Foreign Policy article: Europe's welcome of refugees from Ukraine will not last long

The American magazine Foreign Policy

 that expects the European welcome of refugees from Ukraine to recede if the war prolongs, and says that the discrimination behind the hostility to immigration is not limited to those coming from the Middle East and North Africa only.

The article - written by Muhammad Idris Ahmed, a lecturer in digital journalism at the University of Stirling in Scotland - reviewed the manifestations of European welcome to Ukrainian refugees, saying that people in Germany are waiting at train stations to offer Ukrainians to stay in their homes;

In Romania, villagers drive to the border to take refugees to safety;

In Poland, mothers leave prams at train stations for Ukrainians who may need them for their children.

No precedents for a European welcome

He commented that these scenes show humanity at its best, noting that Europeans have no precedents in recent memory for such a welcome, except in the fall of 2015, when Europe's conscience moved briefly after images of 3-year-old Syrian child Alan Kurdi spread, His dead body was washed up on a Turkish beach after his family failed to reach European shores.

In the following days, many European leaders pledged to accept a large number of refugees.

The image of this child also inspired volunteers from across Europe and the United States to rush to the Greek islands to help refugees arriving in waves.

The writer said that this outpouring of sympathy did not last long after the multiple attacks of the Islamic State in Paris in November of that year (2015), when European attitudes returned to anti-immigration.

Reversal of European sympathy for refugees

While committed activists and aid workers, and some journalists continued to provide sympathetic coverage, the positions of European countries have hardened, criminalizing sympathy itself, accusing people who were helping refugees in the Aegean and the Mediterranean of "human trafficking" and "helping to Illegal immigration".

Idris emphasized that ethnicity and the relative affinity for culture are two factors in the sympathy received by Ukrainians more than those from the Middle East and North Africa, but identity is not a constant thing, as Christianity and whiteness were not always guarantors of hospitality.

In Britain, blue eyes and blonde hair did little to protect Poles from racism in the 2000s.

In 2010, the focus of xenophobia shifted to Romanians and Bulgarians.

According to the author, the Slavs (the inhabitants of Russia, eastern and central Europe and Central Asia) were not always treated as "whites" in the West.

Indeed, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini promised to protect the White West from the Slavs.

Even in the United States, Italians were discriminated against as "savages" and "strangers".

In the United Kingdom, anti-Irish sentiment has persisted from the days of Shakespeare to the present, and did not abate until the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The writer said that these classifications depend on a myriad of other factors.

Time is a critical factor

He pointed out that time is also a decisive factor in the refugee issue, as the development of the situation in Ukraine and the unfolding of the humanitarian crisis very quickly, prompted the Europeans to act out of humanitarian motive without the interference of discrimination or ideology, and treated Ukrainian refugees as refugees.

Then he said that if this crisis does not find a quick solution and the Ukrainians are not able to return home, people will see how the Europeans can reduce the Ukrainians' status from refugees to mere "immigrants".

And if that happens, their skin color likely won't protect them.

Armament is also important

He said that Western countries are currently doing their best to ensure that such a situation does not occur.

Unlike the Syrians, Europe provided the Ukrainians with some means to defend themselves, although not enough to withstand the harsher measures of the Russian army.

The report noted that this is an issue of far greater importance than the magnanimity shown towards refugees.

Idris concluded his report by saying that the real and lasting help that the West can provide is to prevent people from becoming refugees in the first place, and the critical first step in this regard is to restore hope, either by protecting people from military aggression or by giving them the means to resist it.

Finally, Europe is doing so in Ukraine, because this time the war is on its doorstep, but if it had given the Syrians the means to defend themselves in 2012, it is possible that Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been deterred and that Ukraine would have survived his current "invasion".