In a recent article, "How Ukrainian Refugees Could Inadvertently Erase the West," I predicted that
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, or "Islamophobia." While little-noted at this moment of intense focus on Ukrainians, after the current crisis ends and non-Western migrants return to the spotlight, that line of reasoning will certainly prominently emerge and become a force.
The predicted campaign has now begun. "We are all Ukrainians!" is the battlecry of a pro-illegal migrant activist group in Paris that denounces France's "apartheid practices" in the treatment of migrants. (July 18, 2022)
 The meeting in Paris denouncing France's "apartheid" refugee policy. |
July 26, 2022 update: Five major refugee-aid organizations wrote a letter to the prime minister of the Netherlands pressuring him to do more for vulnerable immigrants, noting that this should be possible "given the heartwarming reception provided to tens of thousands of Ukrainians."
July 30, 2022 update: The Financial Times' Raphael Minder pens a sob-story about Belarus-based illegal migrants under the headline "Poland hit by 'forgotten' refugees criticism: Ukrainians welcomed but others coming via Belarus stopped by border 'wall'."
To make his point perfectly clear, he quotes a Polish activist, Agata Ferenc: "Our government has used politically the Ukrainians to show we're a great people, responding to a crisis whose size makes it easy to forget the racism towards very different people crossing from Belarus." If that were not enough, building a €353mn, 5-meter high steel fence for 186 kilometers along the border with Belarus divides an ancient forest proves the Polish government to be ecologically criminal:
Małgorzata Tokarska, a geneticist who studies the bison that roam the forest, said the EU and Unesco had turned a blind eye to a Polish wall that was "the biggest and worst human intervention" suffered by a unique forest that had been protected since medieval times as a royal hunting ground.
Also, the locals complain about a drop in tourism. And the nasty fence does not even work, but just endangers the illegals: it has only "slowed down refugees rather than stopped them completely while encouraging more people to wade through dangerous wetlands on which no fencing can stand."
Of course, Amnesty International gets invoked, accusing Poland of "racism and hypocrisy" in its mistreatment of illegal migrants crossing from Belarus "compared with its embrace of Ukrainians." The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights adds its two cents: "This is now Europe's forgotten refugee crisis, in which the cases of violence and the pushbacks are completely unacceptable."
Comment: As I predicted, treatment of illegal migrants that falls short of the Ukrainian refugees will come under persistent and enraged leftist criticism. It has only just begun.
Aug. 1, 2022 update: The BBC reports that the Harbour Project, a British charity that helps refugees, notes a big variation in how the UK helps people from different countries charity, specifically that many Ukrainians received immediate refugee status and lived in people's homes but Afghans were left in hotels for months.
Aug. 2, 2022 update: Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour leader: "I have to say generally speaking Europe has been very welcoming of Ukrainian refugees and that's good and that's right. Sadly, they are not so welcoming and not so enabling of refugees coming from Yemen or anywhere else. In my book, a refugee needs help and support wherever they come from."
Aug. 22, 2022 update: Ukrainian refugees are aching to go home. In the words of an Associated Press article by Vanessa Gera and Kirsten Grieshaber, "they are biding their time, waiting for the end of a war that shows no signs of ending soon, longing for home and refusing to think too far into the future." As one refugee puts it, ""It seems to me that not only for me but for all Ukrainians, time has stopped. We all live in some kind of limbo."
Aug. 23, 2022 update: A report from the Netherlands finds that Ukrainian refugees find work faster and encounter fewer obstacles than other immigrants. Some 60 percent of the 75,000 refugees between the ages of 18 and 65 have found work in less than six months. The percentage of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries with a job after six months is much lower: 9 from Afghanistan, 5 from Iran, 2 from Syria and Iraq, and just 1 percent from Eritrea.
May 7, 2023 update: Proving again how different Ukrainians refugees are from the illegal migrants coming to Europe from around the world, they have returned home in large numbers, even while the war is in full swing and when an intensification of fighting is imminently expected – and even to towns close to the front. Of 13 million displaced persons, 5.5 million have returned home, according to the International Organization for Migration. The town of Pokrovsk, 30 miles from the front, had a pre-war population of about 50,000 that went down to around 30,000 after the war started and now has rebounded to 57,000, with the added population coming from nearby towns that have been destroyed.
May 15, 2023 update: From the Guardian:
One of the architects of Britain's Homes for Ukraine scheme is calling on the government to replicate the programme for refugees from Sudan. Dr Krish Kandiah, the director of the Sanctuary Foundation, which was instrumental in matching many British hosts with Ukrainian refugees, said he wanted the country to show the "same generosity of spirit" to those fleeing war in Sudan as it did to Ukrainians.
June 21, 2024 update: Happily, the campaign for Europe to deal with all migrants as it does the Ukrainian ones has quieted down. Here's a stray mention, by Theodore Dalrymple reviewing a book by Adam Shatz:
he presents himself as a proponent of unrestricted immigration into Europe (and presumably the United States). He thinks that European generosity toward Ukrainian refugees but hostility toward Muslim refugees from the Middle East is motivated purely by racism and has no rational basis whatsoever, despite the manifest problems Europe already has with integrating Muslims, a considerable proportion of whom claim that they want to institute sharia law, and openly express hatred or contempt for the countries into which they have immigrated.
