Refugees – Interlocking Crises (War, Poverty, Corruption, Crime) Kill Innocent People

QUESTIONS:
What causes refugees?
What are the possible responses to refugees?
Which Responses are most effective?
Is Germany an example of a success story of refugees? Or is it a story of the failure of multiculturalism? Why?

Refugees are the “flip side” of political exiles. Individual people go into political exile for political reasons, whereas refugees are a mass phenomenon of ordinary people. There is no formal legal framework for political exiles, but there is one for refugees, at least in Germany, and in most first world countries.

Modernity, unlike the pre-modern, tended to see the state in its “ideal” form as a unity of territory, and people, and the people as a unity of language and religion. This was never the case of Germany, unlike France, which is why the story of German unification and state power is so conflicted.

German population in Europe prior to the war:

This doesnt include the Germans living in Estonia or Russia (“Ritterorden” and “Wolgadeutsche” respectively) or the various German settlements in Africa and the Americas.
Volksliste

Refugees in the immediate post-war era.

Art. 116 GG
Art. 14 StagG
Some were forced to flee, because Russia seized their property.
Others (the minority) chose to flee.
Almost all the refugee flows were from East Prussia (Pomerania, what is now western Poland and Russia).
Few fled from West to East.
Mass rapes (now jus cogens)
Child soldiers (now jus cogens)

Current refugee issues:
Example – people fleeing war in Libya and Syria wind up on over-loaded boats, which sink, killing the refugees.

-This is an example of neoconservative regime change not thinking through to the unintended consequences of armed interventions.
-Russia opposed attack on Libya vehemently.
-Russia also strongly opposes attack on Syria.

Example – people fleeing overland in overloaded trucks die of suffocation.

Hungary plans to build a wall between it and Serbia, which provokes more refugees (“now or never”)

Organized crime and political corruption together cause the overloading leading to avoidable deaths.

Germany organizes maritime rescue patrols in the Mediterranean

German law on asylum is
a) really well developed
b) very generous
c) tries to prioritize war refugees over economic refugees
d) tries to prefer well-integrated refugees with good working skills over desperate broken people
-case of the Palestinian crying girl
-backlash: fire-bombing of asylum centers, mostly in former East Germany
-compare to bombings of black churches in current USA

Germany took in 800,000 immigrants this year, second largest on earth, a very very large number.

To present, few refugees from Ukraine, because they can settle in Western Ukraine (or Russia).

EU Blue Card

DISCUSSION:
QUESTIONS:
What causes refugees?
What are the possible responses to refugees?
Which Responses are most effective?
Is Germany an example of a success story of refugees? Or is it a story of the failure of multiculturalism? Why?

VIDEOS

GERMAN LANGUAGE – SLOWLY SPOKEN REPORTS – REFUGEES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtCVB5dN4Hc

HISTORICAL VIDEOS

Mass_Movement_Of_German_Refugees_Ulm