“After Most Migrants Leave Ceuta, Exhausted Holdouts Find Shelter on Beach” (New York Times):
Sitting on a beach on Saturday in Ceuta, Spain, a Senegalese man called Djibril Mboup … despite his hunger, Mr. Mboup, 30, said he was not going to return across the border to Morocco.
Mr. Mboup was among roughly 400 men, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, who were gathered on this beach on Saturday. Many of them lay on ragged sheets of cardboard, their feet blistered from crossing the border and roaming Ceuta’s streets.
The fate of some of the holdouts “is not the same as that of the Moroccans,” Mr. Mohamed, 26, said. Unlike Moroccans who had joined the exodus to Ceuta on a last-minute whim, some of the sub-Saharan migrants are from war-torn regions and had journeyed for months to get to Europe. “They genuinely have the right to request international protection,” Mr. Mohamed said.
For those on the beach, the best possible outcome as they navigated the complexities of the European Union’s asylum system was to be transferred to the city’s official migrant reception center.
Mr. Mboup grew up in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, earning a diploma in logistics, he said. After struggling to find work in his early 20s, he decided to leave the country in 2018 and made his way to Morocco by navigating the deadly smuggling routes through the Sahara. He settled in Casablanca, a coastal city, where he scraped by working illegally as a taxi driver at the airport.
What makes this enricher more entitled to live in Europe than the 19+ million Senegalese who stayed in Senegal? It can’t be superior knowledge of geography:
Hoping to avoid the police’s attention, Mr. Mboup joined a group of Moroccans swimming toward Ceuta, he said. He reached the Spanish shore after roughly 30 minutes, he said, though he did not feel that he was in Spain until he saw the cars — the “Spanish cars.”
His happiness quickly gave way to disappointment, he said.
“I kept looking for signs toward Madrid and Barcelona,” he said, only to realize that he was still “on an island” and that mainland Europe was far away.
I can understand a policy under which everyone from Senegal is entitled to move to Europe. A policy under which nobody from Senegal is entitled to move to Europe would also make sense. But I can’t figure out why the Europeans run a system in which a person from Senegal is entitled to move to Europe, or at least spend 10 years there waiting for an asylum case to be heard by a court or for an amnesty to be declared by a politician, conditioned on first swimming to Ceuta or arriving on a beach in Lampedusa.
(Same question about the U.S. We are home to about 25 percent of the world’s Mexicans and 10 percent of the world’s Haitians. Why aren’t the other 75 percent of Mexicans and 90 percent of Haitians entitled to move to the U.S.? What did they do wrong?)
It is because of evil Republicans and their European equivalents.
Longer explanation:
1. As Matthew Yglesias has proven, the population of the USA should be at least one billion in order to compete with China & India. USA today is dangerously underpopulated. So yes, we do need to take in all of Mexico, Senegal etc.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50165554-one-billion-americans
2. However, Yglesias points out that open borders would enrage Republicans and damage Democratic Party. This is completely unacceptable.
3. So we need to practice a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqiyya. Pretend that immigration depends on persecution or having valuable skills or reaching some random Spanish territory in Africa.
I understand it is frustrating and we are all eagerly looking to reaching One Billion people, but have some patience comrades!
> But I can’t figure out why the Europeans run a system in which a person from Senegal is entitled to move to Europe, or at least spend 10 years there waiting for an asylum case to be heard by a court or for an amnesty to be declared by a politician, conditioned on first swimming to Ceuta or arriving on a beach in Lampedusa.
I can give two reasons at the ends of the spectrum (rational/emotional) for why the 10-year thing is happening:
1. The European immigration system is not working properly, and immigrants do not have powerful representation in the law-making/altering bodies. The immigrants who can do something, who are a part of the system, are generally more exploitative than the new immigrants (Django Unchained types).
2. Just as many people like to express all the emotions related to the food problems in Gaza by posting teary-eyed videos and “tweeting from their L-shaped couch,” instead of fasting for a few meals so as to feel what the Gazans feel, seeing some people suffer gives many people something to do and some kind of perverted satisfaction. It makes them feel better about themselves in a perverted way. You know, like doing charity can be a selfless act, done for one’s own internal satisfaction, or it can be done for marketing, so as to bolster one’s moral righteousness.
Your original question can be answered by the following reason:
> conditioned on first swimming to Ceuta or arriving on a beach in Lampedusa.
Seeing those immigrants undergo so much pain at the hands of Nature makes them more serious compared to those who simply take a business-class flight and move to another country. This is why a mark of a great culture in ancient times was how it treated travellers and guests, because travelling was so difficult.
*more exploitative than the citizens (non-immigrants)