#dnaEdit: Turkey as Ellis Island

An agreement reached on March 18 this year between Istanbul and Brussels went into operation on April 4. Illegal immigrants in Greece have been shipped to Turkey. And in return, the European Union (EU) will take in a Syrian refugee in Turkey with proper papers who will be rehabilitated in a suitable member country in Europe. In turn, EU offered financial aid to Turkey for managing the illegal immigrants. There was also the additional incentive that Turkish visitors could travel to EU countries without a visa and Turkey’s application for EU membership will be put on fast track. 

There are several bewildering aspects to the whole issue. There is the confusing logistics involved in its operation. And there is the anger of and protest from human rights organisations over dealing with refugees as though they were things to be put on an exchange conveyor belt. But the more important question is that of the rationale of choosing Turkey as a gateway for immigrants entering EU countries. Why cannot Greece or Italy, Spain or Portugal serve as an entry point for immigrants seeking entry into the EU? 

The problem for EU arises from the Schengen system, which has turned the member-countries into a single legal territory. A person entering Greece or Italy, Spain or Portugal will be free to wander all over Europe without further checks. The problem with the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe was this: they would have spread all over the continent and it would have become difficult to regulate either their movement or their choice of residence. 

EU wants to use Turkey as a convenient entry point where the refugees will be screened, given valid papers and it is after these preliminary clearances that the EU, with the consent of the governments of the member-countries, will assign refugees their place of residence. It appears to be a complex mechanism to deal with a difficult problem. But behind it all is a mental block against non-Europeans, against non-Christians entering the EU.

Europeans are caught between their self-proclaimed liberalism with its universal value system, and a deep-rooted, unconscious prejudice, which is a veiled form of racism. The EU seems to believe that the Syrian and other West Asian refugees will be culturally at home in Asian and Islamic Turkey, and integration and assimilation will be less of a problem. There are as many differences between Turks and Syrians, between Iranians and Iraqis as there are between Hungarians and Finns; between the French and the Germans.

What the EU and its member-countries will have to decide is whether they want to live up to their liberal ideals and accept asylum seekers on humanitarian grounds with its attendant problems of integration, or whether it would want to put up barriers for purely practical reasons. The EU, in the middle of an economic recession, is just not in a position to absorb a few million refugees. There is also the unpalatable truth that many of the refugees are not always fleeing war and persecution, but they are people who are in search of a better place to pursue their dreams of a good life. Europeans themselves had flocked to the US in the second half of the 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th century in search of a good life. EU cannot shirk its responsibility regarding refugees and push it on to Turkey.