Five years after the migration crisis, Merkel, not Trump, seems vindicated

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Five years after the migration crisis, Merkel, not Trump, seems vindicated

By Ishaan Tharoor
9/4/2020, 12:00:00 a.m.

“I’ll put it simply,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared at the end of August 2015. “Germany is a strong country. … We can handle this.”

“This” was an epochal influx of migrants and refugees, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Their exodus from the Levant and North Africa had led to chaotic scenes in countries along Germany’s borders, through which tens of thousands of people were making a trek to greater safety after entering Europe in Greece and Italy. The situation threatened to buckle the continent’s system of internal open borders.

What Merkel famously believed Germany could “handle” was an embrace of hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants. In her rhetoric, it was both a political and moral necessity. Opinion polls in Germany at the time showed majority support for Merkel’s approach. Authorities in Berlin went about trying to find homes for upward of a million new arrivals and integrate them into German society. For her courage and decisiveness, Time magazine made Merkel its 2015 Person of the Year.

The backlash, though, was swift and lasting. Far-right politicians in Europe seized on the willingness of politicians like Merkel to open the gates to foreign — and mostly Muslim — migrants as a kind of betrayal. In a matter of months, public opinion turned against Merkel as instances of violence linked to the migrants dominated headlines and inflamed European politics. The influx of asylum seekers gave momentum to the once-fringe far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which became Germany’s largest opposition party in parliament in 2017.

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In power, Trump hardly relented, occasionally attacking Merkel for her supposed surrender to migrants. In 2017, he claimed that Germany’s crime rate was on the rise because Merkel had taken in “all those illegals.” The opposite was true — according to official data, by 2019, the country saw an 18-year low in crime.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/09/04/merkel-trump-migration-europe/

[Squinch]

1. Yep. Because it was the decent thing to do.

I remember going to Sweden during all of that. People here were chock full of stories about how the refugees were marauding in the streets of Sweden and the society was rife with violence and unrest and it would never be the same.

Got there, traveled around, saw NOTHING of the kind.

[ck4829]

2. K&R