Hussein Shobokshi The sheer scale of the exodus from Syria has left Europe with no coherent response. During a press conference held in Berlin on Aug. 31, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the Europe Union must share the responsibility for taking in the refugees. If the EU responds to the crisis by closing its borders to asylum seekers, she added, “it won't be the Europe we wished for.” That was a clear moral stand by the clear European leader on this issue.
The refugees making life-threatening journeys across the Mediterranean and through Europe have a new hero - German Chancellor Angela Merkel. While Europe has largely floundered in the face of the greatest such crisis since the end of World War II, Merkel has provided rare leadership. The most powerful country in Europe expects to take in 800,000 people this year, four times as many as it did in 2014. Instead of tightening border controls and insisting the country has no room for more refugees, as some governments have done, the German government has made it clear that it will welcome large numbers of the people fleeing the conflict in Syria and other troubled parts of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Asylum seekers have taken to calling the German leader “Mama Merkel.” For too long Europe has closed its eyes to Syria's foul and bloody civil war, and tried to keep the suffering multitudes out. Suddenly the continent's gates have been pushed open by two political forces. One is moral conscience, belatedly wakened by the image of a drowned Syrian child on a Turkish beach. The other is the political courage of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who told her people to set aside their fear of immigrants and show compassion to the needy. There are surely limits to how many migrants any society will accept. But the numbers Europe proposes to receive do not begin to breach them. The boundaries of social tolerance are fuzzy. They change with time and circumstance and leadership. But Merkel's stance is not shared across the whole of the EU. Hungary's southern border has become a flash point for asylum seekers trying to walk into the EU from neighboring Serbia, and the right-wing Hungarian government has responded by building a barbed-wire fence along the frontier and seeking to prosecute migrants who cross illegally. Europe has the capacity to welcome refugees, and at the moment, in many places, it has the inclination to do so. The challenge is to turn that warm and decent impulse into a program that will make the newcomers safe, productive and accepted. But Merkel's position is grounded in demographics and economics as much as it is in history and ethics. Germans are not having enough babies, and so the population is set to decline from 82 million to 65.4 million by 2080, according to projections by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. Powerful German firms have made it clear they need more workers. It may be no coincidence, then, that Germany has eased the Dublin Protocol specifically for Syrians, rather than for any other population. Forty percent of Syrian refugees now in Greece are university educated, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. For now most Germans are staying focused on the logistics of housing all the refugees they have welcomed in. Tent cities that have sprung up, sometimes in one day, must be converted to permanent housing before winter. Social tensions will inevitably arise along the way. But the refugees recognize and appreciate the effort, and many are finding ways to say thank you. When Ophelya Ade, now living in a shelter in Lower Saxony, recently gave birth to a girl, she named the baby Angela Merkel Ade. The chancellor, she explained, “is a very good woman. I like her.”
