 I'm Salvatore Bobonis and today's lecture is the Syrian refugee crisis, European impact. Europe received around one million asylum seekers in the six months after Angela Merkel's August 2015 declaration of an open door for Syrian refugees. A rich continent of 500 million people was much better positioned to care for these people in need than the Middle Eastern countries that have accommodated even larger flows over the last few years. Nonetheless, Europe has struggled to cope. The unfolding refugee crisis has split European societies, led to the rise of extremist political parties, and threatened the very survival of the European Union itself. Clearly, the European Union should be able to accommodate and assimilate large numbers of refugees. Just to use a comparison between the European Union and the three other largest receiving countries of European refugees, the European Union is more than three times as rich as Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan has many times the population compared to Lebanon, 100 times the population of tiny Lebanon, and yet has received fewer refugees than any of Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan. But Europe is not synonymous with the European Union, and even within the European Union, national interests still prevail. So you can see in this map the countries of the European Union with those countries not included in the Union, but still in Europe. Switzerland, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. These countries are affected by the European Union's position on refugees, particularly the Balkan countries of Macedonia and Serbia, but are not actually part of the European Union. Also, within the European Union itself, interests vary dramatically. So Germany, at the heart of the European Union, has announced an open door policy for refugees, but the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia, the countries that stand between the refugee receiving countries and Germany have had no say in that, and the country perhaps most impacted of all. Greece had no say whatsoever in the decision to encourage more refugees to come to Europe, and yet increasingly Greece is where those refugees must stay if they're not admitted into the other European Union countries. Strangely, Angela Merkel seems to have made her August open door declaration without consulting fellow European Union leaders. Her decision to allow Syrians and, in effect, others to claim asylum in Germany had massive unintended consequences, yet these consequences were easily foreseen. In fact, I myself foresaw those consequences immediately, and quickly published an article predicting that continued accommodation of refugees will yield an exponential growth in migrant numbers, a spiraling crisis that will ultimately break the Schengen agreement. The Schengen agreement is the European Union's agreement on the free movement of people within Europe. I said the European Union faces a clear choice, open borders without or open borders within. The old liberal dream of both at once cannot survive the harsh reality of our unequal world. Essentially, what I argued in this article was that if Europe cannot enforce its external borders, then countries within Europe would start enforcing their own internal borders, and that's exactly what has happened over the last six months. The giant-sucking sound of Angela Merkel's declaration was not just heard in Syria, but was heard all across the Middle East with people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, throughout the Middle East making their way to Europe, some of them claiming to be Syrian, others simply in the misunderstanding that all refugees would be accepted, not only Syrian refugees. One major reaction in Europe has been the rise of anti-immigrant xenophobic, and in some cases, transparently racist political parties throughout Europe. This list is taken from an article in the Express newspaper in the UK, but the figures are all included there if you want to click on the link. In Austria, the freedom party, the far-right freedom party, doubled its vote in local elections. In Denmark, the Danish People's Party rose in Finland. The True Finns Party, as its name would indicate, an extreme anti-immigrant party wanting to keep Finland for Finnish people is now in second place in national elections. The National Front in France, which has always campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform, reached first place in the first round of elections, of national local elections in France this year. In Hungary, the ultra-nationalist Jobik party won 21% of the vote, and that's in a context where Hungary's right-wing leader built a fence to defend Hungary against migrants coming from Serbia, Syrian migrants making their way to Hungary from Serbia. Even though the leader of Hungary was himself very aggressive in taking on immigrants and not allowing asylum seekers to transit through Hungary, he still lost votes to a party even further on the ultra-nationalist right-wing. The Dutch Freedom Party is similarly an ultra-nationalist party in the Netherlands, an anti-immigrant party is rising in the polls, the Swedish Democratic Party is the same story, and in Switzerland, the Swiss People's Party, which for a while had disappeared as a major political force, has come back, and again this is a Switzerland for Swiss People anti-immigrant party. Perhaps most tellingly, in Germany the alternative for Deutschland, the alternative for Germany, doubled its support in opinion polls. This is Germany's dedicated anti-immigrant party, it is rising in the polls in the very country that declared it would welcome immigrants. In fact in Germany crowds of up to 25,000 people have been turning out for anti-immigrant rallies held by Pegida, a German ultra-nationalist organization and social movement. Here you see their rally in Dresden in Eastern Germany with a sign proclaiming Frau Merkel, Ms. Merkel, here are the people. The sign is saying here are the people talking saying we don't want refugees in Germany. Anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe have been reinforced both by stereotypes and by the real crimes that inevitably follow in the wake of one million people. It's impossible to find a population of one million people who commit no crimes at all. Thus inevitably some immigrants commit crimes. However this photo that has circulated the internet for the last year purportedly showing Islamic State radicals battling with German police. This photo in particular is a completely made up story. This photo actually has been around for several years. It has nothing to do with Islamic State. It is a photo from a Muslim German counter protest against a far right anti-immigrant protest completely unrelated to Islamic State and yet throughout Europe and even in America this photo has been circulating as evidence that refugee flows are bringing with them Islamic State radicals. There has been criminality especially well reported were attacks and assaults on New Year's Eve of women being harassed and sexually assaulted by people who they believed to be Middle Eastern refugees and presumably were at least many of them refugees coming in as part of the recent migration flow. The biggest attacks were in Cologne Germany where 16 women reported being molested. Eight refugees have been charged in that crime in Sweden, Kolmar Sweden another incident with multiple women being molested. Similar incidents reported in Salzburg Zurich and Helsinki. The common theme here has been young isolated men who don't speak the local language, who don't have families to temper their emotions or give them any guidance and who've not been socialized into European gender norms, who've not been taught to accept that women can wear bare legs you know in a short skirt and that that does not mean it is a license to sexually assault them. Unfortunately these kind of problems are common but these kinds of problems are not as common as people think. When we add up the number of assaults that occurred on New Year's Eve all across Europe reports are of something like 30 or 40 maybe even 50 assaults. Well 50 assaults in a population of one million migrants on a major drinking holiday really is not a large number statistically even if it grabs the attention of the press and the public. Of course everything changed with the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels in November and in March. These seriously hardened European public opinion against any immigrants from the Middle East including refugees and especially immigrants and refugees if they were from Syria. The Paris attacks in particular were conducted by people who had entered Europe alongside this flow of irregular immigration the asylum seekers coming to Europe. Now the blame for these attacks is not the asylum seekers these were not asylum seekers who committed the attacks in fact the people who have been identified as attackers both in Paris and in Brussels were either citizens or people who had permission to live in France and Belgium. They had come in snuck into these countries alongside asylum seekers because of the lack of border enforcement. The lesson here seems to be that asylum seekers should be admitted through regular channels where they can be identified as opposed to simply having people cross over the border in mass irregular waves without any security or any checks. It is in this unfortunate climate that the United Kingdom will vote on June 23rd whether or not to leave the European Union vote that has come to be known as Brexit for British exit from the European Union. Right now as of early April the polls are still very even on whether the British people will vote to stay in the European Union or leave but this French cartoon really captures the mood which is that British people are sitting in their home sweet home on the cliffs of Dover with a sign saying no migrants and speaking to each other you know I don't think we really should want to go over there meaning to Europe and you know no of course not you know why would we the image of Europe from the UK is one of refugees in tents in Calais this image is not one that perhaps encourages British people to want to stay in the European Union. Key takeaways the European Union's inability to enforce its external borders has resulted in the return of internal borders within the European Union itself. Second ultra nationalist anti-immigrant political parties and social movements are on the rise in European countries partly in reaction to the massive wave of refugee flows into Europe and third terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels have inevitably been conflated with the refugee issue despite the fact that they were not committed by actual refugees. Thank you for watching this podcast you can find out more about me at salvatorbonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter.