So why is it that these Eritrean or Somalian asylum seekers insist on claiming asylum only in Central or Northern Europe? There are dozens of other countries in between. The answer, of course, is that these are for the large part economic migrants, not actual refugees fleeing from personal persecution.
Most of them are both, which is part of the problem. The UN refugee convention was created to take care of political dissidents from the Eastern bloc (mainly), whereas modern refugee streams from conflict areas have more in common with, say, Eastern European Jews fleeing to America in the late 1800s. They were both persecuted in their hellish homelands and in search of a better future for the children. The problem is we do not have another America to fill. We are in dire need of a total rethinking of the global refugee system, but there is no one to take charge of it.The UN is hopelessly inefficient.
The distribution of refugees should not depend on what countries they were able to reach by paying large sums to traffickers, but be allocated on a need basis.
This is actually by far the most interesting perspective I've read so far on the issue. Perhaps the first thing that we (as in people of European countries) need to recognize is that one can be persecuted without being hopelessly poor and uninformed. Of course, that's not going to happen, because people like binary perspectives to things.
