Let in the Refugees
Last Tuesday, a group of refugees, many of them Syrians, walked quickly through a field outside the Hungarian village of Röszke. They had broken out of what amounted to a holding pen, where the authorities had kept them, in increasingly desperate conditions, for days. They were going to Budapest and then, they hoped, on to Austria, Germany, or Sweden. When the police tried to bring them back, they started to run. Reporters were there, too, and, as a man carrying a preschooler raced past a camerawoman, she tripped him, and he and the child tumbled to the ground. Her move was caught on video; another clip shows her kicking a small girl, wearing green pants, her hair in a ponytail, as she runs by. (The camerawoman has reportedly been fired.) What may be most remarkable about the scene is that the girl maintains her balance and doesn’t look back. She keeps going.
“Everything which is now taking place before our eyes threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of Europe,” Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, wrote in an op-ed earlier this month, and that is true, even if Orbán—who warns of Europeans becoming a minority in their own continent, their countries “overrun” and no longer Christian—is far from a reliable framer of the principles at stake. Many of the refugees are from Eritrea, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but a growing proportion are Syrian, and the sense of hopelessness about the civil war there is a key reason that their numbers are rising. At transit points like the Greek island of Kos, people are sleeping in the open, but the tensions are not restricted to Europe’s less wealthy margins. The Danish government took out ads in Lebanese newspapers telling potential refugees that it planned to make life harder for them, and briefly cut off its rail connections to Germany, in order to curtail their movement.
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