As European leaders hold a summit later this week, the big idea to avoid political rifts exploding within the 28-member bloc is the creation of "processing centers" in North Africa and the Balkans, where refugees will be detained.
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This idea is being embraced by German chancellor Angela Merkel to offset a revolt within her coalition government. French president Emmanuel Macron is backing it too, as are the more stridently anti-immigrant governments of Italy and Central Europe.
It's a kind of "outsourcing" of the EU refugee problem beyond its external border. Fortress Europe with outposts.
In theory, the multitude of migrants will have their applications for asylum in Europe assessed at these remote centers — centers no better than concentration camps. Few can believe that applicants will be accepted in any significant number. Most will likely be forced back to wherever they came from.
A harbinger of the grim future that lies ahead came this week in a shocking report by the Associated Press in which some 13,000 sub-Saharan Africans were expelled at gunpoint from Algeria over the past year, forced to walk across scorching desert. Many of them, including women and children, are reckoned to have died from the searing heat and dehydration.
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The UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration estimates that twice as many migrants die trying to cross the barren deserts of North Africa to eventually get to Europe, compared with the numbers who drown at sea.
AP reports that the number of people being expelled from Algeria to southern desert wastelands has increased dramatically over the last year since the European Union began putting pressure on North African countries to stem the flow of migrants. An EU spokesman is quoted as saying that the bloc is aware of the forced expulsions, but that it can't interfere in sovereign affairs of other countries. Such a statement is cynical beyond words.
One suspects that what is going on here is that the European Union's political establishment is desperate to avert a growing rupture within the bloc.
The political tensions arising within the EU are threatening to blow the entire bloc apart. Those tensions are between on the one hand Brussels and pro-EU governments like Germany and France, and the rise of populist governments in member states like Italy, Austria and Hungary which are adamantly against taking in more refugees.
The "solution" is therefore for the EU to enlist countries in the Balkans like Albania and in North Africa, such as Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, in order to form a ring of external screening centers.
As these concentration camps burgeon along North Africa, it is anticipated that many more nightmare reports of "death marches" across the Sahara will come to light. If Europe thinks it has an image problem from thousands of wretched people drowning in the Mediterranean, just wait for the harrowing images of many more thousands dying in North Africa's deserts.
Public discussion over Europe's refugee problem fails to address two proverbial elephants in the room.
The first is that the increased flow of migrants to Europe in recent years from Africa and the Middle East is a direct result of American and European illegal wars. Those wars, such as the overt intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, or covert regime-change operations as in Syria, have unleashed the flow of refugees towards Europe.
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American and French Neo-imperialist adventures in Mali, Niger and Ivory Coast, under the guise of "fighting terrorism", have also destabilized those countries which have fed into the human waves proceeding to Europe.
In virtually all public discourse of how Europe can manage its refugee problem, there is little acknowledgement of the criminal role that the US and its NATO allies have played in fomenting the mass migrations.
In order to mitigate the instability across the Middle East and Africa, what should be required is a massive war reparation effort funded by the culpable US and European states. Such an investment and development plan would help re-stabilize countries, and incentivize people to build lives in their home countries.
There is a strong sense that the absolute numbers of immigrants entering Europe — one million since 2015 — are being blown out of proportion to the total EU population of 500 million. There is also a strong sense that the issue of refugees would not cause such resentment and alarm among EU citizens if they were living in prosperous societies, with abundant employment, decently paid jobs and high-standard public services. In other words, the perceived problem of migrants is more related to how conventional capitalist economics are failing to support and develop societies.
The same might be said for the anxieties over immigration in the US. As with Europe, the numbers of migrants have actually fallen over the past year and more, but the issue is inflaming grievances more than ever, in large part because of the feeling of marginalization by resident communities due to failure and austerity from the economic system.
The point is that if more political effort were put into changing an inept economic system in Europe and the US, replacing it with something more viable and democratic, then a lot of perceived problems over illegal immigration would diminish.
In summary, if the issue of mass migration is to be addressed effectively, then the US and its European allies must be held to account for the wars and conflicts they have stoked. These culprits must pay massive reparations to repair broken nations.
Setting up concentration camps beyond Fortress Europe is only going to bring more misery and failure.
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No doubt, the naysayers will disparage the alternative proposition. "But our economies couldn't afford such a solution," they will complain.
That is exactly the point. Their bankrupt economies are the essential problem. It is time for the elite-driven parasitic capitalist system to be overhauled for democratic fit-for-purpose systems. If public control of trillions of dollars were realized, societies would be transformed into places fit for humans, without wars and refugees.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
