Refugees International

by Tom Kando

 When I was a child, I was a refugee. My parents and I left Hungary shortly after World War Two, when I was seven. My birth country had been the battlefield for the titanic struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Budapest had been pulverized, looking the same as Dresden and Hiroshima. Our family house was left barely standing, its walls pockmarked with bullet holes, with a German Panzer tank stuck in our backyard.

We fled to Paris. For the next decade, we lived like paupers, like rejects. My only ID document was a United Nations card saying that I was “Stateless” (“Apatride”). I belonged to no country. I spent time in an Italian refugee colony, I lived with host families in Switzerland and in the Netherlands. At age nine, I picked fruit on French farms. After I turned eighteen, I took the boat one-way to America. It took the old Liberty ship ten days to transport fifteen hundred emigrants and refugees to the New World. It was just like in the movies. I bunked with eight or nine other men in steerage - a Moroccan, a Swede, a couple of Dutchman, etc. It wasn’t until my 26th birthday, after a wait of eight years, that I became a US citizen, the first time I enjoyed ANY citizenship.


Today, the world’s refugee problem is the worst it has been in memory, at least since the end of World War Two, when dozens of millions were fleeing, for example over three million Germans chased out of Eastern Europe.

There are now over sixty million refugees in the world, most of them - again - displaced by war. In Syria alone, ten million people have had to flee their homes, that’s half the country’s population (see Refugees International). Millions are fleeing from Libya and other parts of Africa. Millions more from Bangladesh, Myanmar and other parts of Asia. These multitudes are impacting Europe and Australia.

Then there are the millions of Latin American migrants and refugees who are impacting North America.

The Western response to this flood has not been warm. Westerners feel very threatened.

● European nativism is growing stronger every year. I have written before about the likes of Geert Wilders in Holland, the Le Pen family in France, the Jobbik movement in Hungary and other European nativists (see Demography is Destiny).

● The people of Australia and the US are also worried about too many “others” moving in. On June 16, Donald Trump said that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re...sending people that have lots of problems, and they're... bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists....” More alarming than the stupidity of a weird tycoon is the fact that millions agree with Trump.

● The Europeans want to block the stream of refugees coming across the Mediterranean. Hungary has taken the lead by sending soldiers to the Serbian border and starting to build an anti-migrant fence/wall there.

● Australia is turning back boatloads of refugees, sending them to various Asian islands and countries. In the US, Republicans have been urging the government for years to deport millions of “illegals” and to shut down the border.

The West’s concerns are threefold:

1. It feels that it is being swamped demographically. In other words, it feels threatened in its white, Caucasian identity. This feeds nativism and racism.

2. It feels that this is an economic burden: Millions of poor people are streaming in, costing the governments a great deal of money.

3. It fears that the newcomers are bringing with them violence and terrorism. We all remember the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the bloody “Charlie Hebdo” incident on January 7, when seventeen people were murdered in France by two Muslim assassins, and the July 1 murder of a San Francisco woman by the illegal Mexican immigrant Francisco Sanchez.

My response to these concerns is as follows:

1. Preserving racial purity is a nonsensical objective. Saving the sacred purity of Hungarian blood is an absurd value. It is pure racism. If Caucasian Europeans are worried about the changing ethnic balance, they have no one to blame but themselves. They are not having enough babies - not in Europe, not in the US. Year after year, Hungary’s population has been declining, as has that of Germany and many other European countries. The US population is only growing because minorities are still having many babies. The white middle class is not replacing itself.

If it is CULTURAL admixture which (white, Christian) westerners fear, this is also a nonsensical fear. While cultures often clash, cultural change and cultural synthesis are to be welcomed, not feared.

There is only one point on which I share this concern: The rabid ISIL-type version of Islam which aims to establish a caliphate, at least in the Middle East, and to bring violence to the West. But in the US, this problem is remote.

2. While immigrants sometimes become an economic burden on a country’s state and its taxpayers, the effect is usually the opposite. Immigrants’ economic contributions exceed their costs. They do the jobs which no one else wants. They are part of the population base needed to sustain the growing retired elderly population. Immigrants are a NECESSITY in the job markets and the economies of Western countries - in Germany, in the US, and elsewhere.

And there is also the incredible brain drain that has fueled science and technology in the West, from Einstein to Werner von Braun, Fermi, Edward Teller and the hundreds of scientists from India, China and elsewhere who have made MIT and Caltech the scientific powerhouses of the world and given America supremacy in space, in computers, and in all other technologies.

To say that immigrants have made a positive contribution to America and the rest of the West doesn’t even get at the truth: The truth is that America IS a nation of immigrants and refugees, in its totality, beginning with the landing of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620.  How is today different from the past? For the US anyway, it’s all been about immigrants. NO ONE in America IS NOT an immigrant or a descendent of one (with the obvious exception of American Indians).

3. Do the newcomers bring with them an inordinate amount of violence and terrorism? The media are grossly exaggerating the importance of events such as “Charlie Hebdo” in Paris and Francisco Sanchez in San Francisco. It is difficult to estimate the contribution to crime made by immigrants. According to one study, “in the United States, the percentage of foreign-born men who are incarcerated (1.6%) is less than the percentage of U.S.-born men who are imprisoned (3.3%).”(Immigrants and Crime). So the Trump-like fear mongering is also nonsense.

Finally, The moral aspect: As a youngster, I was saved by generous Dutchmen and Americans. Since then, nothing has changed. We must treat the new refugees in the same benevolent way as I was treated. Today, I am ashamed to be a Hungarian. Hungary now has the distinction to be the first and only country, so far, to plan to seal and militarize its border in order to stop refugees from entering. They should get along well with Texas and other places where xenophobia is particularly strong when the “other’s” skin color is darker.

Look, I understand that Europe and North America cannot go on forever admitting millions upon millions of migrating refugees. Granted, there is also a potential destabilizing effect. Some immigrants/refugees, dissatisfied with second-class status, become violent (Charlie Hebdo).

But on balance, Europe and North America need to MAXIMIZE the welcoming carpet, not minimize it. It is not only the moral thing to do, it also benefits the West in the long run, as it has done in the past. The vast majority of the newcomers contribute positively rather than negatively, as my family and I have.
© Tom Kando 2015
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