 I'm Salvaturba Bonas and today's lecture is the Syrian refugee crisis flows to Europe. Out of more than 10 million people displaced by civil war in Syria, some 4 million have fled the country, of which 1 million have made their way to Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people began to enter Europe in 2014 and 2015, undertaking dangerous sea crossings from North Africa, alongside refugees and migrants from Africa and the rest of the Middle East. This steady flow of maritime migrants to Europe became an absolute flood in September 2015 after German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open door policy for Syrians fleeing civil war. The result has been a series of irregular, uncontrolled, and often deadly waves of migration that, despite their enormous resources, European countries have struggled to manage. At the beginning of 2015, in Europe, press reports about refugees usually focused on the jungle, a refugee and migrant camp in Calais in northern France at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Several thousand people lived there, no one knows the exact number, and the camp still exists. The population fluctuates from month to month, somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000 people live there at any one time in squalid tents, as you can see, with no sanitary facilities, no electricity, no running water. These people are attempting to make the crossing from France into England, where they hope they will be able to find jobs and work in England's informal economy, because it is much easier for people without proper work permission to find jobs in England than in France and continental Europe. Also many of them speak English, but don't speak French. People from the jungle have been trying to get into England through all sorts of means, jumping onto moving trains, hiding under the carriages of trucks, in one case two of them even rented wetsuits and attempted to cross by sea, or perhaps they were trying to reach a ferry and latch onto the sides of the ferry and didn't make it. The press reports from the jungle usually focused on these terribly tragic deaths of ones and twos of people trying to make it unsuccessfully into the United Kingdom. But by the middle of 2015, media attention shifted to the Mediterranean, where some 150,000 people arrived by boat in the first half of the year. There were two main routes, the Italian route, or central Mediterranean route, of migrants leaving Libya to try to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. Lampedusa is off the coast of Sicily, roughly halfway between Libya and Sicily proper. So it's the closest point of European Union land to the Libyan coastline. They left from Libya because Libya has been in a state of civil war and civil disturbance ever since the Arab Spring, so ever since mid 2011 when the government of Muammar Gaddafi fell in Libya. As a result, all sorts of illegal activities go on in Libya, and people smuggling has flourished alongside smuggling of every other kind. By mid-year, approximately 75,000 people had made the crossing from Libya to Italy, with at least 1,841 known to have died at sea. It's suspected that many more died. This is a very dangerous crossing, and as you can see by the numbers, we're talking about 3 or 4% of all people who attempt the crossing drowning on the way. Countries of origin from this flow were not primarily from Syria, though Syrians were included. The top countries of origin were probably people from Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan. People fleeing the civil wars in Africa, and equally refugees just as much as Syrians fleeing civil war in Syria. The second route across the Mediterranean was and is the Greek route across the eastern Mediterranean. These are people leaving Turkey to reach the Greek island of Lesbos or the Greek island of Kos. These islands are as little as 4 kilometers away from Turkey at the shortest stretch, although the Turkish authorities do prevent most boats from leaving from the very closest points, so the trip is usually longer for most people. This trip is much shorter than the trip from Libya, but Turkey has a fully functioning government with police service, and so when Turkey desires to prevent boats from leaving, they're perfectly able to do so. Again, about 75,000 people had left Turkey for Greece by the middle of 2015. Countries of origin here were mostly Middle Eastern people coming from Syria, of course, but also from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. And once again, many people have a very legitimate cause to be refugees from countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq, not just from the civil war in Syria. Then came a momentous event. On August 24, 2015, Germany's Chancellor, Angela Merkel, took the momentous decision to declare an open door policy for Syrian refugees. She essentially said that any Syrian who makes it to German soil will be granted asylum in Germany for the duration of the Syrian civil war. She was celebrated in Time Magazine as Time's Person of the Year. She was, well, pilloried in German magazines like Der Spiegel for her sobriquet of being a Mama Angola or Mother Angola or in German Mutter Angola to the Syrians who were trying to reach Europe. Angela Merkel said that Germany would allow refugees to claim asylum in Germany even if they arrived via a safe European country. This decision was a contrast to the normal European Union policy, which was that people were expected to claim asylum in the first European country they entered. The assumption behind that policy is that all of the European Union countries are safe places for refugees. Thus, if a refugee lands in Spain or Italy or Greece, that person is safe in Spain or Italy or Greece and would have no cause to be a refugee further up the line in countries further north. This was called the Dublin Protocol, which was Europe's arrangement for how refugee claims would be handled. Under the Dublin Protocol, if a refugee arrived in Italy and then traveled to Germany and attempted to claim asylum in Germany, that person would be returned to Italy as the country of first arrival in the European Union. Many refugees were already ignoring the Dublin Protocol and the demand that they register in Italy and Greece. Italy and Greece simply did not have the capacity to register all migrants. Both countries were experiencing economic crises and so were unable to care for all of the migrants who were entering. On top of all of that, there was no provision in European law for forcing refugees to register. To do so would have required internment in internment camps, which would have been anathema in Europe at the time. With memories of Nazism and concentration camps in Europe, Europeans are understandably very sensitive about the idea of putting migrants in detention to force them to register. As a result, many refugees simply landed in Italy, walked off the beach to the nearest train station to buy a ticket to make their way north. In Italy especially, train conductors are rumored to have been instructed to just let migrants ride the trains without a ticket. Even if they couldn't afford a train ticket, Italy was in effect exporting its asylum responsibilities northward simply by letting them ride the trains for free. That was all unofficial, but it was certainly a widespread practice in 2015. When Angela Merkel made her announcement in August 2015 that Syrian refugees would be given safe harbor in Germany, that merely accelerated or encouraged a trend that was already underway in Greece, but especially in Italy. This action was hailed at the time as a decisive and conscientious action. Newspaper accounts said that Angela Merkel had made a decision to take action where other European Union leaders were dithering and not really taking the migrant crisis seriously. But this conscientious action had massive unintended consequences. It encouraged roughly one million migrants to make the dangerous sea voyage to Europe between September 2015 and March 2016. And they are still coming. Other million migrants quote unquote piled up in Turkey, meaning that they started the journey to Europe but have not yet been able to leave Turkey, thus increasing Turkey's Syrian refugee population very rapidly from one million to two million. So as a result of Merkel's simple declaration, roughly two million people have been put on the road, one million reaching Europe and another million so far reaching Turkey without making it into Europe itself. Many of the new wave of immigrants to Europe consisted of people who were already in refugee camps, that is people who were already registered as refugees and technically did not need to move to find refuge because they were in United Nations administered refugee camps. But it's to say many of this new wave were not people actually fleeing Syria. They were Syrians fleeing refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and other countries. Also many of the people who joined this wave of migrants were non-Syrians attempting to take advantage of Germany's blanket offer to Syrians. So anyone who felt they could pass as Syrian might just leave their identity documents behind, come up with a fake back story of being Syrian and attempt to pass for Syrian at the border. These flows were exacerbated or maybe a push was added to the pull factor as funds ran out for refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. Amazingly at the same time that the European Union was announcing or at least Angela Merkel was announcing an open door policy for migrants from Syria, the European Union and other rich countries were inadequately funding refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. In fact the World Food Program had to cut food rations in refugee camps serving Syrian refugees. Many people simply walked out of the camps because they needed food. If you can't feed your family in a refugee camp the next best alternative might be to take your family on the road to Europe. Another factor pushing refugees into Europe was a low level war in Turkey. In 2015 a low level civil war or what might be called a domestic conflict between the Turkish government and activists from the minority Kurdish population in eastern Turkey resumed. This war or this conflict had been frozen for many years under a peace accord. But in late 2015 bombings started again, shooting started again, curfews started again and now the Turkish government is once again imposing martial law in many parts of eastern Turkey. This has made Turkey much less safe for Syrian refugees and also reduced the amount of resources that Turkey has had available to provide for the Syrians under its care. As a result of these push and pull factors millions of people just got on the road and started on their way to Europe. These roads to Germany were actually formalized or at least informally formalized into a series of paths of preferred routes as news spread among refugees as to which routes were open, which had facilities available, which had supportive civil society organizations along the way. This map shows the two main routes from Greece. In late 2015 the Italian route had dried up, far fewer migrants are crossing the Mediterranean into Italy now because of the well publicized deaths of thousands of people at sea. But the sea crossing from Turkey is much safer and Syrian refugees tend to be much better resourced than the African refugees who had been arriving in Italy. These refugees attempt to make it to Athens, they take a boat to the Greek islands, once they get to the Greek islands they attempt to book ferry transit to Athens and then start the long journey depending on their resources either on foot or by bus or train up through the Balkans from Greece to Macedonia through Serbia. From Serbia initially the main migrant flow was from Hungary into Austria and then on to Germany, later Hungary closed its border and the flow shifted to Croatia through Slovenia to Austria. Refugees simply walked hundreds of miles across Europe, refusing to register as refugees until they reached Germany. And they were bussed forward by transit companies, countries. So for a while Macedonian and Serbian authorities did not want to have hundreds of thousands of people clogging their roads so they simply chartered buses and loaded them up and pushed people along to the next country along the route. This started to end almost as soon as it began when in August 2015 Hungary began building a border fence with Serbia and Croatia to block its border with those countries. And here you see a segment of the fence with soldiers on the Hungarian side and the Syrian migrants, Syrian and other migrants on the Serbian side wanting to get in but unable to and simply piling up against the fence. The Austrian president severely criticized Hungary's leader Viktor Orban for erecting the border fence but then very quickly within just a few months Austria did the same and built its own border fence. And here you can see a map of border fences. Border fences have now been built by Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bulgaria to block borders with other countries further down the chain on the way to Germany. These fences have been built because countries do not want to be transit countries for hundreds of thousands of migrants a month on their way to Germany. The most ironic case is Austria. Austria had severely criticized Hungary for closing its border. Then as migration flows moved from the Hungarian route to the route through Slovenia into Austria, Austria built a fence to channel people through official crossings only. They limited migration to 3,200 people per day with a limit of only 80 each day who could actually claim asylum in Austria. The other 3,120 per day let in had to transit directly through to Germany. Now there are more than 100,000 refugees bottled up in Greece with up to 100,000 per month expected to start arriving this northern spring as weather warms up. Liberals have been relatively limited in January, February and March by winter weather and the hazards of crossing the Mediterranean in the winter months. Even so, tens of thousands per month have been arriving in Greece throughout the winter months. Nobody knows exactly what will happen starting in April, but it is expected that once again something on the order of 100,000 per month will begin making the crossing into Greece and thus into the European Union. Key takeaways. First, in August 2015 German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared an open door policy for Syrian refugees. Second, approximately 1,000,000 migrants entered Europe as a result of Merkel's call with perhaps another 1,000,000 going to Turkey and route to Europe. And third, European transit companies responded by erecting border fences to stem the flow of migrants through their territories even when these fences violated the spirit of the Schengen Treaty assuring the free movement of people across the entire European Union. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me at SalvatoreBobonis.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter.