The Global Refugee Crisis: How Should We Respond? by Louise Arbour

Author:Louise Arbour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2016-11-23T15:39:43+00:00

Pre-Debate Interviews with Rudyard Griffiths

Mark Steyn in Conversation with Rudyard Griffiths

Rudyard Griffiths: Welcome to our pre-debate interviews. We’re having conversations with each of our debaters before tonight’s confab on the global refugee crisis.

It’s my pleasure to be sitting down with Mark Steyn. We know him as a celebrated columnist and a big media personality both here and in Canada and the United States: Fox News, the Rush Limbaugh Show — you name it, Mark’s on it. He’s also a bestselling author and a much-followed recording artist, which is terrific, Mark.

It’s great to have you here and part of this conversation. What is a refugee in your view, and how does that relate to the debate we’re having tonight?

Mark Steyn: A refugee is someone who has genuine fear of persecution. There are grave risks to genuine refugees, of whom there are many in the world.

Look at what’s happened to the Christians in Iraq or the Yazidis: they have a genuine fear of persecution — a genuine fear of extermination.

But there are also people who just want to live in the West. If you can recall, there was a German village in Lower Saxony — I think it was Sumte — which had 102 people, and the German government said that they should take 750 refugees. They initially told them to accept one thousand and then downgraded it to 750.

Interestingly, that’s roughly the proportion of the developed world to the rest of the planet. There are one billion of us who live in the developed world, give or take, and about six billion who don’t. And not a terribly large proportion of them have to come to the developed world to completely overwhelm it.

The head honcho at Davos said a couple of weeks ago that he thought that a billion people were ready to make the move from the rest of the world to the developed world, essentially because Angela Merkel hung a sign out saying if you can get here, you can stay here.

Rudyard Griffiths: How would you respond to the argument that Syria is a failed state? There is mass death unfolding and there are a variety of people responsible for that, from Assad to various splinter and jihadist groups, and arguably we, the West, who have had no small role to play in this collapse. So, in a sense, what do we owe the people of Syria?

Mark Steyn: I think that’s a good point and I accept that argument, although not in the case of Syria. I think it’s certainly true in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Afghans are stampeding for the exits as a result of essentially an American protectorate for fifteen years, that’s a poor reflection on Washington and the rest of the West.

But Assad and Syria, I think, is a slightly different case. But what is the best way to deal with that, as failed states multiply across that region and beyond? Do we simply import their populations and add them to ours?

I don’t think so. I’m

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