Erik Moberg ©:
12. THE ASYLUM SEEKERS–SUMMARY
After the detailed discussions about the emigration
reasons for the individual countries I will now make a summary and thereby,
hopefully, also make the whole picture clearer. At first, as shown in Table 4,
most of the countries of origin of emigrants have large shares of Muslims in
their populations. In several cases this means that there are, within the
countries, severe conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis, but even when it is not
so, for instance in almost completely Shiite Iran, the Muslim dominance usually
entails repressiveness disliked by many, in particular among the young. But
even if this dominance of Islam is characteristic for most of the countries discussed
here it is not, by itself, in any of the countries, a sufficient reason for
emigration. Some kind of triggering cause has also had to be present, and this
cause has, for different countries, been of different kinds.
Table 4: Percentages of Muslims in the countries
treated
Country |
Muslims in the population, percentage |
Afghanistan |
99.7 |
Iran |
99.4 |
Iraq |
99.0 |
Somalia |
98.5 |
Turkey |
ca 98 |
Pakistan |
96.3 |
Syria |
92.2 |
Bangladesh |
89.6 |
Kosovo |
89.6 |
Guinea |
84.4 |
Albania |
79.9 |
Nigeria |
50.4 |
Eritrea |
36.5 |
Macedonia |
33.3 |
Russia |
11.7 |
Georgia |
9.9 |
Sri Lanka |
8.5 |
Serbia |
3.2 |
I will start with the Arab Spring. This was directly
triggering the emigration stream from just one country, namely Syria. But then
the Arab Spring was also important in another way, namely by leading to fall
and death of Gadaffi and thus to the collapse of the
Libyan state, and thereby to opening of a window in North Africa for migration
from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe.
Another very important triggering cause, relevant in
particular for Afghanistan and Iraq, was the politics of the US, initiated by
George W. Bush, and some other Western countries. In these two countries a very
large number of Western troops, mainly US ones, intervened in 2001 and 2003
respectively. The immediate reason was, in the case of Afghanistan to find and
take Osama-bin laden and in the case of Iraq to find and destroy weapons of
mass destruction–ambitions which failed in both countries. But in addition to
this, and in both countries, the troops were also used for far-reaching efforts
to democratize the countries. Then the US, with its new president Barack Obama,
withdraw most of the troops, prematurely as it seems, and thereby leaving a
chaos, a chaos which triggered the large scale emigration. In the case of
Afghanistan, this chaos also spread to Pakistan, and in Iraq it led to the emergence
of IS.
Then there seems to be still a triggering mechanism, working in some states with large shares of Muslims in their populations, as well as other ones, namely stimulation or contamination. Thus, and when a migration stream from some country passes through another country, some people in this latter country may be inspired to emigrate as well, in particular if they are approached by smugglers or traffickers. This kind of mechanism may explain a lot of the migration from Iran and from the Balkan countries.
At last. The fact that three important triggering mechanisms–that is the Arab Spring, the Western withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and the similar withdrawal from Iraq–occurred almost simultaneously was a mere coincidence. It could as well have been otherwise. But now, being as it was, it certainly contributed to strength of the further triggering mechanism of contamination or stimulation. And thereby I finish my discussion about the "migration streams of people of an extraordinary magnitude, length, complexity and dispersion".
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