The Europeans have an advertised policy of welcoming anyone who shows up in Europe as a “refugee” as long as the person faces some sort of threat back in his or her home country.
Suppose that a government finds that 25 percent of its citizens are some combination of (a) poorly educated, (b) unproductive, (c) disabled, or (d) imprisoned following criminal convictions. This group of people is a drain on the treasury through a combination of welfare payments and prison expenses. Certainly there is no hope of collecting tax revenues from these folks.
What stops the government from saying “If you fall into one of these categories you will be executed on June 1, 2016, but we are also pleased to offer you a plane ticket to Germany or a trip to the coast of Germany or Sweden.” Perhaps the Germans won’t let planeloads of refugees land every day and disembark, but can they stop a foreign government’s ship from unloading refugees into rubber boats just off the coast yet still in international waters? Due to the death sentence advertised publicly, all of the refugees would be eligible for asylum under EU rules.
Thus a country can unload its most economically burdensome citizens any time that it wants to. Instead of spending oil wealth on welfare, for example, an oil-rich state could have its least educated citizens supported by German and Swedish taxpayers. This would leave the remaining population, but especially a dictator or royal family, substantially wealthier.
Ordinarily one might argue that it is cruel to cast a person loose in international waters, but with Swedish and German taxpayers promising to provide free housing, free health care, free food, etc., the unwanted citizens of a less-developed country should be better off in Europe.
Obviously this hasn’t happened yet so there is a flaw in the above argument somewhere, but the question for readers is… where is the flaw?
I had this thought just the other day. I don’t see any reason this wouldn’t work because European countries’ refugee laws make the assumption no one lies (unlike US law, which assumes fraud). In Germany they immediately provide housing and cash once your application is submitted.
This is one reason so many Balkans keep going despite a 99% asylum failure rate. Just buy a one-way ticket, and Germany will give you a place to stay, a couple hundred Euros (you can work under the table for more money), then 3-6 months later they’ll pay for your trip home.
*****
“Due to the death sentence advertised publicly, all of the refugees would be eligible for asylum under EU rules”
There’s a case in the UK with an Imam that preaches anti-Western Jihad. The government spent years trying to deport him, but he claimed he’d get tortured in, iirc, Jordan.
Europeans also have something called “the right to family life,” that foreigners use to avoid deportation. Basically, once a person gets into Europe with their family, and their family has the right to stay, they can’t be separated from their family even if they’re criminals. So all you need is one family member that’s a citizen of one EU country, and it’s almost impossible to get deported.
Check out the book “The Camp of the Saints.” It deals with a similar scenario.
> where is the flaw?
It would draw the wrong kind of attention to the refugee and migrant influx. So people like this guy wouldn’t like it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18519395
You had a hard enough time getting snowy a passage…
Note: Those that advocate such policy’s, will also be purged, to dangerous, gets ideas, outside the box, that not legitimate, sealing ones own sarcophagus.
The flaw is in assuming that the govt works in the interest of its people, rather than as a self-serving mechanism to get its leaders elected again. Why deport unproductive people when you can ensure their vote for you by promising them more free stuff?
Read about the Mariel Cubans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
“The exodus started to have negative political implications for U.S. president Jimmy Carter when it was discovered that a number of the refugees had been released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities.”
Chris: great example! I was just about reference the same. This was probably one of the more brilliant things Fidel did …
John Galt: Not all governments are elected! Royal families and/or dictatorships are especially common in resource-rich countries.
O.K., I’ll bite. Flaws with the argument:
(1) The assumption that eliminating 25% of the population will make the governing elites (or the remaining 75% generally) wealthier.
If the government that you have in mind as implementing this policy is a dictatorship or absolute monarchy, such governments rarely spend very much money on a social safety net. What safety net does exist is for the purpose of buying social peace and reducing the risk of mass uprising that could cost the ruling class its hold on power. Mass deportation of people would risk a backlash from their relatives and neighbors that remain behind. That leaves money spent on prisoners, and any government willing to make a credible commitment to execute 25% of its population could surely come up with a very inexpensive way of eliminating whatever budget it currently devotes to prisons. Executing all prisoners would almost certainly be a preferable option to antagonizing Europe with your “refugee” idea. (Also, given that prison systems exist largely to deter crime or undesirable political activity, sending all prisoners to better lives in Western Europe would create incentives very different from what those in power would prefer.)
If you are instead imagining a society with a Western-style social safety net (one that actually costs real money), deporting 25% of the population is going to cause disruptions that would very likely reduce elite wealth, not increase it. To take the U.S. as an example, 59% of people over age 16 currently work. Most of those that do not work at the moment will work for a substantial portion of their lives. (Take as an example, someone who goes to law school, graduates at 25, retires at 65, and dies at the actuarially predicted 79. That person spends 36.5% of his/her years over age 16 “not employed.”) The only way to deport 25% is to deport a large number of workers and/or their immediate families. That would be hugely disruptive to a wide range of businesses that count on those people as both employees and customers, and would thus cost their owners money. (What happens to Walmart when a large fraction of its customers disappear, but its costs for real estate and a sophisticated distribution network remain?)
It would also cause great upheaval in the real estate market. Rental vacancies would soar and rents would plummet. This, in turn, would reduce demand for owner-occupied homes and cause their prices to drop. With fewer workers to house and fewer customers to serve, commercial real estate would likewise drop in value. Banks would fail, as the collateral for the loans on their books collapses in value. See Detroit for an example of what happens to real estate wealth when a city is depopulated.
Other forms of wealth would be similarly impaired. For example, transportation infrastructure like airliners and mass transit systems would become less economically viable due to reduced demand. Absent major government bailout, the truly wealthy would likely lose more in terms of lost value of their existing investments than they would gain from a reduction in taxes going toward the social safety net. (It’s not as if the social safety net cost would disappear entirely, unless the plan included deporting everyone old enough to collect social security.)
In short, I suspect the circumstances where you can deport 25% of a population and thereby make most of the remaining population wealthier are rather rare.
(2) The assumption that the remaining 75% would support (or tolerate) deportation of 25% of the population, even it made them wealthier as a result.
Unless the society already has a pervasive system of racial / ethnic / linguistic / religious segregation, I seriously doubt that you could find a way of identifying the 25% of “unproductive” people that would not end up roping in close family members or friends of a large majority of the population. (Surely you have cousins, nephews, etc. who would fall in the bottom 25%?) Will people just stand by and watch those people they care about deported at the point of a gun? Your police forces and military will probably be even more likely to have family members who are affected. Will they enforce your decrees? Just to save the treasury and wealthy taxpayers a few bucks? Or will they depose you instead, and be celebrated as saviors by the masses?
Of course, the caveat about a segregated society is an important one. History shows it is easy to get police or militaries to carry out horrible acts against a group that is distinctively “other.” If your cleaver idea is to engage in “ethnic cleansing” to improve government finances, color me unimpressed.
(3) The assumption that this idea would work, without actually killing anyone.
The European authorities may make mistakes, but they are not quite as stupid as you seem to assume. They are not going to accept refugees simply because you claim you will execute people. That threat would need to be credible. Your government that previously provided a costly safety net would need to switch to actually killing a bunch of people before the Europeans would accept the danger as a real one. The real option you are proposing is not one of bluffing Germany and Sweden into accepting those members of your society that you have declared to be too expensive to keep around. Rather it is one of starting to actually murder innocent members of your society in order to make the threat a real one. All of this just to save a few bucks.
In summary, I think that your proposed idea is entirely impractical on the sort of scale you propose and would not likely achieve the benefits you suggest. (The Mariel boatlift was about 0.1% of the Cuban population, not 25%.)
I also feel that I must remind you of why things like the U.N. Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or the modern refugee policies of the U.S. or of Germany exist. It is not a coincidence that the first U.S. refugee law was enacted in 1948 or that Germany has one of the most liberal refugee policies in the world. More liberal refugee policies in the late 1930s or early 1940s would have saved millions of innocent lives. Given what I presume to be the Yiddish origins of your last name, I would suggest that perhaps you should celebrate Germany for the somewhat more enlightened approach it takes to refugees and minority religious / ethnic groups today than it did 75 years ago.
Neil: Excellent analysis. Thanks. Are we sure that oil-rich states don’t spend a lot on welfare? http://www.us-sabc.org/custom/news/details.cfm?id=1645 says that the Saudis spent 14 percent of their budget on “health and social affairs” and this is growing at 48 percent per year. They also have an “education and training” budget that scales with population size.
On the “You’re Jewish so you should encourage the Europeans to support unlimited migration” theme that you raised… I will do a separate blog post on this but I don’t think the World War II-era Jews are the right population to compare to today’s migrants. Germany had 500,000 Jews before Hitler was elected and 250,000 before the war started. These folks were singled out for bad treatment due to their religion/ethnicity. The World War II-era Jews would thus arguably be comparable to Christians living in Muslim countries. What World War II-era group corresponds to today’s migrants? That would be essentially the entire European population. Anyone who was in a war zone, anyone who lived in a place that was being bombed, anyone who was serving as a soldier (common soldiers did not start any wars), anyone who was suffering from poverty due to wartime shortages or other economic dislocations. So if we were to roll back the clock to 1941 and ask “who should have been a refugee entitled to come to North America?”, under today’s rules the answer would be “Anyone in Germany, anyone in France, anyone in Southern England, anyone in Central/Eastern Europe, and anyone in Russia west of the Ural Mountains”. So there would have been more than 200 million potential migrants, very few of them Jews.
Americans would be more likely to threaten people who stay married too long. These people are a burden on the legal industry by not investing enough in its services.
Hitler did this, only he didn’t allow the asylum thing to occur. I guess he saved money on all that potential shipping.
Being a monarchy doesn’t mean you are automatically in power. It means that if you loose popular support, rather than retiring, they chop your head off.
Mark: I don’t think Hitler’s targeting of Jews (1% of the population when he was elected to national office; about 0.5% when World War II started) can be compared to the original posting’s hypothetical. There was no coherent economic rationale for German political leaders to try to get rid of this segment of the population.
I read a book (In the Garden of Beasts) about pre-war Germany, where it said that the Germans had plans to deport all the Jews to Madagascar. Later when the war was going worse and worse it ended up they decided to kill them. But had they all been sent to Madagascar, I wonder how today’s world situation would be different. Would Israel exist?
Would Madagascar be a major technical industrial powerhouse?