Credit: CE
Billionaire Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris is proposing to buy an island off the coast of Italy for refugees to live on. (1)
I do get the sincerity of his offer and the love that motivates him. However I have to say that I doubt that the plan would fulfill his intentions.
As an ex-refugee adjudicator, (2) I see a number of aspects of the plan that would probably cause it to go awry.
First of all, many if not most of the “refugees” seeking “asylum” in Europe are, as far as I understand, not refugees. They’re economic migrants.
Refugees might benefit from his plan but economic migrants probably would not.
What’s the difference between the two? Refugees are fleeing persecution in their home countries. Economic migrants are seeking a better life.
It probably isn’t the desire of economic migrants to live on an island off Italy. It’s more likely their desire to reach mainland Europe and find a better life. That means that the island would likely only prove a waystation at best for the largest number of people who reach it.
Either large numbers of refugees and migrants would be on the island demanding to be able to leave it or else many would get back in their boats, after using the island as a waystation, and continue on to mainland Europe.
Either way, there’d likely be no commitment from the migrants to building or maintaining it. It would probably become a ghetto before very long. It would do little to solve the problems refugees face.
The problem of refugees cannot be solved by thinking from the same level as the problem.
Without looking at the problem from an overarching, contextual level, it cannot be solved.
At a contextual level, we need to stop the cabal-generated wars of the world that create refugees in the first place, dismantle the system of nation states with their unworkable borders and corrupt governments, lift the poor of the world out of poverty, build homes for the homeless, eliminate manmade pandemics and their toxic vaccines, free innocent prisoners in for-profit prisons, etc. We need to restore or level the playing field in all ways and give back to the migrating peoples of the world and everyone else a life lived with dignity.
Then let’s take another look at the problem.
I predict that, given these improvements, the problem will have disappeared.
You may think these words pie-in-the-sky. But I predict that all of these measures will be well underway by a year from now.
Everything we do to address the situations I just enumerated brings us a step closer to a world without refugees. To end the refugee problem, we need to end persecution on the planet and address the residue in poverty, homelessness, etc.
Footnotes
(1) Alanna Ketler, “This Egyptian Billionaire Offers To Buy An Island off Italy Or Greece To Rehouse Syrian Refugees,” CE, Sept. 10, 2015, at https://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/09/10/this-egyptian-billionaire-offers-to-buy-an-island-off-italy-or-greece-to-rehouse-syrian-refugees/.
(2) As a Member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.