An inevitable downside of such a passionate and fast moving debate is that we tend to lose some gems if we aren't careful.
I copied and pasted the following from another thread about Calais as it seemed to be so profound. To my shame, I didn't note the poster. I think it may have been othehugemanatee but forgive and correct me if that is wrong.
The post read:
Calais is really the tiniest tip of the iceberg. The 'Calais situation' can't be solved in isolation, because it's a product not just of conflict in the Middle East but of globalisation. Many of the people at Calais are not Syrians but Afghans, South Asians, North or West Africans. There is conflict and persecution all over the world: millions of people meet the criteria for the Dublin convention on refugees, and millions more know this fact than used to. It's also easier to travel than it used to be; information travels more quickly than it used to, via social media and mobile phones; and capitalism has lifted millions more just enough out of poverty to be able to see that others elsewhere have a nicer life than they do, and to scrape together the money to attempt the journey. This is only going to escalate. The Great Migration is just beginning, and it's a product not of poverty but of relative wealth.
Those who are arguing that we should be kind and human and let all the poor suffering people-who-we-are-equal-to-and-therefore-have-a-duty-to in: how many do you really, truly think we should take? Because there are not hundreds, or thousands, but millions, or hundreds of millions. Do we really believe that we can meet idealistic refugee standards that were set in an age when refugees numbered in the mere tens or hundreds annually? Those standards, I'd argue, are so generous precisely because the age that created them knew they would never be invoked at any kind of scale. That's changed now. As someone said upthread, the response needs to be a rational one, not an emotional one.
Calais is really the tiniest tip of the iceberg. The 'Calais situation' can't be solved in isolation, because it's a product not just of conflict in the Middle East but of globalisation. Many of the people at Calais are not Syrians but Afghans, South Asians, North or West Africans. There is conflict and persecution all over the world: millions of people meet the criteria for the Dublin convention on refugees, and millions more know this fact than used to. It's also easier to travel than it used to be; information travels more quickly than it used to, via social media and mobile phones; and capitalism has lifted millions more just enough out of poverty to be able to see that others elsewhere have a nicer life than they do, and to scrape together the money to attempt the journey. This is only going to escalate. The Great Migration is just beginning, and it's a product not of poverty but of relative wealth.
Those who are arguing that we should be kind and human and let all the poor suffering people-who-we-are-equal-to-and-therefore-have-a-duty-to in: how many do you really, truly think we should take? Because there are not hundreds, or thousands, but millions, or hundreds of millions. Do we really believe that we can meet idealistic refugee standards that were set in an age when refugees numbered in the mere tens or hundreds annually? Those standards, I'd argue, are so generous precisely because the age that created them knew they would never be invoked at any kind of scale. That's changed now. As someone said upthread, the response needs to be a rational one, not an emotional one.
Do you have a post or a link that captures your thoughts better than you could yourself? We could start a separate thread for those so they don't get lost.