German Chancellor Angela Merkel essentially made a Palestinian teenager cry on German TV today by compassionately explaining to her that Germany is about to deport her and her family back to, well, wherever, I guess, on account of “politics is hard sometimes.” Watch:
There are lots of refugees out there, and if Germany accepts one family of refugees then they’re apparently obligated to accept all refugees, or something, and that ain’t happening. Germany ain’t here to hand out free lunches; it’s too busy shaking down Greek retirees for their pension money to provide that kind of reckless largesse.
I’d write more, but Vox’s Amanda Taub, a former human rights lawyer, already wrote it:
What Merkel really means is that there are currently millions of people in the world who could have valid asylum claims, and she’s worried they’ll all come to Germany if it seems even slightly welcoming. So Germany deports people like this young Palestinian and her family to set an example that’s just cruel enough to serve as a deterrent.
But that is also deeply unjust. Refugees exist. They are already desperate, already fleeing their homes, and they have to go somewhere. Germany may think it’s facing a refugee crisis, but the truth is that it’s hosting only a tiny fraction of the people who are fleeing war or other persecution.
The state of refugee affairs is so sorry that Germany isn’t even the worst Western nation in terms of refugees admitted per capita, and yet it has admitted vastly fewer refugees than countries like Turkey, Pakistan, and Jordan. Granted, those countries all border active conflict zones, but they’re conflicts that have been going on for several years now, so if Germany were willing to take some of those refugees in it could easily have done so by now. Germany’s refugee population is comparable to Kenya’s, despite the fact that Germany’s economy is orders of magnitude larger than Kenya’s and so Germany could actually afford to host considerably more refugees than Kenya can. And the refugees who do manage to get into Germany are treated miserably:
But the truth about the situation of asylum seekers in Germany is actually much uglier. Arson attacks on refugee hostels are a growing problem across the country. Just today, arsonists burned down a building outside Munich that was supposed to house 67 refugees. In April, there was an attack on a building in the city of Tröglitz. Before that, Der Spiegel reports, there were similar attacks in and around Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, and Sanitz. Right-wing groups committed more than 500 violent xenophobic attacks last year.
It’s not that Germany, or the rest of Europe (or the United States), couldn’t handle larger influxes of refugees, or that it can’t take steps to ensure that they are safe from right-wing terrorism, it’s that they simply don’t want to take more refugees in. Racists don’t like it when you do that, you see, and they tend to be single-issue voters. If it comes down to a choice between doing the right thing for the most vulnerable people in the world or keeping her job, Angela Merkel knows exactly what her priority is, and it doesn’t have anything to do with that crying Palestinian child. Politics is hard, you know?
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