Refugee Quota Poll

Samaris wrote: »

Well, yes, and it's pretty counter-productive and short-sighted (and selfish) of them. But it's down to exactly the sort of attitudes already displayed in the very basis of the thread - whataboutery about EU migrant workers for one, attempting to solve an unrelated crisis by seeing what can be taken from the refugee group, since they have the least rights and can be most easily abused, the panic that more brown people means the end of white society and all the other bollockry.

It results in some countries having to bear a disproportionate amount of the cost of the problem - which is not the fault of individual refugees either - which results in enclaves that will not integrate, rejection and suspicion of individual people that naturally enough makes them less able to integrate even without packing them together like sardines and demanding that they then become Greek/British/whatever...somehow. It results in damage to the economies of the individual countries, especially ones that are struggling anyway, like Greece, and it risks the cohesiveness of the EU.

But people are short-sighted. Why are you surprised that other countries do it too?

rgossip30 wrote: »

You don't offer a suggestion on how it should be edited ?

Samaris wrote: »

Because basic humanity for a start.

Yes, there's limits and there's things that need to be done. But the whole "Ban them all, they add nothing to the state and I'm alright jack so I don't give a flying if thousands die" is selfish nonsense. The argument seems to be "if you support immigration you support unfettered immigration and you're a liberal idiots" versus "if you don't support immigration you want to ban everyone and you're a right-wing racist". Most people who want to argue "yes, we have a duty to take in refugees, as other countries have always done, including for us, but there is a massive crisis at the moment and countries need to work together to deal with it" get shouted down.

It'll be interesting to see how the argument changes when Ireland is being badly impacted by climate change and could start producing ...oh dear, economic migrants to deal with it. I suspect it will change quite sharply around that point. We'll probably manage to keep it up when it's only the Spanish, Portuguese, Greeks, Italians etcetera being affected, because why should we have to take in our neighbours? But eventually it'll hit us too. Not sure where we'll go. North, I assume.