This comment was chosen by Mod TR from the post “Turkey’s Gates To Europe”.  The moderator believes this comment looks at another reason for the flood of refugees into Germany – cheap labour and political useage. There is a lack of concern by the elites/political classes about who they have let into Europe. There are many reasons for this crisis but fundamentally it is the wars perpetrated by the “West” that has allowed the creation of displaced individuals who will be exploited for the gain of this group.

Comment by Purple Library Guy

 

In a broader sense, there is no bigger wheel than the desire to get some cheap labour. The entire point of modern elite-driven political economy is to get cheap labour and make sure it stays that way.

Even the oil wars are ultimately about cheap labour. They weren’t, after all, about getting access to the oil–they already had access to the oil. The point was getting control of the oil, so that it could be wielded as a weapon. And the point of wielding it as a weapon is so that the United States can remain hegemon. But the point for US and international elites of the United States remaining hegemon is so that pro-corporate, anti-labour policies can continue to be enforced worldwide. Oil is mainly one more weapon for enforcing the politics of ensuring that labour is cheap and elites get to rake off the difference, whether directly by producing stuff in sweatshops and selling it for more, or indirectly by ensuring the proles aren’t in a position to object to financial shenanigans like printing tons of money and making sure only financiers can have it, or by indebting them and charging them interest et cetera.

Given that, I think people are both too quick to dismiss the German elite interest in getting cheap labour and too quick to assume that German elites care whether there are a few thugs and/or terrorists among the refugees that cause some short term chaos and hurt, rape or kill a few people. If anything, German elites are probably happy that there are some thugs and terrorists among the refugees.

This is also where right wing cultural analyses are dead wrong: German and other European elites are in no way interested in creating a homogenized society in which the immigrants and existing population blend together and lose their respective cultures. To the contrary. This is also where East European makes his mistake: “I remember how hard it was for even a single qualified individual to get a residential permit to say, Germany” . . . well, yes, of course. A single qualified individual. From a non-demonized group. In short, someone who might expect to come in and make a good wage in a real job on an equal basis with middle class Germans. What use is that to elites? They want immigrants, sure–but they want them impoverished, isolated, scared, and ideally constituting a brand new social division to be exploited. If there were no thugs among them to help create a backlash, elites would have to bring some in. If anything what German elites would really love is to create US blacks: A permanent underemployed underclass which will stay separate and create divisions in the electorate forever, bringing down average wages, swelling the army of hungry poor that would take any crap job, making unionization and working class politics far harder both because of that reserve army willing to accept worse conditions and because of the social division.
For that dream, Angela Merkel’s political career is a very small price to pay, and even some risk of breakthroughs by hard-right parties who don’t threaten white bankers or factory-owners in the first place isn’t a huge deal. If anything, with the current popular dissatisfaction with austerity policies that has tended to build grassroots leftism, elites may actually feel that they benefit from the rise of the hard right because it sucks political energy from the left. They’re quite likely using the populist right, just like they used Hitler–although they may be miscalculating, just like they did with Hitler.

All that analysis aside, I’m not sure I really buy the idea that there’s anything too grand in the acceleration of refugee arrivals. Erdogan is certainly an Islamist, but I doubt he wants to take Vienna. It’s true he may have concluded he can no longer really use the huge camps of refugees for anything . . . but if they’re not useful, that means they’re a cost, and the Turkish economy isn’t doing so great. Not running camps full of gajillions of refugees is cheaper than running those camps. But also, it may just be the rhythm of things . . . Syrians may be avoiding going through Turkey and getting caught in camps because they’ve heard that if you go through Turkey you get caught in camps. Syrian refugees may have stopped in other places in the Middle East a lot at the beginning, like Lebanon, Jordan, even Iraq, but are now moving past them because there’s no room or the welcome has soured. The rate of refugees from other places like Libya, even Yemen, may be accelerating. The “business” of refugee transport may have gotten bigger and better organized and has simply been better able to move people than it was at the beginning. It’s inevitable that there’s a lot of fairly wild speculation about it all because frankly it would take a big expensive investigative effort to really get much of a handle on just how all these people are flowing and why rates of arrival are changing.

One thing that there can be no dispute about though: The bottom line is that ultimately all these refugees are a form of blowback. If the EU were to stop helping the US attack and destabilize these countries and refuse to give them diplomatic cover for such actions, they would ultimately see far fewer refugees.