The Refugee Crisis in Europe: Q&A with Demetrios Papademetriou

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CHAPTERS 

[00:01:31]: Germany leads amid absent EU-wide response 

[00:03:09]: Reception centers in and beyond Europe 

[00:04:05]: Designating safe countries of origin 

[00:05:19]: Returning economic migrants and processing abroad 

[00:09:04]: U.S. leadership and Gulf states’ roles 

[00:10:24]: Historical precedent: Indochinese resettlement 

[00:11:45]: Building sustainable long-term solutions 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:20.10] 

We have probably as many as 6 or 700,000 people who have already made it into Europe seeking asylum. These are mixed flows, both migrants and refugees, and that number is expected to grow to maybe 850 or even 1 million people by the end of the year.

[00:00:45.08] 

Yes, we have increasing numbers of Syrians coming via Greece and then with the western Balkans trying to make it into Hungary, and then to the rest of Europe. The rest of Europe typically means Austria to a certain degree, but primarily Germany and Sweden. The numbers are already very large, probably well over 400,000 for this year so far. And there are expectations, projections that these numbers could easily double and perhaps even go higher than that. And it is important to also note that although most of them will be Syrians, the floors are mixed, including both economic migrants and refugees.

[00:01:31.12] 

So far you have no European response. What you have is responses, some exquisite ones by some member states of the European Union, particularly Germany, that has opened up to everyone that comes into Germany and has already stated at the highest level that Syrians will receive protection in Germany. Those numbers are very large. Yesterday, the Vice Chancellor of Germany suggested that Germany would be willing to take half a million refugees for the foreseeable future. By that we mean two or three years from now.

[00:02:08.17] 

And the planning estimate in Germany is that as many as 800,000 may actually reach Germany.

[00:02:19.29] 

The near term solution or response is essentially an emergency response. Europeans must be able to find ways to register and to adjudicate claims by people who might indeed be refugees. These are going to be very large numbers. It will require adjudicators from all, all over Europe to actually put their heads together and try to do so. But this is only dealing with the consequences of the crisis.

[00:02:51.09] 

Beyond that, Europe will need to redistribute some of these people. This way, the burden does not fall on only two or three countries. It needs to find ways to integrate these folks. It is important that they start thinking immediately about education and language training, etc., etc.

[00:03:09.16] 

This way they can get this refugees even before they have been adjudicated, to be full refugees to the labor market as quickly as possible. But even that is dealing with the consequences. So Europe will find a way, will need to find a way that will actually reduce the number of people who are coming into Europe seeking asylum and economic opportunity the way that they come today. And Europe is planning to do so by creating reception centers, reception facilities that will also at least do some preliminary adjudications in Greece, Italy and Hungary, and in a separate table, because this will be a much larger, much more difficult conversation. They will try to find places outside of Europe that can also play a similar role.

[00:04:05.10] 

And again, this is dealing once more with part of the consequences. In order for Europe to be able to get ahead of this issue, rather than simply respond to it and respond in an emergency way, they will have to do other things that become more and more difficult. They will have to agree on a number of safe countries of origin. The West, Balkans are indeed the best candidates for that. I believe that they will probably agree to do that.

[00:04:38.04] 

If you designate a country as a safe country of origin, it means that you can actually process people within very short period of time. And the presumption would be that that country does not produce refugees. Typically, those things can be done as quickly as far as 48 hours, which then would mean that Germany and Austria and Budapest could actually return, what a few months ago, in the middle of the year, were as many as 40% of all the migrants that they were getting.

[00:05:19.04] 

The other thing that Europe will have to do is find a means to actually remove people who are just economic migrants. If you are expecting your public to become so generous, to be as generous as they are today, and taking all the people who indeed are fleeing completely terrible circumstances in their own country, particularly war, civil war specifically, then you have to be able to tell your people, your public, that you're doing that only for people who are real refugees who deserve this extraordinary benefit of protection in Europe, that means that those people who are economic migrants must be returned. This is not an easy thing to do in any country. It is particularly difficult to do in Europe. In addition, they will need to find ways to actually have people being processed while they're still over there.

[00:06:29.25] 

And the over there means in the three countries that surround Syria that are responsible for most of the refugees. And we have to basically invest very large sums of money in order to create opportunities for livelihoods. There are people need to resume their lives. If they decide that they cannot resume their lives in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, and considering that the EU will continue to be open to them, they will take the only logical step, which is spend the money, take all the chances in order to make it to Europe. This requires a strategic approach to the problem.

[00:07:18.21] 

So far, the EU has not had the time or shown an interest, a deep interest, to do so.

[00:07:31.27] 

Trying to sort of put Syria back together or Libya back together is going to be a long term exercise. It requires massive amounts of diplomatic and political capital and it will require the entire international community to work with a common goal in all this. So for the time being, although the foreign policy apparatus of both the EU and individual member states continues to work on these issues, I don't think it is realistic to expect something to happen that will affect the flows for the next two or three years.

[00:08:14.04] 

In terms of its global reach, it's as challenging, in fact, more challenging than anything that we've seen since the Second World War. Not only is there a need for a global response, but we're actually likely, very likely, to have a global response. For instance, this week alone, the Australian Prime Minister announced that they would be taken to a Syrian refugees over and above the refugees that they take in. And the United States is reportedly considering also having a very broad new initiative with regard to resettling refugees. The United States spends well over $4 billion in trying to deal with these issues or support the countries that are dealing with these issues in that part of the world.

[00:09:04.11] 

I suspect that we're also going to have a resettlement program that is going to grow to quite a bit of significant number in a relatively short period of time. By that I mean in the next 12 to 18 months. Once the United States decides to do that, the pressure on other countries, starting with English-speaking countries, you know, of Canada and New Zealand, is going to be immense for them to also open up the refugees. The Gulf states have contributed generously, in fact, massive amounts of money to try to deal with the consequences of the crisis in the region. What they haven't done, at least not in a significant way, is open their doors to significant numbers of refugees.

[00:09:49.01] 

But this hides something else that some of the Gulf states have done, particularly Saudi Arabia. They have been offering work visas to people from Syria and they have been extending these work visas. This way those people do not have to go back to a situation that's completely untenable. So gradually the Gulf states have been stepping up to the plate. And I suspect when a global response becomes sort of the reality, they will also have to play a very large role.

[00:10:24.23] 

This could motivate the entire international community to do something that they have hardly ever done in the past. The only comparable example, although quite different as to origins and consequences, is the resettlement of the Indochinese in the late 70s, not just to the United States and France, but throughout a large number of additional countries.

[00:10:55.05] 

There is an end, but not necessarily in sight. Europe happens to be in a part of the world that will only be more rather than less unstable. Yemen is beginning to exhibit some of the symptoms that we saw in Syria just four years ago. If Egypt continues on the present course you're going to have significant and then large possibly at least large outflows from Egypt and Egypt also will become a place where people don't want to either transverse or stay for protection. And of course the whole north of Africa, east parts of Africa and western Africa are going to be in a if not a chaotic situation, certainly an unstable situation for the next decade.

[00:11:45.25] 

So the refugee response that we have been discussing is not going to be the response that can last for the next 10 years because at the end of the day no country is going to basically look at unending waves of people coming to it and say we're going to take you all in. So an awful lot of diplomatic and political capital and financial aid and new ideas about development aid etc., etc. Will have to be put on the table in order to try to deal with this particular consequence of instability which is people leaving their place taking all chances in order to make it to Europe.