Refugees Pour into Arctic, Next Stop — America

The vast influx of Syrian refugees sweeping across Europe and seeking asylum are now migrating further north — as the once-welcoming countries in the south become reluctant to grant them entry.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-armed welcome to more than 500,000 refugees in 2015 soured severely after a string of terrorist attacks struck the country during the summer — not to mention the infamous bout of sexual harassment and assaults Germany witnessed New Year’s Eve. As Germany began to discuss limits, the refugees turned elsewhere. Now that it is becoming clear that they have exhausted much of the good graces and hospitality of the European nations, refugees hailing from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa are setting their sights on Scandinavia.

“And the general public has started to act upon their own common sense and realize that without borders, you have nothing. Without the integrity of the sovereignty of the nation, you can’t talk about anything else.”

But Norway has decided to build a border wall to discourage the immigration, and officials in Denmark began offering free transportation for the asylum-seekers out of the country and into Sweden. Sweden responded by offering what The Washington Post called “a one-way refugee express to the very last place it is plausible to go: Finland, beyond which is nothing except Russia and the Arctic Circle.”

Encouraged by Finland’s reputation as a “refugee-friendly” country — in part due to the Facebook page called Refugees Welcome Finland — the asylum-seekers hoped to settle there. Finnish officials estimate that anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 refugees will have arrived by the end of this year, according to The Washington Post. But even Finland has begun to question how many of the more than 750,000 refugees trekking across the European mainland should stay.

Amid all this turmoil, more questions arise — and are left unanswered. Why did Europe, and even the United States, feel the need to resettle so many refugees when countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, or Kuwait — each of which is closer to the refugees’ countries of origin — barely took in any of them? And these countries, most of which have a per capita wealth greater than that of the United States, already share more similar religious and cultural makeups with the refugees than their European or American counterparts. Although Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and others quickly took in millions of refugees, the nearby Gulf states and wealthy Arab countries initially accepted scant hundreds of refugees in comparison, according to data from the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR).

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Dr. Sebastian Gorka is author of The New York Times bestseller “Defeating Jihad” and the vice president and professor of strategy and irregular warfare at the Institute of World Politics. He told LifeZette he found his December 2015 visit to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan particularly illuminating in analyzing the global response to the ongoing refugee crisis.

“And having spoken to the head, the Jordanian head of the camp there, it’s very interesting that the Jordanians are Sunni Muslims, so they’re talking about their fellow co-religioners,” Gorka said. “And this commander said that the ideal scenario sooner or later is that these people go back to their country. The idea that they’re in Jordan is one thing — but the idea to push them even further west or even further north is nonsense.”

But there seems to be a lack of consensus between the Europe, the U.S., and the refugees themselves regarding the long-term picture. And as a result, the refugee crisis is taking its universal toll as each country considers how best it can conserve its own values while aiding the asylum-seekers.

“So, you know, if you have a Muslim nation in the vicinity of the war say that the refugees sooner or later need to go back to their homeland, I think that’s a far more credible source than anybody else in America or Norway or what have you,” Gorka said. “So I think the Western powers have this completely — you know, have it completely 180 degrees out of reality. The idea that you want to absorb as many refugees as possible, that doesn’t help anybody, and it doesn’t help the country conserve, either.”

“Across the Western world we’re seeing a reaction to a naïve foreign policy that doesn’t understand how the world works.”

As the United States, Scandinavian countries, European powers, and Middle Eastern countries consider the complex religious and social issues underlying the immigration crisis, Gorka recommends they heed all warning signs.

“Western civilization is based on Judeo-Christian values, so we are obliged to help people when we can help them,” Gorka said. “But I think what we’re seeing now — I think the Brexit phenomena … and I think even the Trump phenomena — is all in reaction to this lack of reality, this naiveté that is demonstrated by the political elite in America and in Europe.”

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Indeed, as the refugee crisis has been sweeping across Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States have been dealing with their own “populist uprisings.” When the U.K. voted to leave the European Union in June — largely over the issues of open borders and national sovereignty — the world took notice. And in the United States, when political outsider Donald Trump rose to the top of the Republican Party as its presidential nominee, the world watched him take on the political Establishment and call for stricter enforcement of immigration policies and national sovereignty.

“And the general public has started to act upon their own common sense and realize that without borders, you have nothing. Without the integrity of the sovereignty of the nation, you can’t talk about anything else. You can’t talk about education. You can’t talk about health care,” Gorka said. “If you don’t have a functioning nation-state with integral borders, then everything else is just a fantasy. So I think across the Western world we’re seeing a reaction to a naïve foreign policy that doesn’t understand how the world works.”