Early this week, the Antiplanner listened to a presentation in Greece about the Syrian refugee crisis. The presenter noted that almost all members of the European Union had signed the Dublin agreement defining how countries should treat refugees. A major exception, however, was Turkey, which treated people fleeing Syria as potential immigrants rather than refugees. The speaker made it sound as though Turkey was heartless and uncaring about refugee problems.
Arda Akçiçek, a researcher at Istanbul’s Medipol University and activist with the Association for Liberal Thinking, has a very different view: by treating Syrians as immigrants rather than refugees, Turkey is treating them as potential economic contributors rather than likely recipients of welfare.
Some sheer numbers support this viewpoint. Germany has accepted something like 300,000 to 360,000 refugees, more than any other European nation under the Dublin agreement. The country has allocated more than $19 billion to refugees for 2016 alone, or roughly $55,000 per refugee.
