The Archbishop of Tangiers, in Morocco, Santiago Agrelo Martinez, is outraged at the way the E.U. is treating migrants. He claims that setting up camps in Africa where these migrants are to be processed would be tantamount to creating “concentration camps for people who have no rights.”
The Archbishop’s language is disconcerting. “Concentration camps” — we think immediately of the Nazis or the Soviets — were places that people were violently herded into, lived in subhuman conditions, and were shot if they tried to escape. In the camps themselves, they were beaten, starved, tortured, and murdered en masse.
The camps the European Union is planning to set up in Africa will be places where migrants will be examined as to their claims to asylum. If the claim is upheld, they will be assigned to a country in Europe that will take them in. If their claim is denied, they will be sent home. There of course will be no starving, beating, or killing. At any time, anyone in these camps can request that he, or she, be sent home. While in the camps, the E.U. will see to it that they receive perfectly adequate food, are given medical attention when necessary, and clothing suitable to the season and the climate. None of this, of course, occurs in real concentration camps. They are there not to be punished or harmed, but simply placed there so that their application may be properly weighed. They want to be in those processing centers, are glad to be there, for they recognize it as a step on the path — so they devoutly hope — to being admitted to Europe.
Could it be that Archbishop Agrelo is unfamiliar with what happened in real concentration camps? Does he need to be informed of how the prisoners in Treblinka, Belzec, Birkenau, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and dozens of other infamous places were worked to death, tortured, gassed, electrocuted, hung, stabbed, burned alive, injected with phenol into the heart, frozen to death in fiendish medical experiments performed on them by “Doctor” Mengele and so many others? Does he need reminding of all the fun the Germans had tormenting those prisoners in ever-more imaginative ways? Sometimes they would throw Jewish babies up in the air, and catch them on their bayonets. Or they would have great fun setting prisoners to fight each other, letting them know that the one who lost would immediately be shot. And the survivor of one bout would then have to fight another opponent, and another, until he lost, and it was his turn to be killed. What fun, too, to force prisoners to run straight into electrified fences. Or to make them lift heavy stones fourteen hours a day, until they died of exhaustion. Likening these E.U. processing centers, where would-be migrants are required to live temporarily in order to have their applications for asylum processed, to the Nazi death camps, is indecent and unforgivable.
The Archbishop adds: “We treat them like slaves.”
“If we want them, we take them from their homes and countries to work on our agricultural land, but if we don’t need them, even though they’re hungry, we enclose them in camps.”
How are they treated like slaves? Is he talking about the economic migrants who have been pouring into Europe, quick to claim every possible benefit the generous welfare states of Europe provide? If admitted, they immediately start to receive free or highly subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, family allowances, and the equivalent of unemployment benefits without ever having to have been employed. “Treat them like slaves”? What kind of slaves are treated like that?
“We take them from their homes and countries.” The Archbishop has got it backwards. These migrants are not “taken” from “their homes and countries.” They leave their homes willingly, and try desperately to get into Europe. They are forcing their way in, not being forced in. They clamber over fences topped with barbed wire to get into Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish enclaves within Morocco, which means they have made it legally into Spain. They take any sort of vessel they can, crossing the Mediterranean to land wherever the boats are permitted. Meanwhile, Europeans, having recently allowed millions of migrants in, from Africa and the Middle East, with all the problems that has created, are now trying to keep out the hordes of people who want in. They are not “being taken from their homes” but are, rather, pushing themselves into Europe, economic migrants who present themselves as “refugees” — “asylum seekers” fleeing persecution and death. Those allowed into Europe take full advantage of all the benefits that Europe offers, and many are in no hurry to find work, finding the benefits of Europe’s generous welfare states to be sufficient.
Whether they live on benefits, or are willing to work — obviously at lower-paying jobs, given their lack of skills and training — these migrants are not, as the Archbishop seems to think, “slaves.” They are at all times free to return to their countries of origin. No one is making them remain in Europe to receive benefits, or to work at jobs they may feel are beneath them. What does the Archbishop mean when he clams that “if we don’t need them, even though they’re hungry, we enclose them in camps”? Like any other worker, if a migrant is laid off from his job, he receives benefits from the government. He is not starving; these benefits include allowances for food and shelter. Nor are he or his family forcibly “enclosed in camps.” Where are these “camps” where unemployed migrant workers are supposedly “enclosed”? The only camps are those used to house would-be migrants, until their claims can be evaluated.
If they are allowed to remain in Europe, they are sent to housing provided, free or at very low cost, by the government. The only new development is that the E.U. now proposes to place some of those processing centers in Africa, which would make it easier to return to their homes those whose claims are denied. The Archbishop’s language — “concentration camps,” “taken from their homes and countries,” “treated like slaves” — is hallucinatory.