How Gov'ts are Obfuscating the Problems of Asylum, (Mass) Immigration, and Freeloading

An enquiry into how gov't and legacy media lies with both statistics and maps

Not all debates are tied to reality as can be observed, and the ‘discussion™’ about mass immigration and refugees is notoriously infamous. Earlier today, I saw a quite interesting posting over on LinkedIn:

Here’s the rest of Prof. Hein de Haas (Sociology, Social Geography, U of Amsterdam) posting, with my emphases added:

This map suggests that Germans (alongside Austrians) may have good reasons to feel that neigbouring countries are having a free ride on their hospitality. This shows that the ‘refugee crisis’ is essentially a POLITICAL crisis born out of a lack of solidarity between European countries (and, within countries, between regions and municipalities).

Far-right leaders praise Denmark or Hungary for their stringent asylum policies, but what they essentially do is to ‘dump’ the responsibility for reception on neigbouring countries.

The picture would look quite a bit different when you would include hospitality towards Ukrainian refugees (not included in asylum statistics with the exception of Iceland), most of whom settled in Poland and also the Czech Republic (besides, again, Germany).

So, shall we see if this is ‘true™’ or true?

UNHCR on Ukrainian Refugees

It turns out that Prof. de Haas is quite, if partially, correct. According to UNHCR’s website, here’s an overview of refugees taken in (I’m doing a composite listing of countries that took in more than 100K people only, which derives from three listings: neighbouring countries, other European ones*, and Russia/Belarus)

• Russia: 1,227,555

• Germany*: 1,200,435

• Poland: 970,120

• Czech Republic*: 370,980

• United Kingdom*: 248,360

• Spain*: 211,305

• Italy*: 172,820

• Romania: 162,180

• Slovakia: 125,940

• Moldova: 123,185

• Netherlands*: 117,840

• Ireland*: 110,060

We note, in passing, that due to their lower population numbers, the share of refugees taken in by esp. Eastern European countries is massive. Don’t be fooled by the obviously high totals for Russia and Germany.

I’ll delimit myself to a few examples:

• Romania has approx. 19m inhabitants, i.e., we’re talking .85% of their residents are now Ukrainian.

• Slovakia has 5.4m inhabitants, i.e., we’re talking 2.33% of their residents are now Ukrainian.

• Moldova’s 2.4m inhabitants mean that a whopping 5.1% of their residents are now Ukrainian.

If you wish to correlate these numbers with median income levels and the like, you can see that the ‘unsolidaric’ (and, presumably, also ‘unwashed’) Easterners are pushing well above the weight of their wealthier Western European ‘partners™’.

How to ‘massage’ the numbers, Norwegian style

To make matters worse, that’s not even the whole story here. I’m not going to pretend I’ll deliver the entirety here, but there’s yet another confounder: all other immigrants who don’t fall into the categories of ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘Ukrainian refugees’.

I’m quite familiar with the data from Norway, so I’ll use their numbers to illustrate this.

• So far, we learned that there are some 75,010 Ukrainians in Norway (this number comes from the UNHCR’s above-linked website).

Yet, in 2017, the ‘right-wing™’ gov’t of Erna Solberg significantly limited the number of asylum seekers permitted into the country, which was followed by a sharp drop of their numbers.

According to Statistics Norway, however, this ‘dip’ wasn’t really remarkable at-all. The number of immigrants in Norway 2024 is up by a whopping 21.7% from a year earlier.

There were only few more Ukrainians who came since late 2023, and Statistics Norway provides a clue about where else to look for more comprehensive figures: immigration is divided between the Directorate of Immigration (UDI), which processes asylum, immigration, ‘and other’ requests AND the the Directorate of Integration and Diversity (IMDi).

Note that neither is a cabinet-level institution or ministry, which means their heads and doings aren’t subject to the same level of parliamentary oversight than, say, ‘official’ ministries or departments of state.

Statistics Norway also offers this report (2023), from where the below graph was taken (p. 27):

One way to ‘hide’, or least obscure—via categorising immigrants in different categories—is clearly visible once one cross-relates the numbers.

UNHCR tells us there’s approx. 75K Ukrainian refugees in Norway; yet, the above-mentioned 2023 report from Statistics Norway tells us (p. 28) that

Around 30,000 Ukrainians had been granted temporary collective protection by the end the end of the year and the situation continues into 2023. In total, there were 36,800 Ukrainians living in Norway in 2023.

And this is how they massage the numbers: by moving individuals and/or groups from one category to another; these 30K Ukrainians are now no longer in the category of ‘asylum seekers’; they are also now no longer found under the purview of the UDI but have been moved to that of IMDi; this also means that this sleight-of-hand has influenced how Norway is shown in the above-related map by Prof. de Haas.

Of Solidarity and Virtue-Signalling

Speaking of that map, have another look and this time at the yellow-brown countries that display such ‘disgusting™’ and ‘non-solidarity’ behaviour, such as Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Romania whose citizens have taken in such a much larger share of refugees from Ukraine than so-called ‘asylum-seekers’:

As a thought experiment, we may revisit the above-related exemplary numbers from UNHCR:

• Romania has approx. 19m inhabitants, i.e., we’re talking .85% of their residents are now Ukrainian.

• Slovakia has 5.4m inhabitants, i.e., we’re talking 2.33% of their residents are now Ukrainian.

• Moldova’s 2.4m inhabitants mean that a whopping 5.1% of their residents are now Ukrainian.

If, e.g., Germany would have taken in .85% of their resident population, we’d be talking 714,000 Ukrainians (base line: 84m residents in Germany): Germany did more than Romania, relatively speaking.

If Germany would be doing as much as Slovakia, however, Berlin would have to admit close to 2m refugees, relatively speaking.

If Germany would be doing as much as Moldova—which isn’t even shown on the above map—it would have to take in 4,284,000 Ukrainians.

Dear Prof. de Haas, have you bothered to check how the Dutch gov’t comes up here?

According to the UNHCR, the Netherlands took in 117,840 refugees from Ukraine, which corresponds to some .65% of the population (there are some 18.2m residents in the Netherlands). This is significantly less than much poorer Romania, and there’s no need to point to the much larger efforts done by Slovakia and esp. Moldova.

UPDATE: Norway Changed the Legal Status of Some) Ukrainians

I read this literally a little bit after posting: according to the Norwegian Justice Dept., as per state broadcaster NRK,

Norway ends collective protection for six counties in Ukraine, effective immediately, according to a press release from the Ministry of Justice.

Ukrainians who come from areas that the UDI considers safe will no longer be granted collective protection.

Today, this applies to six areas in the west of the country: Lviv, Volyn, Zakarpatska, Ivano Frankivsk, Ternopil, and Rivne.

Around 10% of Ukrainians who have arrived in Norway so far in 2024 come from one of these areas.

So, there you have it. Another legal wrench thrown into the cogwheels; it’ll be quite, well, tricky to continue to uphold the fiction that this cannot be done for (parts of) other countries, such as Syria or Eritrea.

Bottom Lines

Pray tell, which are the countries whose governments and citizens are more or less forthcoming to helping those displaced by war and conflict?

I’m afraid it’s not as easy and clear-cut as most gov’t agencies obscure these numbers by dividing them up across various agencies, categories, and the like.

Even if we do some digging and show how much more ambivalent all of this is, the failure on part of the ‘journos™’ and ‘politicos™’ not to do this kind of ‘homework’ and instead offer anything from lofty, if empty, phrases to virtue-signalling ‘suicidal empathy’ (Gaad Sad) is—nothing short of reckless, dangerous, and highly corrosive.

Asylum seeker numbers isn’t the only metric that matters, and clouding one’s vision by pointing to merely one such category is neither helpful nor illuminating.

All it does is sow further division while the problems remain unaddressed.

Shame on these ‘journos™’ and ‘politicos™’.