Well, it’s official, Washington can add “out of control refugee crisis” to the list of bad foreign policy outcomes stemming from America's Mid-East meddling.
That list also includes things like accidentally arming [8] an Iran-backed militia with a half billion in sophisticated weapons in Yemen, sponsoring the nullification [9] of a democratic election outcome in Turkey, abandoning support for one Egyptian despot only to see the new US-backed despot sentenced to death [10] after being overthrown in a military coup, and training a group of Syrian freedom fighters who later metamorphosed into a black flag-waving band of marauding jihadists bent on establishing a medieval caliphate.
And that’s all in the space of, let’s call it five years.
Of course the US has a habit of dragging its European allies along for the ride and the conflict in Syria is no different only this time around, not only will Western Europe be expected to join (or at the very least verbally sanction) the invasion of a sovereign Middle Eastern country at the possible cost of thousands of soldiers’ lives, it will now also have to cope with an unprecedented flow of asylum seekers fleeing the carnage in Syria. The EU’s first stab at tackling the migrant crisis came on Wednesday in the form of a compulsory quota system that seeks to distribute some 160,000 refugees. Because the “plan” has been the subject of some confusion and a lot of criticism, we thought it useful to provide an overview of the proposal and on that note, we turn it over to The New York Times [11]:
The president of the European Commission offered a plan on Wednesday to share the burden of resettling 160,000 people in Greece, Hungary and Italy, the three countries where the most migrants have arrived in Europe.
The plan assigns each member state a number of people based on its economic strength, population, unemployment and the number of asylum applications it has approved over the last five years.
Based on the proportions outlined in the proposal, here are countries that have already approved asylum applications at a rate:
[12]
[13]
[14]
