Europe’s Refugee Crisis: What Readers Want to Know

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/world/europe/europe-refugee-crisis-questions.html

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The New York Times has been asking readers for their questions about the refugee crisis in Europe. We have already answered some questions about asylum seekers’ rights and the ability of European countries to welcome migrants. Here are some more responses to your questions, and a way for you to ask new ones.

Q. What is happening to the women being left behind by all the men heading to Europe? — Sara Hobler, Buffalo, N.Y.

A. Many of the more than a half-million migrants and refugees who have arrived in Europe this year are young men. Their mass exodus from countries like Syria, homeland to more than half of those fleeing, poses great challenges.

Many Syrians have strong, extended family networks, and it is common for women whose husbands or sons have left for Europe to get support from other relatives. Those families, too, have lost the incomes of the men who have left or been killed in the war, and they often struggle to make ends meet.

I did meet some married men who were traveling to Europe with their families among the waves of young, single males escaping war, conscription and other experiences that have left them with physical and emotional scars. All the married men I met who were traveling alone said they planned to send for their wives, and children, if they had any, as soon as they got settled in Europe. Many asylum seekers had researched the family reunification policies of different European countries and planned to seek asylum in the countries most likely to allow them to bring over their spouses.

— BEN HUBBARD

Q. Why does everybody always say that the economy will benefit from a big stream of migrants, while there is in fact already a very high unemployment rate of well-educated people? — Reiner, Brussels, Belgium

A. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, included the benefits of migration for the European economy in his State of the Union speech to the European Parliament last month. He described Europe as “an aging continent in demographic decline” in need of “talent,” and said migration could be “a well-managed resource.”

There’s no doubt that overall unemployment across the European Union remains stubbornly high at nearly 10 percent. The rate among those with tertiary levels of education is lower: 6.6 percent in the 19 eurozone countries and 5.5 percent across the European Union, according to officials at Eurostat, the bloc’s statistical office.

Even so, Mr. Juncker’s assertion does seem to support the views of some economists and migration experts who argue that migration can help drive economic activity, growth and employment in some countries.

Providing education and skills will be crucial, those experts say.

In a policy paper in May 2014, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental think tank in Paris, said that getting migrants jobs would be the most important factor in determining how much they would pay into, or receive from, the state.

“Raising immigrants’ employment rate to that of the native-born would entail substantial fiscal gains in many European O.E.C.D. countries, in particular in Belgium, France and Sweden,” the paper said.

Few empirical studies have tried, however, to estimate the overall impact of net migration on economic growth, in part because of a shortage of comparative data on international migration by skill levels.

Germany, with an overall jobless rate below 5 percent (and a jobless rate of 2.3 percent for those with tertiary education), should be able to integrate new arrivals into its work force as long as those people lacking qualifications and skills receive sufficient training, according to Matthias Busse, a researcher at the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels.

But the long-term effects on Europe’s economy are less clear because of a range of variables like skills, success at integration and the average age of immigrants and asylum seekers.

“Young migrants will profit from our education system and they still have a full work life to contribute to the welfare state,” Mr. Busse said. He added that “upskilling adult arrivals may also contribute, but the net impact is more difficult to assess.”

— JAMES KANTER

Q. For how long is Europe willing to take in refugees, and how many? Is this an open-ended commitment that could last until the population of the Middle East and Africa has migrated to Europe? — Sandy Belkin, Bellmore, N.Y.

A. The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which for many years applied only to Europe, says that signatories to the convention have the obligation to take in all those fleeing a clear danger of persecution or threat to their lives from war or other dangers.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has said repeatedly that there is no limit on how many refugees Europe could or should absorb — at least in theory. But as Ms. Merkel and certainly some of her critics have also said, there is a practical limit to the number of people that can be effectively absorbed over a short period.

The entire population of the Middle East or Africa could not emigrate to Europe. But large numbers of people are expected to be on the move as long as the war in Syria persists. And there are other causes of the mass migration we’re witnessing. In August, the United Nations predicted that Africa would add 1.3 billion people by 2050. That is about the current population of China. Economic growth is also predicted for Africa, but it’s uncertain that this growth will be sufficient to support the continent’s inhabitants, forcing many to move elsewhere in search of work.

Europe, by contrast, is getting older. Germany is among the European countries with a rapidly aging population, and Ms. Merkel has long noted that Europeans cannot expect to retain their current living standards if the Continent has just 7 percent of the world’s population but accounts for 50 percent of global expenditures on welfare.

— ALISON SMALE