Middle East Migrants: Stay in Your Culture Zone

The passengers of Reach 871, a U.S. Air Force C-17 flying from Kabul to Qatar on Aug. 15, 2021, carrying 823 Afghans.

As the prospect of great numbers of Afghans fleeing their country – five million have been mentioned – comes into focus, a near-universal assumption exists that the West – meaning here Western and Central Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – should be their ultimate destination. But does this make sense?

From the Afghan perspective, living in Christian-heritage, secular societies offends many of their mores and creates severe stresses. Their general lack of skills appropriate to modern economies holds them back. Finding host populations prejudiced against them, they complain tearfully about structural racism, xenophobia, and “Islamophobia.” They point to hate incidents and even murderous attacks, such as those in New York City, North Carolina, Quebec, New Zealand, and beyond.

From the Western perspective, the open invitation of 2015-16 by the leaders of Germany and Sweden, allowing into their countries an estimated 1 million and 100,000 unvetted migrants, respectively, from Syria and elsewhere, turned out badly. Westerners watched helplessly as Middle Easterners arrived by plane, boat, train, bus, car, and foot through the beaches, fields, and railroad stations of Europe. They then witnessed those large numbers bring disease, resist assimilation, impose Islamic laws, engage in crime wave, perpetrate the Cologne taharrush (mass sexual assault), and execute jihadi attacks in Paris and Brussels. They uneasily accepted that their societies turned into quasi-surveillance states.

These problems point to the need radically to rethink what is best for both migrants in distress and Westerners. I shall argue that the former generally should remain within their own cultural zone. That is where they most readily fit in – where they can stay truest to their traditions, best find economic roles, most easily return home, and least disrupt the host society. Thus, East Asians refugees, asylum seekers, and illegals should be directed to resettle in East Asia, South Asians in South Asia, Middle Easterners in the Middle East, Africans in Africa, Latin Americans in Latin America, and Westerners in the West. This can mean internal migration, as in Syria, or moving to nearby countries.

Focusing on the Middle East, this pattern, to be sure, already does exist: most notably, some 2.2 million Afghan refugees live in Pakistan and Iran, victims of the last Taliban takeover in 1996; and some 5.6 million Syrian refugees live in five nearby countries.

To exclude illegal migrants, especially from Afghanistan, Turkey’s government is building a 295 km-long wall along its border with Iran.

But, with the slight exception of Turkey, where some 4 percent of Syrian refugees are estimated to have received Turkish citizenship, these are emergency situations, where refugees are maintained in misery, either in holding pens or urban squalor, not allowed to get too comfortable but urged either to return home or move on to the West. This attitude prevails even in Turkey, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan revealed when he asserted that “Turkey has no duty, responsibility or obligation to be Europe’s refugee warehouse.”

This reluctance is nothing new; most Arab states (and Lebanon especially) have for over seventy years done their best to make Palestinians feel unwelcome, hoping thereby to encourage them eventually to leave.

Such brutal and negligent attitudes are unacceptable. A fundamental shift must take place. International organizations must ramp up expectations and Western governments must apply pressure. Middle Easterners need to take responsibility for their brethren.

Once they do, finding suitable destinations will be particularly easy in the Middle Eastern case. The six Gulf Cooperation Council states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are nearby and wealthy, they have a nearly insatiable need for labor, and they dispose of vast empty expanses; indeed, so attractive are they as a destination, foreigners already constitute half their population.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the largest of them in land size, population, and economy, in particular offers many attractions for Sunni Muslims. For starters, the KSA has 100,000 high-quality, empty fiberglass tents that can house about 3 million people on an emergency basis in Mina, just east of Mecca. Fireproof and air-conditioned, complete with toilets and kitchens, this unique resource is occupied a mere five days a year by pilgrims on the hajj.

Living in Saudi Arabia means not enduring frozen climes (as in Sweden) or learning difficult languages spoken by few (such as Hungarian). It is obviously much more convenient to repatriate from the KSA to Afghanistan than from, say, California.

Sharing deep cultural ties with their Saudi brothers and sisters, many Afghans will find KSA’s severe strictures culturally more congenial than the West. They can rejoice in a law code that (unlike Ireland) permits polygamy, that (unlike Britain) allows child marriages, that (unlike France) permits burkinis and allows the advocacy of wife-beating, that (unlike the United States) permits slaveholding and female genital mutilation, while going easy on honor killing, and that (unlike all Western countries) engages in official beheadings.

Conversely, consider some of the haram (forbidden) elements in the West that Afghan migrants avoid by living in Saudi Arabia:

No danger of running into a gay pride parade, such as this one, in Saudi Arabia.

• Pet dogs (70 million of them alone in the United States), seen as unclean.
• A pork-infused cuisine and an alcohol-soaked social life.
• State-sponsored lotteries, Las Vegas-style gambling emporia, and obligatory insurance schemes.
• New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and other holidays offensive to Muslim sensibilities.
• Interest payments on loans.
• Women in revealing clothes, ballet, swimsuit beauty contests, single women living alone, mixed bathing, topless bathing, dating, gentlemen’s clubs, and lawful prostitution.
• Gay bars, gay-pride parades, and gay marriage.
• A drug subculture and lax attitudes toward hallucinogens, with some drugs legal in certain jurisdictions.
• The public expression of anti-Islamic sentiments, blasphemous novels, anti-Koran politicians, organizations of ex-Muslims, and a pastor who publicly burns Korans.

Wealthy and sparsely populated Arab states can most easily settle migrants but other Middle Eastern states, such as Egypt and Algeria, also have this capacity. Accordingly, governments, international organizations, and refugee organizations should stop focusing exclusively on the West as a destination and turn instead to nearby countries to take in, house, employ, and enfranchise their brethren in need.

This listing of cultural features has another implication: Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Yazidis, Baha’is, et al. find themselves increasingly unwelcome in the Middle East and should be welcomed in the West.

Focusing on Christians, the region’s largest religious minority: European colonialism elevated the status of regional Christians but in the long term created an anger against them that turned into a policy of eliminationism, of pushing them out of their homes and off to the West. This and other religious minorities should be welcomed.

Some Western governments have begun to take notice. As the Syrian crisis worsened in 2015, Poland‘s Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz announced that her government would accept just 60 Christian Syrian refugee families, explaining that “Christians who are being persecuted in a barbaric fashion in Syria deserve Christian countries like Poland to act fast to help them,” implying Muslims do not deserve this help. Similarly, the Slovak government accepted 200 Christian Syrian refugees, explaining that “In Slovakia, we don’t have mosques.” Therefore, an Interior Ministry spokesman went on, Muslim migrants would not feel at home there. Hungarian authorities quietly gave sanctuary to about 1,000 Egyptian Christians over a two-year period even as they excluded Muslims.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (Republican of Texas) also favors taking in Christian but not Muslim refugees. CNN reports that he “thinks that Muslims fleeing the Syrian civil war should be repopulated to other Muslim countries. But the Christian population, he believes, has nowhere else to go, and Cruz batted away concerns by telling reporters ... that Christians posed ‘no meaningful risk’ to national security.”

Europeans are increasingly thinking in terms of culture zones.

In 2014, Denmark’s largest opposition party, Venstre, called for a distinction between “a Christian American or Swede” on the one hand and “a Muslim Somali or Pakistani” on the other due to the “big difference in the[ir] ability and will to integrate.” It went on:

In 2015, the ruling VVD party in the Netherlands came out against accepting non-European refugees. Also in early 2015, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party responded to the Charlie Hebdo jihadi attack by calling for strict policies to restrict immigration from outside Europe and noting that, compared to other European countries, there are few “people with cultural backgrounds different from ours” in Hungary. Austria‘s then-foreign minister and now chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, in 2017 suggested the country of Georgia as a possible location for refugee camps, causing a stir there and in the Kremlin.

Donald Trump in September 2017 endorsed refugees staying in their own region:

The location of EU-funded projects in Turkey to encourage illegal migrants to stay in Turkey.

The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan on Aug. 15 prompted many calls from European politicians, especially in Germany, for Afghan migrants staying in their region. Germans seemed to remember 2015-16 with a shudder, according to quotes collected by Frederik Schindler in Die Welt:

• Chancellor Angela Merkel: Germany should do everything to help Afghanistan’s neighboring countries “support the refugees.”
• CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak: “We will not be able to solve the Afghanistan issue through migration to Germany.”
• Thorsten Frei (CDU), vice-head of the Union parliamentary group: “Germany and the international community must do everything possible to support the neighboring states in accepting them and to ensure that refugees are supplied close to home in the region.” In 2015, too few refugee camps in Syria’s neighboring countries forced people to make their way to Europe and “A similar development must not be repeated.”
• Union candidate for chancellor Armin Laschet: “This time we have to provide humanitarian aid in the region, in the countries of origin, in good time. ... The focus must be on providing humanitarian aid on site.”
• SPD candidate for chancellor Olaf Scholz: The goal is primarily to support Afghanistan’s neighbors and not to repeat the mistake of again ignoring these countries.
• A FDP position paper: In talks with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the European Union should establish safe escape corridors for Afghan refugees; plus, Berlin should engage in in-depth discussions with Ankara about hosting other refugees.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders called for Afghans to be kept “in the region. Why don’t other Muslim countries provide safe shelter?” An official Dutch government document asks “Why are asylum seekers not kept in the region?” and replies “That is what the Dutch government and the European Union (EU) want. But it takes time to organize that. ... Reinforcing reception facilities in the region must be combined with the possibility of resettling refugees to Europe.”

Santiago Abascal, head of the Vox party in Spain: “Afghans fleeing Taliban terror must be welcomed into neighboring Muslim countries.”

The Austrian government called for an EU plan to deport illegal immigrants to future “deportation centers in the region around Afghanistan.” Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer added that “Those who need protection must receive it as close as possible to their country of origin.” Santiago Abascal of the Vox party in Spain stated that “Afghans fleeing Taliban terror must be welcomed into neighboring Muslim countries.” The Greek migration minister, Notis Mitarachi, stated that he considers Turkey is a safe place for Afghans to remain. President Emmanuel Macron of France insisted that “Europe alone cannot shoulder the consequences” of developments in Afghanistan.

Six EU governments jointly called for increased cooperation with Pakistan and Iran so that Afghans remain in those countries. More broadly, EU interior ministers commissioned the EU Commission to draw up a plan by which neighboring and transit states receive EU funding on condition that they agree not just to accept Afghan refugees but, Turkish style, institute steps to prevent them from leaving the region. According to Christoph B. Schiltz in Die Welt, those neighbors include Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

The trouble is, not one of Afghanistan’s six neighbors shows any willingness to take in Afghan refugees. From an article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw:

The West remains the destination of choice for much of the world’s refugee and economic migrant populations alike; yet this facile assumption needs to be questioned.

From the migrant point of view, more familiar linguistic, climatic, economic, social, and religious circumstances will permit them to flourish. The unthinking drive to reach the most advanced Christian-majority countries makes especially little sense for Muslim migrants, who should head instead to countries geographically closer and culturally more akin, where they can better find employment and begin new lives.

From the host country point of view, the queue of difficult immigrants has no visible end: Syrians yesterday; Afghans today; Iranians, Yemenis, Tunisians tomorrow; and sub-Saharan Africans the day after. In all, the numbers looking to emigrate to the West could potentially surpass the 1,150 million population of the West. If Western civilization is to survive, migrants must mainly remain in their culture zones.

For the good of all, directing distressed migrants to their own culture zones needs urgently to start.