European Union

"If you are worried about them, stop supporting terrorists. Can you feel sad for a child's death in the sea and not for thousands of children who have been killed by the terrorists in Syria?"

While influential voices like the Pope are correct that this is a travesty, the policies promoted by him and other government officials will only make this worse. Offering assistance to migrants by rescuing them when they become troubled or allowing migrants to remain without changing the underlying bureaucratic issue will only create greater incentives for more and more people to take the same dangerous routes. Risk compensation has to be considered — the greater the safety mechanisms in place, the more risky the behavior will become. Unfortunately, the current solutions presented by officials will likely result in boats even more overloaded with people and even greater numbers traversing dangerous jungle passes.

As thousands of refugees pour into Europe to escape the horrors of war, with many dying along the way, a different sort of tragedy has played out in many of the European Union’s newest member states. The states known collectively as “Eastern Europe,” including my native Poland, have revealed themselves to be intolerant, illiberal, xenophobic, and incapable of remembering the spirit of solidarity that carried them to freedom a quarter-century ago.

Europe's refugee crisis is getting worse by the day. Less than 24 hours after Germany announced it would impose border controls with Austria, followed promptly by the Czech Republic, Slovenia and now the Netherlands, German vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel predicted that as many as 1 million refugees may arrive by the end of the year as other nations moved to fortify their frontiers. In the meantime, however, Europe is dramatically escalating measures to halt the influx and as AFP reported earlier today, the European Union has now approved military action against human traffickers in the Mediterranean Sea.

None other than Europe's master state, Germany itself, is about to launch an ICBM at Schengen when, as BBC reports, "Germany is to reintroduce some form of controls on its border with Austria to cope with the influx of migrants, German and Austrian media report." While the BBC said that it is not clear what measures would be introduced, it is likely that a full return to the pre-Schengen era, with extensive customs checks of every border crosser is imminent. Not only that but Express reported that the "German Defence Minister has admitted that the country verges on "an emergency" after cracks have begun to emerge in the 'German generosity' and that some 4000 German troops have been put on standby.

Europe has complex immigration rules. But, as the recent influx of refugees and economic migrants has shown, the EU government is able to flex its muscle in an ad hoc fashion in the service of compelling member states to accept the migrants and refugees. Ultimately, however, the imposed "solutions" to the migrant and refugee crisis may be a signal to many members that the EU isn't quite what they thought it was.

As part of the refugee crisis in which tens of thousands of innocent Syrians have been displaced and seeking European asylum, it was only a matter of time before one or more was "found" to be ISIS terrorists in order to perpetuate the fear and crisis narrative. A crisis which Brussels would never go to waste. That time has arrived after a report by German RTL and carried by NewObserver that "an ISIS terrorist posing as an "asylum seeker" has been arrested by German police in a “refugee” center in Stuttgart, and German customs officers have seized boxes containing Syrian passports being smuggled into Europe."

Don’t let anyone fool you: As we have detailed since 2013, sectarian strife in Syria has been engineered to provide cover for a war for access to oil and gas, and the power and money that come along with it.

Europe's handling of its refugee crisis has led to much criticism and left even more to be desired, but until now Europe's general population was largely on the side of the misplaced migrants who are trying to reestablish their lives away from the daily horrors of the middle east, all in the name of a Qatari gas pipeline. That may soon change as Europe realizes the influx of tens of thousands of refugees will result in a dramatic surge in public costs, costs which have to be footed by someone. That someone will be the general population (with the wealthy targeted at first) courtesy of even higher taxes.

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As WSJ reports, "the European Union on Wednesday proposed redistributing 160,000 refugees across the bloc and speeding up procedures to send back those who don’t qualify for asylum, in a bid to improve a stuttering response to the largest wave of migration on the continent since the aftermath of World War II."

"We believe a global recession scenario has become the most likely global macroeconomic scenario for the next two years or so. Helicopter money drops would be the best instrument to tackle a downturn in all DMs. We expect to see QE #N, where N could become a large integer, as part of the monetary policy response in the US and the UK, and QEE2 in Japan." 

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