Five years of the Turkey deal: refugees are best helped in their neighboring countries

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Five years after the EU-Turkey declaration, its core idea should be turned into a paradigm for a more efficient and thus better refugee policy.

The idea behind the “Turkey Deal” was as simple as it is good: the crossings to Greece will be stopped, in return the EU states will finance proper accommodation for the refugees in Turkey and fly in some particularly needy people from there.

That never worked completely.

But in conjunction with the border protection that was set up almost at the same time on the Balkan route from Greece to Germany and its neighboring countries, the strongest migration movement of modern times to Europe was drastically reduced in spring 2016.

The goal of a long-term refugee policy should be to help as many of the more than 20 million people worldwide who have fled their country as possible to freedom from persecution and decent living conditions.

A fixation on the small part that manages to migrate to the EU and especially to Germany is counterproductive.

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In order to achieve the goal of helping as many refugees as possible around the world, Germany and the EU should strive for an efficient international division of labor: the neighboring states of the crisis regions will be even more responsible for taking in refugees than is already the case today.

In return, the richest countries in the world in the EU and elsewhere undertake to fully cover all material follow-up costs of taking in refugees that the mostly poor neighbors of the refugee countries incur.

In addition, some particularly needy people are legally resettled from there to rich countries.

For example, Turkey can take in the culturally and geographically close Syrians with much less effort - the EU has the means to support this massively and must therefore be active in financial aid, housing and economic development.

Settling Afghans in Pakistan or Somalis in Uganda close to home is advantageous because contacts to the region of origin are more likely to be maintained, which makes it easier to return after the persecution situation has ceased or the war has ended.

It would be the task of the EU not only to fully finance the camps, but also to encourage foreign direct investment in the host regions, to support Western companies in setting up production facilities in these often poor countries and to participate in vocational training.

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To illustrate the material potential that a paradigm shift in refugee policy would open up - away from illegal migration and towards massive support for neighboring countries - some figures should be mentioned.

The UN refugee organization receives around eight billion euros annually from the international community to support more than 20 million refugees around the world.

This roughly corresponds to Germany's spending on looking after around 60,000 so-called unaccompanied minor foreigners (UmA) in 2016 and 2017. More than ninety percent of global spending on refugees goes to the ten percent of those seeking protection who mostly illegally move to the wealthiest States to travel on.

The current German refugee policy, with its focus on settlement in its own national territory, is structurally inefficient primarily because it inevitably overcomes the actual goal, namely to enable people seeking protection to be free from persecution and security.

Almost every refugee who manages to travel from his first country of refuge to the EU and then to Germany and who is recognized here as entitled to protection receives, in addition to his security, an enormous improvement in his material standard of living almost automatically.

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Not only in relation to his miserable situation as a refugee, but also in relation to his level of prosperity before the reason for fleeing occurred, i.e. before the persecution or displacement began.

This inefficiency of the current refugee policy is increased by the fact that those unauthorized persons seeking protection whose applications are rejected - that is the majority - also benefit from this massive increase in prosperity.

This is because most of them are not deported and because those responsible for politics have created a legal situation in Germany and the EU over the past few decades that prescribes a rapid harmonization of social standards for all people in a national territory.

It is undoubtedly also a great achievement that the Federal Government through its policies - and society through its willingness to accept - is improving the concrete lives of so many people, opening up new perspectives, employment and educational opportunities for them.

However, there is no moral obligation to offer refugees, in addition to protection from persecution, a higher standard of living than they did before they were threatened with persecution.

Solvents and researchers in particular make it to us

Strictly speaking, the Federal Republic of Germany has hardly saved anyone from war and persecution in recent years, but has taken in more than one and a half million people from Austria and other neighboring countries as refugees.

However, an efficient refugee policy could, with the same financial commitment as before, help improve the living conditions of many more people who have fled their homeland.

From the dozens of UN camps around the world, Germany could not only fly in around 7,000 refugees per year as part of legal humanitarian migration - but significantly more.

Instead, the Federal Republic of Germany assumes its responsibility for the worldwide refugees mainly by waiting to see who is solvent, healthy and brisk enough to enter illegally across many borders in order to then usually “integrate” these people permanently, including fewer than them Half with a protective reason.

That's not particularly clever.

A paradigm shift in refugee policy would probably meet with approval from the population.

When asked by Infratest-Dimap whether “the unauthorized entry of asylum seekers into the EU should be largely prevented in the future, but in return more people in need of protection should be flown into the EU directly from crisis regions”, 59 percent answered in the affirmative last year and only 30 percent rejecting.

The remaining 11 percent were undecided.

The proposal outlined here, which takes up the thoughts of Alexander Betts, Paul Collier, Gerald Knaus and David Ricardo, would of course also have considerable consequential problems.

After all, what would happen in concrete terms to those seeking protection who still travel illegally from their neighboring countries, which are then intensively supported, to the EU?

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In this case, effective take-back agreements would have to be negotiated with the initial reception states, which would then be complied with.

The latter is one of the weaknesses of the EU-Turkey Declaration adopted five years ago.

Since then, the coast guard of the Bosporus state has tried to prevent many refugees and other migrants from crossing in return for the EU billions.

But as soon as this succeeds, Turkey only very rarely takes them back from Greece, since the Corona crisis it has completely refused to take them back.

There are no simple solutions for a change to a long-term responsible and efficient refugee policy.

We have to take the complicated ones.