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.
mortimer says
The archbishop implies that it is a legal right for non-Spaniards to enter Spain. Only SPANIARDS have a legal right to enter Spain. All others are privileged to enter. The Spanish people make that decision by the parties they elect.
Renate says
How can the world take anything that the Pope or Archbishop Agrelo or any others like them in the Roman Catholic Church seriously anymore? If these people aren’t Communist shills, I don’t know what else to call them.
Joe says
Apostates.
Dr. G. de Porras says
Este Arzobispo, antes de hablar, debería protestar ante el Rey de Marruecos sobre la comprobada explotación que se hace en Tanger de personas obligadas a trabajar en pésimas condiciones y salarios de hambre, durante 10 horas seguidas en talleres donde, a precios muy bajos se confecciona ropa para muy importantes marcas, que luego se venden en Europa a altos precios. Si tiene campos de concentración en su Arzobispado que proteste por esa explotación de trabajadores. Y conste que soy católico
AleX says
El Arzobispo es una vergüenza por la Iglesia, no tiene originalidad ni tampoco dignidad.
Temiendo la furia musúlmana, es un cobarde y un traitor de su fé con cara petulante.
CTTV15@Hotmail.com says
Dear Archbishop:
Please show me any place on the planet, where this “social justice” experiment in abject anti-assimilation / multiculturalism stupidity has worked.. ANYWHERE?
Better yet, please show me any place in the entire world, where this group hug approach has not worked out miserably for those nations, and those people, which have tried this nonsense and failed – including the Catholic Church.. Remember The Crusades?
It’s like mixing gasoline and a match.. It’s a mess, and has been for over 1,400 years now. It’s ISLAM..
Dale Netherton says
As long as there are people pointing to imaginary deities for guidance you will have diverse opinions and hatred of those who disagree.
Mike Stevens says
Here’s a thing: the World Bank and others estimate that hundreds of millions across the world struggle to survive on a few dollars a day. These are the genuine poor, trapped by poverty, war, and the corrupt governments of black Africa and the Muslim world with no possibility of escape.
Almost without exception, the current wave of migrants/”refugees”/asylum seekers have paid THOUSANDS of dollars for transport and to people smugglers. THEY ARE NOT THE WORLD’S POOR. They are the better off, even rich, of the Third World who are not escaping war or poverty, but have their eye on an easy life in the prosperous countries of the West foolish enough to take them in and subsidise them indefinitely. Abandoning their countries and leaving those less fortunate to pick up the pieces.
Genuine “refugees” would and should seek asylum in the first safe country they reach; but with smartphones and access to the Internet they know which countries are the softest touch. The Iranians pitching up on the English coast have done their homework – they know that, unlike France or Germany, Britain offers immediate benefits to asylum seekers: they are housed, fed, given free medical care and cash payments. And the lengthy asylum process gives them ample time to simply “disappear” into the huge ethnic communties already in British cities.
If the West wants to help the world’s poor, it should concentrate on the genuine people trapped in the Third world and not those who are, by definition, no more than economic parasites.
dan christensen says
It is obvious that the Archbishop of Tangiers, in Morocco, Santiago Agrelo Martinez, is closer to heaven than to earth.
He must be planning for moving to the papal residence in the Vatican.
By uttering political correct sentences of compassionate character, he is paving the way for donning the papal tiara in the future.
What sensible Christian Europeans suffer by limitless islamic migration to Europe is no concern of his.
Demote him to monk and send him to Mekka as missionary a.s.a.p. – that should teach him a lesson about the real world!
Promote him to pope, if he has can convert a single muslim in Mecca to Christianity – and they both survive.
somehistory says
Wishful thinking or thinkful wishing. Some people really like having something about which to complain.
If no one is forcing them to go to the camp, if they can request after going to be sent home, then it is not like the camps where Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies and others were interred and treated to demonic persecution by sadistic men and women.
Using the term “concentration camp” is meant to inflame the anger in those who don’t know all of the facts.
Garfield says
My friends father survived the camps of ww 2 . He had to dig graves for other Jews His pregnant wife was taken away and gassed. All his siblings were killed. No, these migrant camps are not like concentration camps. R.I.P Aaron Abraham.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Garfield.
And many of those freed from Nazi concentration camps spent some time in transit camps while they were being processed–and in many cases nursed back to health.
Did *any* of these people consider these to be the same as Nazi concentration camps? Of course not.
Raja says
This man seems to be full of Leftism and globalism, little does he know how the nations and languages came to existence though he is bestowed with a title: Archbishop.
He cannot discern how he will live with people who want to kill him or have him killed. The very same migrants will dance over his murder like they did it on Sep 11…
gravenimage says
I think this is more dhimmitude. He lives under the Muslim boot, and feels compelled to lick it.
Ole Pederson says
The archbishop can go to any migrant camp and do good instead of talking hot air. Let’s see if he survives a day.
Dapto says
Time to sell all Catholic churches since they dont want to help Christians in any country and considering most churches are empty on sundays , they can use the money for all their bloviated causes.
gravenimage says
Archbishop Agrelo: “Migrant Camps Are Concentration Camps” (Part One)
…………………………
What sickening calumny.
And claiming we are seizing slaves when in actuality these migrants are clamoring–sometimes violently–to enter our nations–is a total reversal of reality. Then, few of these Muslim migrants work–they instead come here to live off the dole.