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Faelco on 07 September 2015
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pearljammer said:
Faelco said:
pearljammer said:
Being from Canada, I'm a bit out of touch here - so take what I say as having as little validity to it as you wish. I think we should be taking in as many as we can regardless of any economic burden. Everyone. My only condition would be so long as Sharia does not trump the laws of their refuge.

 

I'm french, and unfortunately I have to disagree. We already have problems with legal immigration because of a really difficult integration. The economy is bad here, with a lot of unemployment, and it's even harder for migrants or foreigners. They can't get a job, so they can't get a place to live other than poor districts, and the result is almost foreign cities within cities. They're not really integrated in the country, and neither are their children, and a lot of them don't consider themselves french, and have no reason to do so. They're not dying or anything, of course, but they don't live in good conditions at all and can't hope for anything more for most of them. 

 

For illegal immigrants (like gypsies), it's worse, some of them live in slums and have to steal or beg, usually "employed" by mafia groups (for example to reimburse the travel). These camps barely have water, no electricity, and are frequently fed by associations to survive. The government is trying to destroy the slums, because they are a sanitary risk for the population. 

 

It's useless to say "Come, come, you're welcomed here", if the result is a slum with almost worse living conditions than an UN refugees camp in the middle  of nowhere. It's not worth the risk of crossing the sea, and we could easily build camps with better conditions in other countries closer to the countries at war (so, without the deadly travel). 

I'm partially ignorant to your countries woes and troubles. I admit that fully. I cannot with any degree of confidence fully contest anything you said. I also sympathize with your position and would argue that you're rightly grounded in having it.

However, these people are obviously going for a reason, whether they're imperiled, refused elsewhere or even given the impression (perhaps falsely) that  these are safe, caring places to go. There is no choice for them. For me the value human lives far outweigh even the conditions their given and the inconveniences it provides oithers (with some caveats).


Of course! I'm not saying "let them die". What I'm saying is that it's cute to say "let's welcome everyone" without anything more, but it's useless, because it's not a solution, and it won't change anything to the real problems (dead people because of the travel and awful living conditions). Refugees are not a problem but a symptom of something else, and it can only get worse until we do something about the real problem. 

 

So what I'm saying is : let's make something for them to keep living in their country, or at least closer from their country to avoid lots of useless deaths. It's not like the Syrian situation happened last week, but European politicians are still saying that we can't and won't do anything about it. Same thing with Libya for example. So instead of doing some nice PR talks where everyone is happy and nice and love all refugees, let's at least think about the real problem... It's stupid to do a party to welcome a refugee in front  of cameras if his family drowned on the way... Hypocrisy is nice, but it has its limits... 

 

I worked on a small research paper about Arab Spring for a french Defense training institution (affiliated to the Department of Defense). It was in 2011, and already our biggest point was the immigrants risk if nothing was done to help some countries. Everyone already knew back then that there would be a lot of deaths because of this. Nothing was done about it, people died, and it's stupid to wake up now trying to look nice. We let them die, and we were fully aware of that for a long time.