Irish entrepreneur, Declan J Ganley writing in the Catholic Herald, offered a bold attempt to find a solution to one of Europe’s biggest issues, that of migration, based on Catholic teaching, in response to the scenes we all witnessed from Ceuta in the last couple of weeks’ news, as tens of thousands of young men from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa surged across the border into Spain’s enclave by land and sea, with dozens dying in the attempt.
It appears that this was the result of fake news following the mass regularisation amnesty programme that this country offered to undocumented migrants earlier this year. But while that is so, the bigger problem remains. Europe, as the article says ”has become the softest touch. The combination of relatively open access, slow processing and easy welfare creates a powerful magnetic pull. Economic migrants and those fleeing genuine danger travel the same routes, often facilitated by traffickers who exploit both desperation and our legal frameworks. The result is chaos at the frontier, resentment in host communities and the hollowing out of the very societies these people leave behind.”
And so he puts forward what he calls the “better way”, through which European countries would establish “secure safe havens adjacent to, or preferably inside, countries of origin such as Sudan and others generating large outflows. These would be places of genuine protection where people at risk of death or persecution could find shelter, food, medical care and order until conditions allowed return or orderly resettlement”. And he explains that security “would be provided by European and possibly other allied armed forces”. And this would be in conjunction with “much tighter border controls. Europe’s external frontiers – Ceuta, Melilla, the Mediterranean, Russia, the East and the English Channel – require physical barriers, rapid interception and consistent enforcement”.
Do read through the article. It is a genuine attempt to address a very complex problem. And while some elements may appear unthought through, such as to extent to which nations at war and their neighbours would be prepared to allow the establishment of secure safe havens on their territory, the author argues that this is consistent with Catholic teaching.
“True charity”, he says, “does not require Europe to dissolve its own social fabric in order to signal virtue”. And he describes his proposal as “the policy of a civilisation that still believes it has something worth preserving and something worth offering the world: not by inviting the world to overwhelm it, but by helping the world’s most desperate people where they actually are”.
Read the article in the Catholic Herald here.
Picture above: Ceuta, seen from the belvedere of Isabel II, near the Moroccan border, own work by Ongayo, in the public domain