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Yeah, I also was quite surprised when I found out that one of my most stridently left-wing friend, a palestine supporter no less, is in favor of work camps for asylum seekers. His logic is simple: War is horrible. ANYTHING is better than war. However, we can't even afford our current asylum scheme due to excessive burden from welfare. Turning away asylum seekers is in his opinion horribly unethical no matter what, and any kind of basic sanity check has an intolerably high false positive rate (for example, anything that requires an ID punishes people who may have lost them while fleeing, while ironically being easier to produce for pure economic immigrants who can organize their move as they want). So the conclusion is straightforward, better to let them live in shitty conditions and force them to work than abandoning them.
It's pretty internally consistent, and not entirely unreasonable imo. As the economy and the social situation in Europe gets worse, I think we will see an increase in this style of tough-minded leftist thought. I don't really trust them to not devolve fully into communist-style totalitarianism, though, so it's not something I'm looking forward to.
What productive work can be given to a camp in a Western country at this point, though? Most of the menial stuff left is either customer service or care work for the elderly/children, neither of which scale particularly well in that format.
Imagine the public reaction to a bunch of Muslim maybe-terrorist maybe-pedophile 19 year old boys running a daycare as the condition of asylum.
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I think cruel "work camps" will also not be most efficient: refugees will do the bare minimum, and learn to hate your country, which may haunt it later even if they're deported once their home country becomes stable (which may never happen anyways).
My impression is that most able-bodied refugees will voluntarily take low-paying jobs. So I'd propose something more modest: ensure welfare is below unskilled labor, allow refugees to accept unskilled labor (AFAIK some countries don't do this and give the refugees welfare), reduce under-the-table jobs by reducing taxes and regulations for over-the-table ones. And most importantly (which may seem out-there, but I think should be obviously part of any program imposed on any group), ask refugees what they want and think would be a good system; obviously if they say "pay us for doing nothing" don't do that, but even that is useful as an indication they're not assimilating.
lol. The sheep asked the wolf what he wanted for dinner.
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Does it actually matter? What vengeance will a stable Syria take?
This reminds of all of the "soft power" talk: there's never really a concrete explanation of the downside. It's one thing if we're talking about people from Hong Kong or China but most refugees don't come from countries whose opinion matters that much, quite frankly.
The Arabs use a bunch of us Third Worlders as human machinery and nothing has ever come of it (speaking from direct experience: their long history as slavers counts for fucking nothing amongst Africans who watch American slavery movies*). China is fucking over the Uighurs and they were defended by Saudi Arabia. Japan takes few migrants and yet everyone loves Akira Toriyama.
The reason the West has to care what people think is because of immigration in the first place. It doesn't matter if Haitians hate the US for deporting their coethnics back home; it is precisely because a bunch of immigrants - and their allies - can vote that it's even a problem in the first place.
If it were true that it would haunt nations, America's flirtation with racist and anti-immigrant leaders like Trump would make a bunch of people go home. It's a sort of guilt round robin where the sort of people prone to guilt (left-wingers) coach the people who will guilt them into folding and then hold that up to their fellow citizens as a justification to do what they wanted to do anyway. The important thing is not the refugees, it's the citizens.
* If I hear about Bilal one more time...
You may be right. But look at Palestine: the nation itself seems to barely affect Israel, but it has garnered support which may shift politics in larger nations.
Well, the worst drop in Israel's approval happened following an attack that was serious so I wouldn't say "barely". But, in any case, that's because Israel has the misfortune of being plopped right amongst the very nations Palestinians can inflame the most and depends on foreign support to survive there. And the foreign support it depends upon is now suspect because of ,in part, Muslim migration into many of those European countries.
The situation is different for America and even for a hypothetical low-migration Europe. There would still be important levers - like the oil embargoes of the past - but we can question if we'd see the same impact.
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I don't perfectly remember the discussion since it was just some talking while simultaneously looking after our respective kids, but I think his intention was something like this: Asylum seekers get direct access to the job market from day one and some modest welfare. As time passes and they don't find work by themselves, they get reduced welfare and increasingly pushed into shitty jobs with shitty pay. Some % will still not start working and at some point they get shuffled into obligatory state organized work with minimal welfare. I told him this is basically work camps, he bit the bullet and said yes, he would support work camps if he gets unlimited asylum rights in return. And then elaborated roughly as I explained, that work camps are better than turning away asylum seekers at the border etc.
The main problem with letting asylum seekers immigrate is that the system is being gamed and most of them are not really asylum seekers. I'm not sure there would even be enough of them to be an issue if it was limited to genuine asylum seekers, so figuring out how to handle asylum seekers misses the point.
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