What should the Europeans do in order to
avert frequent recurrence of such tragedies on their doorstep? Can something be
done at all? I am very dissatisfied with what I have heard and read in the
media and in my friends circle. Sympathy and rescue operations testify that we
haven’t become totally cold-hearted yet. But solving the problem is a very different matter. There are two
prerequisites to that – firstly, an in-depth analysis of the causes of the
problem and, secondly, the will to solve it.
A deep analysis of the causes of the problem
on our hands requires the knowledge that it is a global problem. In connection
with the last few boat disasters in the Mediterranean See we heard of refugees
from Somalia, Eretria, Syria and, generally speaking, North Africa. But such
refugees come from all over the world, even from the emerging economic powers
such as China and India. And their destination is not only Europe, but also North
America and Australia. In case of refugees from Syria and Somalia, partly also
of those from Iraq, the main cause at
present is clearly the on-going civil wars there. But seen globally and
generally, most of them are neither political nor civil war refugees. They
would not want to go back home when the civil war is over or when the
dictatorship in their country is replaced with a democracy. They are also not
fleeing from dire poverty, from hunger. The really poor and their families
cannot pay the price the refugee smugglers demand. In truth, they are economic
refugees, young people who want to try their luck in the highly developed rich
countries. In this enterprise they run high risks, they may fail, they may even
die. But youth is simply like that. In their native country, they cannot bear
the dreary life without any hope.
For really understanding this global
problem, it is necessary to understand in some depth the whole state of the
world today. Even in the apparently clear case of Syrian refugees, it is not
enough to mention the immediate cause, namely the civil war. We must also
understand the cause of the civil war. It was caused by a combination of
growing population, worsening state of the environment, and a bad economic
policy. Syria’s population grew from 8.7 million in 1980 to about 23 million
today. The discontent among the people began with a drought, which soon became
the main driving force of the rebellion against the regime. American journalist
Thomas L. Friedman recently paraphrased in the following words what Samir Aita,
a Syrian economist, told him in this connection:
“ ‘The drought did not cause Syria’s
civil war’ … but, … the failure of the government to respond to the drought
played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened … was that after
Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria
for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as
much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table.
This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to
scrounge for work.” (The New York Times,
18.05.2013)
Friedman
commented: „In an age of climate
change, we’re likely to see many more such conflicts.”
The roots of many such conflicts and rebellions
of the present time lie in these two interwoven problems. The more the
population grows, the more it degrades the environment. And the more the
environment is degraded, the less it can help the population earn its
livelihood. Let us take two more examples:
In 1979, Egypt’s population was 40 million.
By 2011, the year in which the people rebelled against the Mubarak regime, the
figure had risen to 85 million. On the state of the environment there, we read:
“In Egypt, soil compaction and rising sea levels have
already led to saltwater intrusion in the Nile Delta; overfishing and
overdevelopment are threatening the Red Sea ecosystem, and unregulated and
unsustainable agricultural practices in poorer districts, plus more extreme
temperatures, are contributing to erosion and desertification. The World Bank
estimates that environmental degradation is costing Egypt 5 percent of gross
domestic product annually.” (Article of Friedman
in NYT, 21.09.2013)
Let us also take Iran as example, where in
2009 the middle class youth rebelled against the theocratic regime. In 1979, 37
million people lived in Iran. Today, the figure is 75 million. But what is more
dangerous for the future of the country is the worsening state of its
environment. In July of this year, Iran’s
former agriculture minister, Issa Kalantari, an adviser to Iran’s new
president, Hassan Rouhani, said in a newspaper interview:
“Our main problem that threatens us, that is more
dangerous than Israel, America or political fighting, is the issue of living in
Iran.… It is that the Iranian plateau is becoming uninhabitable. ...
Groundwater has decreased and a negative water balance is widespread, and no
one is thinking about this. … I am deeply worried about the future generations.
... If this situation is not reformed, in 30 years Iran will be a ghost town.
Even if there is precipitation in the desert, there will be no yield, because
the area for groundwater will be dried and water will remain at ground level
and evaporate. … All the bodies of natural water in Iran are drying up: Lake
Urumieh, Bakhtegan, Tashak, Parishan and others.”
Kalantari
concluded:
“… the deserts in Iran are spreading, and I am warning you that South
Alborz and East Zagros will be uninhabitable and people will have to migrate.
But where? Easily I can say that of the 75 million people in Iran, 45 million
will have uncertain circumstances. ... If we start this very day to address
this, it will take 12 to 15 years to balance.” (quoted from ibid).
Kalantari’s question, where the
environmental refugees of Iran could in future migrate to, was a rhetorical
question. He meant to say, there was nowhere to go. The world’s economic
refugees of today know the answer: to Europe, North America, and Australia.
Their attempts mostly fail, often ending in a tragedy, as we recently witnessed
at the coast of Lampedusa. Another consequence of these attempts is the rise of
racist and xenophobic extreme right forces in the rich countries, where black,
brown and yellow refugees are totally unwelcome, where they regularly become
victims of fascistic pogroms.
Can something be done at all to solve the problem? What most certainly
will not work is opening all national boundaries, which many good people,
radical leftists included, have been demanding for many years now. Unlike in
the 1950s and 1960s, when the West European and North American economies were
booming, there are today hardly any jobs there for the hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of unskilled economic refugees who would storm the job markets
there if the borders were to be totally opened. The economies of the rich
countries have been stagnating for quite a few years now, and in future, they
would continue to stagnate, most probably even contract. Moreover, most
labor-intensive branches of industry have in the past been outsourced to
cheap-labor countries, or they have been radically automatized, both leading to
rise in unemployment in the rich countries. Nobody would profit from such an
open-border policy except racist and xenophobic extreme right forces. And most
certainly, no government of the rich countries would pursue such a refugee
policy – not the least for fear that extreme rightist and xenophobic mobs would
take violent actions.
The countries the economic refugees come
from would, therefore, not be able to solve their overpopulation problem by
promoting emigration of their surplus population of unemployed and unemployable
young people. In the previous centuries, some of today’s developed European countries
solved their overpopulation problem by encouraging emigration to the then
relatively thinly populated countries, and the first immigrant-inhabitants of
the latter welcomed the new immigrants. “The first nations”, the American
Indians and the Australian Aborigines had of course never been asked for
permission. But today, there is hardly any thinly populated country left in the
world. „Thinly populated” is, of course, a relative term. Australia, one may
argue, is one such country. But that does not help. The present-day inhabitants
of the country simply do not welcome thousands of non-white unskilled
immigrants.
The overpopulated countries of today must
therefore themselves solve the problem, and that must be done at home. There is
no dearth of good ideas for the work. The most important of them is to quickly reduce the birth rate. The
medical-technical possibilities are already there. The necessary political and
socio-economic innovations also do not constitute a big hurdle if the will is
there. The rich countries cannot help, and it is not their task. They may help
a little with money but the greater part of the task and the burden must be
borne by the leaders and people of the problem countries.
Written in
Oktober 2013. Translation of the German original.
Saral Sarkar
saralsarkar@t-online.de
