Refugee policy :  the Ukrainians are different

By David Truman

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has displaced possibly 8 million people, around a fifth of the country’s population.   The great majority have gone to Europe, especially Poland (which received over two million within the first three weeks from the invasion) and Germany, but also, notably, about three million to Russia [source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312584/ukrainian-refugees-by-country/ ].

 The European Union is allowing Ukrainian refugees to live up to three years anywhere within its 27 countries, while giving them healthcare, housing, education and money.  The sympathetic, open-arms welcome given these refugees has been very generous.

But what about the other “refugees”?

Advocates of multiculturalism and open borders have widely seized on the Ukrainian example to argue that any less generous response to migrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, constitutes racism, xenophobia and so-called Islamophobia.  An Afghan in Germany complains “the Ukrainians are first-class refugees and we’re only second-class.”  A Nigerian in Athens says “I hear people say all lives matter, but no, they don’t really all matter.  Black lives matter less.”

This is a spurious argument that should be slapped down.  It is intended to make Westerners feel guilty, and thereby to turn the Ukrainian experience into the template for the whole world. 

There are major differences here.  The Bulgarian Prime Minister has pointed out that the Ukrainians are Europeans – people who are intelligent and educated.  They are genuine refugees, not country shoppers seeking a gravy train to a better economic life.  They are not people who could be terrorists.  None are hostile to European culture and values.  Not a single European country is afraid of the current wave of Ukrainians – apart perhaps from the daunting size of the economic and services burden of so many of them. By contrast, the flood of third-world “refugees” has imposed no-go areas on Europe and great social disharmony.

There are two other big differences distinguishing these Ukrainian refugees from those flooding into Europe from the Middle East, West Asia and Africa.  Firstly, they tend to be the elderly, females and children.  The men are not there.  The young men are fighting. 

By contrast, with the “Syrians” in 2015 and 2016, and currently still with those coming from the third world, it has been overwhelmingly young men of military age – including many characterized in Germany as “rapefugees.” 

A second difference is the viable skills that the Ukrainians have brought with them.  They immediately got employed, versus the unemployability and arrogant entitlement-mentality of so many illegal migrants from the third world.  Good citizenship versus criminality.  Cultural similarity versus differences.  And limited versus unlimited numbers:   there are only so many Ukrainians, whereas the refugee-producing outside world is unlimited. 

Around 200 BC, a Jewish sage, Ben Sira of Jerusalem, wrote:  Every creature prefers its own kind, and people are no different.Just as animals of the same species flock together, so people keep company with people like themselves.  (Sirach 13:15-16 – a deuterocanonical book considered by Catholics and Orthodox as canonical to the Old Testament, but regarded by Protestant denominations as apocrypha. Sirach is also called Ecclesiasticus.)  This principle is self-evidently true, and the multiculturalism and open-borders claptrap imposed on much of the West by bleeding-heart leftists is a key cause of the West’s current self-destruction.  Multiculturalism is just a fancy word for facilitated invasion and preparedness to hate and destroy one’s own culture.

Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum says “I believe that each region of the world, each cultural region, broadly speaking — Latin America, Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and so forth — should contain its own refugees, its own migrants.  So Middle Easterners should go to the Middle East and Africans to Africa and Europeans to Europe.  What could be more natural?  The surge in Ukrainian refugees has revealed, as no other event since World War II, that the West is the natural refuge for its own peoples and not the natural refuge for the entire world.”

Freedom and Heritage strongly agrees.