Where is the U.S. response?
by Tom Sullivan
By Friday night, about 1,000 Syrian refugees and migrants, many of them small children, had left Budapest’s Keleti train station to walk over 100 miles to the Austrian border. Hungarian locals both encouraged the marchers with food, water and tears, while at least one other shouted in Hungarian from a passing car, “Go home already.” Hungarian authorities last night provided a fleet of buses to carry 4,000 to Austria, and perhaps to Germany. Austria joined Germany in agreeing to take them, at least for now.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán earlier in the week called that irresponsible, a failure to defend Europe’s Christian culture:
“We shouldn’t forget that the people who are coming here grew up in a different religion and represent a completely different culture. Most are not Christian, but Muslim,” he said. “Or is it not worrying that Europe’s Christian culture is already barely able to maintain its own set of Christian values?”
Orbán blamed the crisis on what he said were the EU’s “failed immigration policies” as well as those in Europe who have said they would welcome the refugees.
“It is irresponsible for any European politician to give migrants hope of a better life and encourage to leave everything behind and risk their lives en route to Europe,” he said.
That refrain should sound vaguely familiar.
In a statement, the prime ministers of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland rejected “any proposal leading to introduction of mandatory and permanent quota for solidarity measures”. The Washington Post reports this morning:
NICKELSDORF, Austria — Thousands of Syrian asylum-seekers who had been stuck in Hungary for days reached Austria on Saturday, as Hungary’s hard-line authorities backed down from a confrontation with the refugees that they said were overrunning Europe.
Packed city buses ferried men, women and children from the center of Budapest, where people fleeing war in Syria and Iraq had set up a tent city after Hungarian authorities blocked their passage to Western Europe earlier this week. The squalor highlighted Europe’s inability to come up with a plan to deal with the growing wave of asylum-seekers, with Germany and Sweden opening their doors but many other countries barring them.
After trying to round up the asylum-seekers into camps, Hungarian authorities gave up late Friday after thousands of people departed Budapest on foot to try to make the 100-mile trek to the border. Instead, officials had dozens of blue buses pick them up in the night to transport them to Austria. They reached the main border crossing by early morning, and people — many of them bleary-eyed or limping — walked across the frontier, where Red Cross workers waited with blankets and tea.
Nicholas Kristof writes “If you don’t see yourself or your family members in those images of today’s refugees, you need an empathy transplant.” He recalls how after World War II his father swam the Danube River to escape Romania and made his way eventually to Portland, Oregon. But the United States, he reminds readers, had failed such refugees prior to the war, as it has after its war in Iraq. He praises Iceland for its efforts. Others, not so much:
Then there are the Persian Gulf countries. Amnesty International reports that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates haven’t accepted a single Syrian refugee (although they have allowed Syrians to stay without formal refugee status). Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s bombings of Yemen have only added to the global refugee crisis.
We Americans may be tempted to pat ourselves on the back. But the U.S. has accepted only about 1,500 Syrian refugees since the war began, and the Obama administration has dropped the ball on Syria — whether doing something hard like using the threat of missiles to create a safe zone, or something easy like supporting more schools for Syrian refugee children in neighboring countries.
But we are too absorbed with presidential politics to pay attention to a crisis that is, for the most part, out of sight and out of mind. In the wake of the worldwide reaction to the photograph of 3 year-old drowning victim, Aylan Kurdi, Amanda Taub takes the United States to task at Vox for its refusal to look squarely at the crisis it helped create:
And make no mistake: We did know. As the refugee boats have crossed the Mediterranean, photograph after photograph has showed rescue workers cradling tiny babies and toddlers rescued from the water. We knew desperate families were bringing children on these journeys. We knew they would keep coming, because what could drive a parent to bring a child on such a dangerous crossing except fear that staying behind would be worse? And we knew that if we didn’t do more to help them, many of those children would die — and so would their families.
But apparently those children weren’t dead enough to hold our attention. An infant saved from a boat wasn’t good enough for us: We needed to see one dead on a beach, lying alone, face down, in the surf.
And so the world has treated the refugee crisis as a sort of bureaucratic inconvenience, a problem that someone else really ought to be handling. But the truth is that those are just excuses we tell ourselves to feel better about the fact that we’re not doing the right thing. Because make no mistake: This is a situation where there is a right thing to do. And we are not doing it.
Xenophobia and demagogy, Kristof writes, have led some in Europe “to stigmatize refugees and hamper their journeys.” Here in the U.S. individual, candidates and entire political parties have built careers and campaigns based on fear of Otherness and immigrants. If Hungarians had more guns, perhaps they would be forming border militias to keep out Syrian and Afghan Muslims, just like patriotic, god-fearing Americans. If so, we would spend more time focusing on supportive politicians and their antics than on the humanitarian crisis because of the entertainment value.