Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/belarus-eu-poland-migrants-refugees-border/620700/
"An even more important part of the answer might lie in speeding up and expanding the legal processing of migrants. In fact, many of the people who make it to Germany will have their cases examined, will be found not to merit asylum, and will then be sent back. This procedure will take a couple of months, which sounds like a lot unless you remember that similar procedures on the U.S.-Mexico border can take several years. What if an emergency system were created to make that process happen even faster? Those people who genuinely qualify for refugee status or deserve some kind of special consideration could then stay, while the rest would be sent home. The sight of large airplanes carrying people back to Erbil from Warsaw might finally persuade others not to come. David Miliband, the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, an organization that provides long-term aid to refugees around the world, told me that “the speed of processing is vital, so that those with the appropriate claims are quickly accepted, but those who do not qualify are just as quickly sent back.” In the meantime, no one would die in the forest."
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Anne, first please be congratulated for fully mastering the quintessentially Polish skill of "rżnięcie głupa". This broadly translates into "playing dumb", but I am sure Radek can supply on request several less civil translations.
You have obviously never worked in a chaotic situation of large migration flows of human multitudes comprising genuine refugees, economic migrants, war widows, mothers with small children, opportunistic chasers of better life, petty crooks, con men, thieves and cutthroats, soldiers of faded fortunes of assorted vanquished regimes, and terrorist warriors of various causes secular and religious. All intermixed in unknown proportions and united by their desire to be somewhere else. I have, in the Horn of Africa.
Pray tell, how do you return to anywhere in the world people who have deliberately destroyed their documents, so that their identity and nationality cannot be verified? How do you deal with people who frustrate any security checks in police and intelligence databases by simple expedient of changing their stated names three times a day?
In the current Polish-Belarussian border context, passports which were necessary several days prior in order to fly to Belarus, are invariably 'lost in the swamps' of the border forest.
That popular explanation was recently dented by a British Channel 4 reporter who came across a young Iraqi man ripping his passport to shreds and carefully burning the detached pages. "If I call myself a Syrian, my chance of obtaining asylum might be better", he explained matter of factly.
How do you propose to make Iraq accept 'large planes flying from Warsaw to Erbil' full of largely unidentified people who won't tell you their names, and change their stories with every interview, desperately hoping to hit on something the European asylum gods might want to hear?
How do you return anyone claiming to be Afghan to Afghanistan, in the absence of diplomatic recognition of the Taliban? By night parachute drop directly into Kabul CBD?
What do you propose to do with people who will not sign an asylum request form in Poland and resist fingerprinting, explaining that they want asylum in Germany and nowhere else? Do you expect Poland to forcibly hold on Polish territory people who desperately do not want to be there? That would call for building prisons or concentration camps. I think that with our history, we will probably pass on that opportunity.
Feed them and let then loose? That would instantly create the Mark 2 Calais Jungle, only bigger, on the Polish bank of the Oder River. Give them decent accommodation and social security money? Both are in a kind of short supply in Poland, particularly if the need could be growing exponentially and open-ended in time.
So, Anne, please give us the benefit of your sage advice. Better still, lead by example. How many Iraqi families will you pledge to accommodate in the Chobielin Manor?
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