment from the EU was the kick-the-can-down-the-road "solution" to the immigration crisis of 2015-6 that Angela Merkel negotiated. The Syrian refugees are one motive for Turkey's current miltitary incursion into Syria.

The US and the EU have to get better of refugee problems more generally. And they need to take the lead in strangtening and expanding the United Nations' role, as well.

On the other hand, raising the need for (vaguely defined) longterm solutions to immigrantion/refugee issues is also used by xenophobic politicians as a deflection from discusinng more immediate problems. And if you can't be realistic and practical about the current problems, you're unlikely to be serious or realistic about longterm ones.

Österreichs Kurz will keine NGO See-Rettungen

Österreichs Kanzler Sebatian "Milchgesicht" Kurz machte ein Gespräch mit Stephan Löwenstein und Thomas Gutschker von der FAZ (Sonntag): „Diese Politik beendet das Ertrinken“ 14.10.2018. (Die ganze Interview ist nur mit Abo erreichbar.)

Sie haben ihn bei einem zarten Punkt berüht: "Sie wollen in Ihrer Zeit als EU-Ratspräsident das Problem der illegalen Migration nach Europa angehen. Politisch hat sich seit Juli kaum etwas getan." Das stimmt. Und seine EU-Ratspräsidentschaft ist schon mehr als die Hälfte vorbei.

Der Standard berichtet über die FAZ-Sonntag Interview in Kurz setzt Schlepper und Hilfs-NGOs faktisch gleich 13.10.2018.

Der "Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung" sagte Kurz: "Es kann doch nicht sein, dass ein paar Nichtregierungsorganisationen das klare Ziel der 28 Staats- und Regierungschefs in Europa konterkarieren. Und das nicht nur mit dem Ziel, Leben zu retten, sondern gemeinsam mit den Schleppern Menschen nach Mitteleuropa zu bringen."

Der ÖVP-Chef nannte das Schiff "Aquarius 2", das von Ärzte ohne Grenzen und SOS Mediterranee betrieben wird. Schiffe wie die "Aquarius" versuchten, der libyschen Küstenwache beim Bergen von Migranten zuvorzukommen. Das schaffe absurde Situationen. "Wenn nicht europäische Schiffe retten, sondern libysche oder ägyptische, stellen sich komplexe Rechtsfragen gar nicht erst", sagte Kurz.

Kanzler Milchgesicht liebt leere Rhetorik. Und Österreich hat natürlich keine Küste. Aber trotzdem sind solche Aussagen nicht ganz harmlos. Kurz gibt dabei verbale Unterstützung zu rechts-populistischer, anti-Immigration Parteien und Politiker wie Ungarns Viktor Orbán (Fidesz), Italiens Innenminister Matteo Salvini (Lega) (der auch de facto Regierungschef ist), und seinem eigenen Vizekanzler Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ).

Prominent German historian Heinrich August Winkler takes a surprisingly shallow position on immigration in "Der Spiegel"

Heinrich August Winkler is one of Germany's best-known and highly respected historians. The author description Der Spiegel attaches to his article, "Der Westen erodiert" (4:2018 06/10/2018) calls him the most influential German historian.

That makes the section of his article on immigration all the more suprising. A new book by Winkler was just published, Zerbricht der Westen?. The article doesn't indicate whether it's excerpted from the book, and the book may present a more nuanced view of the issue.

But what made it into the Spiegel article can be generously described as frivolous. It could also be read as a concern-troll advocacy of the anti-immigration position nominally pretending to express sympathetic concern.

Labels for current issues change, sometimes quickly. The large influx of refugees in 2015 was certainly a crisis, and everyone recognized it as such. The solution that the EU found for it was the deal that Angela Merkel negotiated with Turkey's authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in early 2016. The deal was essentially that Turkey would hold refugees that reach Turkey in exchange for payments from the EU. The EU outsourced the problem to Turkey, in other words. Turkey now is holding something like three million refugees. My understanding is that a large majority of them live outside of refugee centers. The European press as well as politicians don't seem to feel a lot of impetus to report in great detail on their condition.

There has been a very visible increase in the number of immigrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Northern Africa at least since 2011. That date corresponds with the US-French-British military intervention that ended with the outster of Muammar Gaddafi's government and his lynch-murder of Gaddafit himself. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (in)famously celebrated Gaddafi's murder (after first being anally raped with a bayonet) as a delightful thing (Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died CBS 10/20/2011):

This delightful moment for the Secretary of State meant that Libya would then descend into failed-state conditions. (Ted Galen Carpenter, Libya Is a Failed State (and It's America's Fault) The National Interest 11/24/2017; Giorgio Cafiero and Daniel Wagner, Four Years After Gaddafi, Libya Is a Failed State FPIP 04/06/2015)

Qaddafi's regime was a brutal one. But the removal of his government had various baleful effects, including facilitating arms trafficking and attracting Islamist fighters from other countries. And it meant that Libya was no longer employing the large numbers of immigrant workers from nearby countries that they had been under Qaddafi. And we would probably shudder to think of the ways in which Qaddifi's government blocked irregular immigrantion out of the country and restrained the human smugglers ("coyotes" in American English, Schleppers in German) who were willing to provide passage to Europe. But after Qaddafi's overthrow in 2011, those factors no longer functioned with the same effectiveness.

After 2015-16, thanks primarily to the Turkey deal, refugee flows declined radically in 2017 and 2018. If the large influx of 2015-16 put real strains on the emergency services of EU countries, it would be pure demogoguery to make the same claim for 2017 and 2018. Since there's no shortage of xenophobic demagoguery, advocates for immigration sanity now tend to refer to 2015-16 as a "crisis" but stress that what the EU is facing directly right now can't be described as a crisis. And I try to be mindful of that important distinction.

But looking at the future, I tend to think it would be more accurate to describe the ongoing refugee flows as a long-term crisis that has acute and less acute phases. If Turkey changes its mind about continuing with the 2016 agreement, a new acute phase would follow.

Winkler's argument

Winkler begins the immigration section of his Spiegel article this way:

Deutschland ist am krisenhaften Zustand der Europäischen Union nicht unschuldig. Der deutsche (oder, was die Sache nicht besser macht, deutsch-öterreichische) Alleingang in der Flüchtlings- oder besser Migrationskrise im September 2015 konnte nicht ohne Auswirkungen auf die europäischen Nachbarn bleiben.

[Germany is not innocent in the crisis-like condition of the European Union. The German (or German-Austrian, which didn't make things better) go-it-alone path in the refugee, or better put, migration crisis in September 2015 could not help but have effects on the European neighbors.}

I'm not going to try to deconstruct every sentence of Winkler's argument. But these first two sentences unfortunately telegraph the rest of it pretty well. "Migration" versus "refugees" has become a political slogan. The anti-immigration politicians and publicists prefer to call the people desperate enough to take the high-risk, deadly smuggler routes to get to Europe "migrants", which makes them sound like seasonal workers following the harvests year after year. Refugee is both a discription and a legal category grounded in international law: people who flee their countries due to political persecution or massive violence, like that in civil wars. The latter kind of refugee is entitled to asylum in safe countries, which grants them legal residence, the legal right to work and other advantages. The xenophobes prefer to brand refugees as "economic migrants" who are just looking for a better job or to take advantage of European taxpayers living it up in the "hammock" of the host countries' social systems.

The "German-Austrian go-it-alone path" is a head-scratcher, at best a very clumsy description of the immigrantion crisis events of 2015-16.

He goes on to say that the big problem for the EU in 2015-16 was that Germany tried to tell all the other contries what to do in the crisis. And he says that the other EU countries should have made it very clear that they weren't going to take direction from Germany. He also criticizes the position of Germany, identified with Merkel's stand on the refugee crisis, of presenting itself as "the leading moral nation of Europe." And thus he blames Germany (and Merkel) for mismanaging the refugee crisis and therefore causing the increased political success of the extreme right since then.

How this differs from the simplistic sloganeering of the anti-immigrant right is unclear to me.

If we rewind to 2015, the crisis began with the influx of large numbers of refugees into Hungary through what became known as the "Balkan route." Germany pushed for a "European solution" in which each EU country would agree to take contingents of specified numbers of refugees. This was not only reasonable and practical proposal then. It's still a part of what would be a longterm solution to the chronic refugee crisis.

Hungary's Viktor Orbán, egged on by Vladimir Putin's government in Moscow in pursuit of its longer-term strategy to disrupt the EU, saw an opportunity to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment politically. So once Germany had announced its willingness to accept refugees as part of an EU solution, Orbán's government brought thousands of refugees to the Austrian border, telling them they were being welcomed in Germany. Austria then had an immediate decision: repel the refugees by force or let them through.

The upshot was that Germany agreed to accept large numbers of refugees to solve the immediate crisis and their EU partners for the most part refused to participate. The two most notable exceptions were Sweden and Austria. Evenually, Sweden accepted the largest number of refugees in that wave relative to the country's population. Austria was second, Germany third. But Germany accepted by far the largest number of refugees.

Sweden at some point stopped accepting further refugees. There is an unavoidable chain-reaction effect in such a situation. Once a country shuts its borders to further refugees, the next country in the chain has to decide whether they will accept more or also further limit immigration. The solution, an inherently unstable one, because became the 2016 deal with Turkey.

From the reporting on the 2015-16 crisis, there seems to be real reason to believe that Merkel was motivated by humanitarian concerns in her initial decision to accept large numbers of refugees. But she was also motivated by very practical concerns in dealing with a real problem. Germany, Sweden, and Austria provided a three-country interim solution to a European problem. The picture of Merkel as some kind of self-righteous moralist is a propaganda concoction of the far right. (Well, mostly.) Her deal with Turkey isn't one that Mother Teresa would have likely approved.

Winkler's Spiegel article seems to assume that the right solution for EU countries to the very real and ongoing immigration problem is to imitate the appproach of demogogic politicians like Austria's Sebastian Kurz or Hungary's Viktor Orbán by symbolically pounding their chests, shouting "Close the borders!", and trying to dump the problem onto some other country.

Immigration is a huge and comlex problem for the EU that can be temporarily mitigated by close-the-border chain reactions. But the refugee issue doesn't exist in a vaccum. The EU countries have to decide whether they want an optimal solution to the problem or prefer to lurch from crisis to crisis with all the risks and limitations that go with the current approach, i.e., dump the problem onto Turkey. (And, to a significant but lesser extent, onto the EU outer-border Italy and Greece.)

I doubt that advocates of practical solutions can ever communicate their message in as simplistic slogans as those the fear-mongers use: We're being overrun by foreigners! Political Islam! They're all rapists and murderers! Lazy bums trying to sponge off our tax euros!

But the radical right's simplistic solutions depend on creating phony problems. ("Little girls with hijabs, aaa-iii-eeee!!")

The people trying to find practical longterm adjustments have reality on their side. That always counts for something.

[04/16/2018: Corrected for clarity of wording and typographical errors.]