Citizens from Kosovo, Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Morocco and Tunisia would all have their claims fast-tracked within three months on the assumption that they were likely to fail.
EuroMed Rights - a network of human rights organisations - warned that it was misleading and dangerous to label the seven countries as safe, because they included “countries with documented rights abuses and limited protections for both their own citizens and migrants”.
This is such a hard issue. If documented rights abuses and limited protections are a reason for extending asylum, we could have most of the world in here as refugees, including the whole populations of the US, China and India.
On the other hand, it is a fundamental contradiction of European values to push people back into places where they are abused.
Then again, Russia has weaponized masses of asylum seekers with great effect.
I also believe that migration, refuge status and asylum are very difficult topics but I don’t agree with the framing you make because it seems to me you present the issue as something that came out of the blue.
For me, the context mainly derives from European colonialism, since this is how global inequalities have been established in the first place. European countries have exhausted the resources from formerly colonised places for their benefit. We also need to examine if this so-called “post-colonial era” has really shifted towards decolonisation or to a neo-colonialism in practice.
Without using taking into consideration these aspects, I don’t think we can have a meaningful conversation on the topic.
And that actually shines a light on another issue, the differences between parts of the EU. That is because you are describing the EU as an union of colonizers, it couldn’t be farther from the truth for countries like Finland, Latvia or Hungary, which have been colonies rather than colonizers for most of their existence. In fact, Hungary has mostly been behaving as a German colony for the past 20-30 years.
The way I see it, while the EU has member states with heavy colonial pasts, a lot - IDK even most? - of the others are in a tough spot because of this, as their societies are even less used to the multiculturalism that being a colonial power brings, and they are right IMO in saying “we did not fuck this up, it’s not on us to fix it”.
Finally, again the problem is that while reparations for colonial wrongdoings should happen, the priority should be stopping current neocolonialism. We can’t heal old wounds while inflicting new ones.
On the one hand, the current refugees are not coming to Europe from old European colonies, but from Russian ones. In fact, most of them come because of Russia bombing many of them as a last ditch attempt of a failing colonial power to maintain its exploitative hold on them. That is true of Syria or Ukraine.
I think it’s two separate issues, with migration being the shared aspect. Economic migration I think should be considered in the context of what you said, like people from ex-colonies should be helped by opening up the education system or the job market - in very regulated ways, mostly prescribing a very high minimum wage - for them, while people from eg. Syria should be helped by giving out asylum, but the two systems should be entirely separate. If anything, I think the costs associated by housing Ukrainian or Syrian asylees should be taken from frozen Russian assets, as part of the cost of rebuilding those countries.
Trying to “fix” ex-colonies, or completely opening up the country to economic migration creates neo-colonialistic dynamics IMO.
That is because you are describing the EU as an union of colonizers,
Not at all. Yes they started with their neighbors. You mentioned a couple of examples, another would be Ireland and the UK. Still, some common things tho between european colonisers was their sense of superiority and their brutal practices towards indigenous peoples and their environment.
On the one hand, the current refugees are not coming to Europe from old European colonies, but from Russian ones.
This is not my understanding, for 2 main reasons
- Practically such a huge amount of the world has been colonised by europeans. Btw check out the maps in the wiki page of the colonial empire.
- About the Russia thing, I don’t think so. I found these stats that present a different picture about the countries of origin. See our world in data (sort by Refugee by country of origin). If you have some info that changes significantly this picture, please share.
Edit: I moved around some sentences to make it more coherent. Hopefully.
Yeah, a huge amount of countries and people were colonized by Europeans. Some of those are still colonies. There could be endless arguments about what exactly the people in the Republic of France owe people who have been colonized by the Emperor of France.
The end goal for that should be a relationship like the one the UK has with Canada, which turned from a colony to an equal ally.
For that, there should be a transfer of technology and knowledge, so giving them free access to higher education in eg. France, or gifting them patents, or funding infrastructure - not like China or the IMF though, I mean without an ulterior motive.
On the very stats you sent me it says the top 3 are Afganistan, Syria and Ukraine. Afghanistan is its own mess, and I think the narrative I accept is that Europe’s part in it was that we went there to preserve NATO - much good that did, see Trump - but we’re still part of the problem, and we should take in Afghanis because of that even for long term resettlement, and so should the US.
But the point is, the amount of displaced people from Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine are nearly equal. The latter two are Russian “near abroad” colonies fighting what is essentially a war of independence, and together they far outnumber Afghanis, especially near Europe. And that is an asylum problem rather than a “we owe them” problem IMO.
I think I just understood our main point of difference. Maybe.
For me, the problems in the middle-east / West Asia for example, have been created due to colonialism. More specifically, because eurpean colonisers carved up the area when the Ottoman Empire started to crumble. In a way, I look further back in time to find the root cause, which is not that long ago, if you think about it. Btw, I also consider the US power-house as a problem that derived from european colonialism. Similarly, Australia and Canada even if they don’t seem to have the US power ambitions on global geopolitics.
This is why I also see migration as such a difficult issue, but as you might have noticed I didn’t talk about solutions. The prosperity of western societies was created and is maintained due to the exhaustive exploitation of other parts of the world. I believe before the west addresses that, there can be no solutions, and and-aid legislation (best case scenario that is) cannot help the healing of such deep wounds.
The problem I see with the West addressing this is that for that to happen, we have to stop viewing the West as a single unitary thing, both in terms of nations and of social class. You can’t blame the whole collective West while expecting them to join your side of the neocolonialism debate.
And the flip side is that the whoel subject cannot really be talked about without looking at geopolitics as a whole. Neocolnialism is practiced by all major and some minor powers today, and it is the exact same dynamic playing out in Ukraine that is playing out in Palestine, with the small difference that Ukrainians had a headstart of a mostly functional country in the first place so they can defend themselves from their aggressor more effectively.
Calling for the US to stop backing genocide only makes your argument anti-colonialist if you oppose other attempts of colonialism, like Russia trying to retain its colony Ukraine. Russia has been propped up just as much by its colonies as the US, except they never really made it to prosperity. TBH the current best hope for a great power that is independent enough not to be another colony to emerge, that does not directly need its colonies to even survive, is if Ukraine joins the EU. In that case, I think there may be a future when the French get out of Africa like how the British got out of much of their colonies.
My point here is that the statement that “the US-led West is the biggest exploiter and beneficiary of neocolonialism” might have been true between like 1990 and 2010, but before that the USSR was just as big a contender, and today’s China and Russia are also trying to either set up their new colonial empire, or trying to reclaim some semblance of their old.
Not to mention that the “US-led West” has died with the re-election of Donald Trump.
