Amazing

AMAZING!

Posted by Alon Gabbay on Tuesday, 23 September 2014

THE MIGRANT CRISIS: HERE’S WHY IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europes-migrant-crisis-eight-reasons-its-not-what-youthink/article26194675/?click=sf_globe
DOUG SAUNDERS


ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Syrian refugees and migrants along a railway line as they try to cross from Serbia into Hungary near Horgos on Sept. 1, 2015.

European nations are tightening their borders, shutting down trains and ramping up rhetoric to stop a surge of refugees from reaching their shores. But myths about the European tide are misleading policy makers about how bad the crisis is and why it’s happening - and that could have deadly consequences for asylum seekers. Doug Saunders does a reality check

1. MOST REFUGEES NEVER LEAVE THEIR COUNTRIES

To see the images of boats and trucks, you might think that millions of people are pouring out of their war-torn countries into Europe. But most never leave their countries, and only a few move internationally.

There are about 60 million people around the world who have been displaced – that is, forced to leave their homes due to conflict and unable, for the moment, to return. By far the largest group, two-thirds, are “internally displaced persons” – that is, they do not leave their country. The second largest, many millions in size, are those living in camps across the borders of their country – of the four million Syrian refugees and IDPs, 1.9 million are camped in Turkey, 1.1 million in Lebanon, 630,000 in Jordan. These camp refugees do not generally try to come to the West (except a handful who are sponsored by agencies).

By comparison, the total number of Syrians who have sought refuge in the West since 2011 is estimated at just more than 300,000. Likewise, half a million Eritreans are encamped in adjoining African countries; tens of thousands have come to the West.

There are about 15 conflicts around the world that are responsible for all the world’s refugees; only a handful of those conflicts produce any significant numbers of refugees who leave their region and attempt to seek refuge in the West.

LASZLO BALOGH/REUTERS

Migrants face Hungarian police in the main Eastern Railway station in Budapest on Sept. 1, 2015.

2. REFUGEES ARE A RECURRING CRISIS, NOT A CONSTANT ONE

International refugee flows have not been constantly increasing; in fact, they have generally dropped in number over the last several decades, but experience short-lived peaks during major international crises.

After the years that followed the Second World War (which remain the largest refugee crisis in modern history, after tens of millions of Europeans became refugees), the largest refugee peak in the West occurred in the 1990s, when three million fled the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Then, throughout the 2000s, refugee numbers declined to their lowest in history.

The new peak began in 2011, after the Arab revolutions sent people fleeing the ensuing conflicts and the open southern Mediterranean shore allowed refugees to enter Europe from conflicts in places such as Eritrea. That peak abated in 2012-13, then picked up dramatically in 2014-15, when hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled the escalating war there.

The Syrian refugee flood still has not reached the levels of the Balkan flood of the 1990s, although it could do so. But history shows that refugee numbers will sink back to historic lows once the conflict has stabilized.

3. MANY COUNTRIES SEE REFUGEES ONLY DURING CONFLICTS

Refugees tend to come and go. Germany, shown here, is typical of Western countries (though it receives far more refugees than any other). It experienced negligible numbers of refugee claimants during the 2000s, but large spikes in the 1990s and in the post-2011 years.

The 1990 Balkan refugee wave provoked a political crisis unlike any being experienced today: So fearful were Germans of a permanent tide of refugees that they amended their constitution, which had previously guaranteed citizenship to anyone seeking refugee status. It seemed to many that the Balkan wars would last forever, and the millions of refugees would be permanent.

Those worries proved unfounded. About two-thirds of the 1990s refugees returned to Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo; the third who stayed became well-integrated citizens of Germany. All evidence suggests that the Syrian refugees are in a similar situation, with similar long-term intentions.

DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

Hundreds of families, mostly Syrian, walk down train tracks towards the Macedonian border to have their papers processed before crossing on Sept. 2, 2015, in Idomeni, Greece.

Graphic: Chris Inton, Matthew Weber, Vincent Flasseur, Simon Scarr, Gustavo Cabrera and Travis Hartman (sources: European Commission; Eurostat; International Centre for Migration Policy Development; International Organization for Migration; UNHCR)

4. MOST REFUGEES ARRIVE BY LAND, NOT BOAT

Boat migrants make headlines – in part because they often are killed attempting a crossing – but they do not represent the majority of refugees. In Canada and the United States, the number of refugee claimants arriving by sea is negligibly small; almost all arrive at airports.

In Europe this year, walking has become the most popular way of entry. The number of migrants and refugee claimants who enter the 28-country European Union by foot, crossing Turkey, Greece and the Balkans – what is known as the “Western Balkan route” – is now almost as high as all sea passages combined.

MOHAMED BEN KHALIFA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A sunken boat carrying migrants is pulled in to the port in Zuwara, Libya, on Aug. 27, 2015.

5. MOST BOAT PEOPLE AREN’T SYRIAN, AND OFTEN AREN’T REFUGEES

The people who cross the Mediterranean in illegal, dangerous boats are often called “migrants” or “refugees,” but in fact the distinction is often hard to make – and large numbers of them don’t come from countries that would automatically qualify them as a refugee under the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951, which all Western countries subscribe to.

During the first three months of 2015, the nationalities most often encountered in the most popular Mediterranean route (from Libya and Tunisia to Italy and its outlying islands) were Gambian, Senegalese and Somali – none of them countries with active conflicts that would make people fleeing them automatic refugees.

Crossing the Mediterranean in an overpacked boat costs upwards of $3,000 (U.S.) per person, so the most desperate victims of war or poverty have no chance of making the crossing. Many are people seeking a better life for their families, drawing on networks of people from the same region already living in Europe.

But the process of coming to Europe this way – which typically involves a brutal cross-Sahara walk to Libya, followed by months working in exploitative jobs in Tripoli, then at least one attempt at the extremely dangerous sea crossing – often leaves migrants as wounded and traumatized as any war refugee. Likewise, anyone seeking refuge from a conflict, is, naturally, also an economic migrant: They need to find a place with employment and an economy to provide stability for their families.

So to characterize the Mediterranean boat people as simply “refugees” or alternatively as “economic migrants” is misleading. Most of them historically have not been legitimate refugees, but all of them are both victims of traumatic mistreatment and people seeking economic stability.

6. WESTERN COUNTRIES SEE RELATIVELY FEW REFUGEES

Of the countries that receive the most refugees, no European or North American country even makes the top 10. Western countries, even today, are seeing a small and manageable number of refugees. Countries experiencing refugee numbers large enough to strain their resources include Turkey, Lebanon and Pakistan; Turkey has effectively built an entire large city of hundreds of thousands of people, complete with a school system and public utilities, populated entirely with Syrians.

Many refugees are forced to settle in the nearest available country. Those who settle further afield are no less genuine as refugees: It is best when refugees seek not the closest country, but the safest country with a population of people from the same background and an economic need for newcomers.

MATTHIAS SCHRADER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A young migrant girl from Iraq looks into the camera as her family waits for registration outside the main station in Munich, Germany, on Sept. 1, 2015.

7. REFUGEES ARE VERY UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED IN THE WEST

Almost six out of 10 refugees in Europe today are settling in Sweden or Germany – despite the fact that all Western countries are equally obliged to accept refugees. Germany, with 80 million people, receives more than 100,000 refugee claims per year and accepts more than 70,000 refugees per year, or almost half a million since the current crisis began in 2011. Sweden, with fewer than 10 million people, took 234,000 refugee applications between 2010 and 2014, and accepted most.

Map: Volume of asylum claims in Europe and select industrialized countries, 2010-2014

The United States comes second in the Western world, taking about 100,000 asylum applications per year – but its population is four times the size of Germany’s.

Canada, with 35 million people, takes around 10,000 to 14,000 refugees per year, most of them sponsored by Canadian families. Ottawa has pledged to settle 11,300 Syrian refugees, most from persecuted religious minorities, by the end of 2017.

LASZLO BALOGH/REUTERS

Hungarian police watch as Syrian migrants climb under a fence to enter Hungary at the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke, Hungary.

8. TOUGHER POLICING DOESN’T REDUCE NUMBERS, BUT KILLS MORE

Until the end of 2014, the European Union handled the Mediterranean influx through a program known as Mare Nostrum, which attempted to rescue boat people and bring the victims to Europe.

In October, 2014, amid outcry over the Syrian numbers, that program was cancelled, and replaced with a tougher program known as Operation Triton, in which the search-and-rescue vessels and airplanes were largely replaced with border-protection operations.

The results were disquieting: The new program did nothing to reduce the refugee numbers – they remained largely the same in the first months of 2015 as they were under the old program in the first months of 2014.

But it did cause migrant deaths at sea to increase dramatically: From 17 in the first four months of 2014 to 900 in the first four months of 2015. In other words, the death rate was 54 times higher but the migrant flows weren’t deterred. 

What has reduced boat-migrant numbers is the opening of legal channels for trans-Mediterranean migration, as Spain did in the 2000s. Even if only a few hundred people are admitted through legal, visa-driven entry regimes, countries have found that the existence of such programs causes the numbers of illegal migrants to fall to negligible numbers.

Here’s an easy way to create millions of middle class jobs

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-an-easy-way-to-create-millions-of-middle-class-jobs-2015-9?IR=T&


The Fiscal Times

The nation’s highway and infrastructure projects limped along this summer, funded by yet another short-term, patchwork spending bill approved by Congress before the August recess.

The three-month highway spending bill allowed the states to continue projects through the remainder of the summer construction season while lawmakers and the White House consider proposals for at least three more years of funding.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers return to work next week facing urgent demands from state officials and highway advocates.

The call is for a more dependable and long term funding scheme, the Obama administration has begun highlighting the huge economic risks for the nation if government policy falls short of the needs of the transportation system and other infrastructure projects.  

Roughly 14 million people – or one out of every ten American workers—are currently involved in designing, building, operating and overseeing the nation’s transportation, waterways, and energy systems, according to the Brookings Institution.

A new report by the Departments of Transportation, Labor and Education found that transportation related activities alone will add 417,000 net new jobs through 2022, provided federal and state governments make adequate investments.

The Department of Transportation funds and oversees more than $51 billion of surface transportation construction annually, including highways, bridges and other public transportation systems. For every $1 billion expended on this sort of infrastructure, 13,000 jobs will be created over the coming decade, according to the government report.

“In addition to these hundreds of thousands of jobs that will be created, transportation employers across the main subsectors of trucking, transit, air, highway, rail, and maritime will need to hire up to 4.6 million workers – 1.2 times the current transportation workforce – in the next decade, due to the industry’s employment needs that will result from growth, retirements, and turnover,” the report added. “Many of these individuals will require training to meet the skill requirements of transportation employers.”

Flickr/Neil Kremer

As state governments compete with one another to attract more businesses and residents, investment in infrastructure is a vital tool in their arsenals. “Careers in the transportation industry can lift Americans into the middle class or help them stay there, and this report concludes that there will be more job opportunities in the near future,” said Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. 

Under current policies, there will be net transportation job growth in practically every state and region. The cities most likely to benefit from this job expansion include Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Chicago and New York, according to the report. Only two states -- Kentucky and Vermont – are likely to incur small declines because of spending or policy decisions.

Joseph Kane, a senior analyst with Brookings who specializes in metropolitan infrastructure, stressed the importance of these jobs because they pay more competitive wages in contrast to all jobs nationally and they provide as much as 30 percent more in salary to lower-income workers.

He says that these transportation-related jobs fill “a huge void” in an important segment of the workforce.

REUTERS/Jason Redmond
People look on as the machine head of Bertha, the world's largest tunnel-boring machine, is lifted from an access pit for repairs in Seattle, Washington March 30, 2015.

In an interview on Thursday, Kane said that lawmakers, state officials, business groups and other advocates have understandably focused on the problems of a near bankrupt Federal Highway Trust Fund that has repeatedly threatened the cutoff of critical federal funds for highway and bridge projects.

Kane said that some may be overlooking or mistakenly downplaying the importance of funding infrastructure projects across the board that are vital to the country’s long term economic well-being. President Obama has repeatedly warned that the U.S. lags far behind China and other global economic rivals in infrastructure construction, such as energy grids, port facilities, airports and other major projects that enhance a country’s competitive edge in trade.

“There’s been this predominant focus” on highway and bridge projects, he said, particularly in a post-recessionary era when the government engaged in considerable stimulus spending to try to jump-start the economy.

“But what this DOT report and what we at Brookings have emphasized in the past is that the highway trust fund is supporting a lot of those construction jobs, but it’s also important to create and maintain those infrastructure facilities that ultimately are operated by millions of different workers across the country.”

“So it’s not just construction workers you see along the highways, but it is also the truck drivers, the technicians, the engineers – workers across all skill levels—that are involved in these projects,” Kane said.

This story was originally published by  The Fiscal Times.

JALAN SUNYI SEORANG PRESIDEN

https://www.facebook.com/jbaditya/posts/10153515797796380:0
Jim B Aditya

(Tulisan ini saya kembangkan dari komentar saya di status seorang tokoh. Atas komentar itu saya dibilang bodoh dan dituduh ikut senang jika KPK dibubarkan. Saya jawab dalam hati "Saya memang bodoh tapi saya punya imajinasi.")

.

Tak dapat dielakkan memang, kalau kini banyak orang yang mempertanyakan komitmen Presiden Jokowi terhadap pemberantasan korupsi. Mereka membandingkannya dengan mantan Presiden SBY, yang mau turut campur membela pimpinan KPK saat pecah konflik cicak buaya. Sementara Jokowi memilih diam dan terkesan tidak mau ikut campur ketika KPK diserang dan dilemahkan oleh berbagai pihak.

Siapakah yang bersikap lebih bijak? Mantan Presiden SBY-kah? Atau Jokowi?

Sama seperti kecurigaan banyak sahabat, saya pun awalnya berprasangka buruk pada Jokowi. Ikut kecewa dan mengganggap Presiden pilihan rakyat itu sudah melanggar janjinya saat kampanye di pilpres yang lalu. Tapi benarkah Jokowi tidak peduli dengan KPK? Atau benarkah dia tidak peduli dengan pemberantasan korupsi di negeri ini?

Rasanya tuduhan itu kok terlalu terburu-buru. Prasangka sepihak yang sama sekali tak memberi ruang atau cakrawala untuk mengkaji ada apa di balik sikap diamnya Jokowi.

Andai kita mau berpaling sebentar ke belakang, dan memutar ulang kisah perjalanan KPK sejak lembaga itu berdiri hingga kini, mungkin kita bisa memahami sikap Jokowi. Tanpa bermaksud mengecilkan peran KPK dalam pemberantasan korupsi, kehadiran lembaga ini sebetulnya lebih banyak mendatangkan kehebohan daripada memberantas korupsi.

Sejak kasus Antasari, lalu Susno Duadji yang bergulir menjadi konflik cicak buaya. Kemudian kasus Bibit-Chandra, kasus simulator SIM, Novel Basweda, kriminalisasi pimpinan KPK Abraham Samad dan Bambang Widjojanto, dan banyak lagi kejadian yang membuat KPK tak ubahnya seperti ring tinju. Atau tempat berlangsungnya sebuah acara entertainmen yang selalu ramai diliput oleh awak media. Baik media cetak maupun elektronik. Dari dalam dan luar negeri.

Lalu dengan segala kehebohan yang membuat malu nama bangsa di dunia internasional itu, apakah korupsi menjadi berkurang? Tidak. Malahan semakin menjadi-jadi. Semakin kuat lembaga KPK, semakin keras pula perlawanan dari para pesakitan. Pun calon pesakitan, yang saya berani taruhan, masih sangat banyak jumlahnya di republik ini.

Nah, Apakah Jokowi mau ikut terlibat dalam hiruk-pikuk yang melelahkan ini? Hiruk-pikuk yang menguras waktu, uang, tenaga, dan pikiran? Atau dia memilih jalan sunyi? Jalan samurai? Yang mencoba memerangi korupsi dengan caranya sendiri?

Tampaknya nalar Jokowi memilih jalan yang terakhir. Dia lebih suka memerangi korupsi dengan cara mencegah sebelum hal itu terjadi. Dia berkerja. Dia membenahi birokrasi. Dia memangkas pos-pos perizinan. Dia meneruka jalan agar semua tampak lebih jernih dan transparan. Dengan kendali kekuasaan yang kini ada padanya, dia mencoba membasmi korupsi mulai dari akarnya. Bukan dengan cara menangkapinya setelah kejadian, atau setelah cukup barang bukti. Memberantas korupsi jauh lebih efektif, efisien, dan berdampak jangka panjang bila dilakukan lewat membangun sistem pemerintahan yang bersih.

Di sisi lain, dia juga memburu mafia impor berbagai kebutuhan pokok. Dia membabat kanker korupsi yang sudah menahun di pelabuhan. Dan jangan lupa, hanya disaat pemerintahan Jokowi, menteri Susi berani membekukan dan menyita aset lima perusahaan perikanan yang disinyalir melakukan illegal fishing selama puluhan tahun di perairan Indonesia. Dua di antaranya adalah milik Tomy Winata, yang dalam dua periode pemerintahan SBY, dibiarkan bebas mengeruk kekayaan laut kita.

Jadi janganlah terlalu terburu-buru mencap Jokowi tidak berpihak kepada KPK. Dia sendiri sudah menjelma menjadi KPK.