UN’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, wants the world to rise to the task of protecting refugees across the globe.
At this time of turbulence, the international community must do far more to shoulder this responsibility together. It is a moment to build a more equitable response to refugee crises through a sharing of responsibility.
Absolutely, the international community must, and the time is now.
However.
Taking in refugees ad lib is a fine feel-good measure, but it’s nothing more than virtue-signaling. All this does is “help” those fortunate enough to escape, while the receiving nations cynically turn their backs on, and abandon, those who cannot escape and remain trapped in what those receiving nations agree—by their acceptance of refugees—are terrible conditions in the originating countries.
No.
If the international community truly wants to help refugees, the constituent nations will attack the problem at the source. They’ll enter refugee-creating nations and help them (or force them) to correct the ills that create such squalid, criminal, and otherwise dangerous conditions that citizens feel constrained to risk their lives trekking across vast deserts with inadequate supplies and security and floating across wide seas in inadequate boats with inadequate supplies to another, any other, nation. They’ll move to eliminate, or vastly mitigate, the need for people to become refugees.
Enter another nation to force changes—what about those nations’ sovereignty? That’s a valid consideration, but we must weigh that against the deprecation of sovereignty caused by accepting—encouraging—the brain drain and the economic drain, such as it is, that is created by encouraging the flight of what’s left of the best of those nations from those nations.
We also must balance those refugee-creating nations’ sovereignty against the sovereignty and human rights of the people themselves left in that squalor and those criminal and otherwise dangerous conditions.
