Η Ευρώπη θα μπορούσε να λύσει τη μεταναστευτική κρίση - αν ήθελε!

‘How we respond will most likely come down to whether we see these people as refugees in need of protection, or as people who are playing the system for a better deal. But the uncomfortable truth is that they are both.’ Photograph: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

It takes about two hours to burn off your fingerprints. You find a piece of metal pipe, stick it in the fire until the end goes red hot, then rub the tips of your fingers quickly but firmly along the glowing end – and repeat. Such is the body’s ability to repair itself, the damage only lasts a few days; but long enough to make it impossible for border police to enter your details into Eurodac, the European Union’s fingerprint database for asylum seekers.

This technique, described to me recently by a Sudanese refugee who spent five months living rough in Calais last year, was an attempt to dodge the EU’s Dublin regulation, which insists that refugees claim asylum in the first member state they set foot in. It’s just one example of the desperate and self-destructive measures taken by the many thousands of people who come to Europe as refugees, then spend months or years travelling the continent in search of a new home. This week a Guardian reporting team brought many other such experiences to life in a vivid portrait of the Calais camps; the death of a man by the ferry port on Tuesday further underlined the dangers the migrants face.

Yet it often seems as if these stories are as likely to evoke disgust as they are sympathy. These people are living lives that the majority of British residents will find it difficult to imagine. Reading about them might make us more likely to support liberal immigration policies – but then again, it might provoke us todismiss them as “cockroaches”, or a “swarm of people”, as David Cameron didtoday. For every reader who is shocked by Monday’s revelation that HMS Enterprise, sent by Britain to support search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean a month ago, has not yet saved a single life, there could be another who thinks “good, we don’t want any more migrants coming to Europe”.

How we respond will most likely come down to whether we see these people as refugees in need of protection, or as people who are playing the system for a better deal. But the uncomfortable truth is that they are both. The Sudanese I met, for instance, were for the most part refugees from the massacres in Darfur, a conflict that drew the global media’s attention a decade ago but has since been ignored. But by the time they reached Calais, they had been through several European countries where there was no immediate threat to their lives. Having first arrived in Italy or Greece, they had left and were trying to sneak into the UK – some, hedging their bets, were applying for asylum in France at the same time.http://www.theguardian.com/