I have this picture in my mind of a Diamondian collapse, where failed, imploding societies flood the less-failed societies nearby with refugees, causing them to fail as well.
Anyway, I've not been on CFC for a long time, so I just (in the best of traditions) skimmed this thread and feel entitled to comment as if I were an expert. So...
... in my opinion, we need to set up some plan for the above-mentioned potential future. As of yet, for Europe to accept and perhaps absorb several hundred thousand refugees from a single migratory wave (let's call it the "Arab Spring" wave and cry bitter tears) is pretty feasible. There will be the usual squabbling in the EU about who should bear what portion of the burden, but in principle, it's doable and not even that much expensive.
HOWEVER... there are political and practical realities to consider. Chiefly, the European populace is by and large hostile to the idea of unrestricted migration from the third world. In Britain, they constantly bit-- about those "Eastern Europeans" without whom their economy would grind to a halt, and they are among the most educated and skilled migrant workforces you can imagine, not to mention very easy to integrate due to largely shared Western viewpoints on key cultural "rich points". In other words, Poles won't be demanding Sharia courts, unlike certain other groups of migrants coming from North Africa or the Middle East.
In the mind of an average citizen, there is not much of a difference between "refugee" and "immigrant". Why? is a good question, because there should be. In the olden days of Cold War, refugees were people from behind the Iron Curtain fleeing totalitarian oppression. Nobody much resisted their arrival, considering they were mostly Western, educated, willing to obey the host country's rules and customs, and had a pretty solid cause for fleeing their home country. Also, the Communist governments obligingly co-operated with the West in preventing mass migration by, you know, putting electric fences patrolled by armed guards on their borders and shooting people for trying to leave the Socialist paradise.
After the Cold War, "refugee" came to mean "someone claiming asylum in order to immigrate to Europe for work". Before somebody screams "xenophobia", this view is not wholly ungrounded; abuse of the system indeed happens and will continue to happen so long as there is incentive for people from poorer countries to try to immigrate to richer countries against the will of the citizens of said richer countries.
Secondly, even if all refugees were legit and we indeed accepted our moral obligation to shelter them, where are the limits? At what point can a country say "No more, we are full, we can't take more people in before the strain breaks our backs"? Don't scoff, it's a legitimate question. Sure, countries like Germany can easily afford to take in more migrants and their avoidance of responsibility and shifting it to the more exposed frontline states is disingenuous. But what about countries like Malta? Cyprus? Or even medium sized ones, like, say, Portugal or Sweden? How many refugees can they realistically take in before their living standard starts falling and the side effect of rapid immigration of people from often completely different cultural backgrounds leads to a collapse of social cohesion?
Now extend this to Europe as a whole -- how many people is Europe obliged to take in and at what risk? At what point does one moral imperative, to provide for the well being of its CITIZENS outweigh the other moral imperative, that of assisting NON-CITIZENS in need?
This is what we need to answer, IMO, and make adequate plans for the future in which this question may become unpleasantly topical.
In the meantime, I'd say it should be made clear that asylum in Europe doesn't equal permanent residency permit. If the situation gets better, these people must return. If they ask to stay, standard cost-benefit approaches to immigration should apply: i.e., those who can benefit the society in a tangible way and are not likely to represent a burden can stay, the rest will be repatriated. At the very least, it should calm the public a little, knowing that refugees won't automatically become immigrants.
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Mark my words, this century is going to be hellish. And Western nations are going to face impossible dilemmas in dealing with all these refugees from climate change and conflict. If they strongly restrict immigration like the right wants, they're called racist and evil, and they are leaving millions of people to suffer. If they open the floodgates and let literally anyone in like some on the left want, there is no way their welfare systems or cultures could possibly support the tens of millions of people who want in (and looking at how the global population continues to rise as climate change and rising sea levels threaten the carrying capacities of the very places with the most serious population increases, there will be a whole lot of people who can't or won't stay in those places like Bangladesh anymore). If Western countries take a middling approach, they'll be hated for letting in both too many people and not enough.
Note I only said "Western nations." Places like Japan are blessed with the ability to be as xenophobic and closed to immigration as they please without getting a word of criticism, even though they could economically benefit from immigration due to a rapidly aging population. Because reasons.
