Migrants fleeing to Europe. How many have died attempting to make the crossing? Despite nearly daily reports of scores of deaths, the count remains at a level reported many months ago at 2,000. Odd…
It would appear that there is no ‘official record’ or count of the number who have died. Nor would it seem there is an official count of the number that have survived. A loose number of about a quarter million is the going figure of those fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. They travel to Turkey and cross the Mediterranean to Greece. They are then transported to Italy and dispersed throughout Europe.
What happened?
There are 1.6 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. But now Pakistan doesn’t want them. They say, time is up and they want them to go home. But Afghanistan is a mess. So, instead they are fleeing to Europe. The refugees in Iran are also mostly Afghan standing at over a million. Iran doesn’t want them – go home has become the endearing cry. But they can’t go home. There is no home. So they flee to the only place willing to take them – Europe.
Some are peaceable – but others are not. They are war torn and weary. They are hungry and angry. They have lost everything. And then some are ISIS, Al Qaeda, and therein lies an even greater complication.
Just as Afghanistan can no longer be home, neither will Syria, these places are dust, given to the criminals/terrorists to reign over and rule. A modern day Ghengis Khan.
Fleeing to Europe they are greeted with less than hospitable locals. You see, the locals are already consumed in their own financial collapse and bitterness and have little patience for the onslaught of foreigners much less possible terrorists to integrate. They see money that could be spent on their failing economy instead spent on migrants. So where in Europe do they end up? Norway, Switzerland, UK, Germany, Sweden, France and Italy have taken in the largest segment. But the proportion of other EU countries taking in refugees is relatively small.
What happens to these immigrants when they arrive to their ‘host country’?
Germany expects to see 450,000+ immigrants this year alone. They are initially housed in tents, or at sports facilities until they can be properly documented. This process can take from 3 months to a year During which time they can not work and must subsist on government entitlements. How much does that cost? Billions? We don’t know exactly because no one has done a tally for the continent. The UK estimates put the bill at 4 billion euro’s per year just for them.
The US is embroiled in its own immigrant crisis, most are coming from drug ravaged countries, but many are also ISIS. They build sophisticated tunnels, they come in the dark, and we continue to do little to nothing except turn a blind eye and exclaim loudly about the – ‘crisis’. How much does the illegal immigration cost the US? Estimates put the cost at $100 billion per year!
That could certainly build a lot of wall… The border between the US and Mexico is just shy of 2000 miles long. So far the government has spent $1.7 billion to build 653 miles of wall/fencing.
A) we all take for granted it would have been half that amount had the contract not been with the government.
B) if immigrants cost us $100 billion annually and the wall costs conservatively $5 billion, we are still $95 billion in the black the first year alone! It’s a one time cost!
But Washington doesn’t think in mindsets of businessmen, they think in mindsets of bureaucracy. They look at the committees that would have to ‘plan the fence’, the architecture and design committee, the permit committee, the commission committee, and the final planning committee. If they are anything like the EPA, a probable evaluation and report might be issued in 2020 with construction bids still outstanding. Of course, by then the committee’s would have billed taxpayers $100 billion and the contractors would puff up their costs to $25 billion with a five year construction contingency that would fall apart because they never collaborated with the architectural committee and thus find that the drawings required materials to be shipped from China, but in the meantime we would have slapped China with Tariffs and Taxes thereby causing the prices to inflate 150% which would put the project out of budget and require it to go back to the ‘planning committee’ for re-evaluation.
Just a thought…