It is not often that a U.N. agency can legitimately claim the moral high ground. But when it comes to the question of Iraqi refugees living in Europe, the U.N.'s Refugee Agency, or UNHCR, puts more than one European country to shame.
The UNHCR has been warning that efforts to return refugees to Iraq would put many of them in grave danger: Many of them, after all, had individual reasons to flee that went beyond the general violence. But this has given countries like Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands no pause. As this newspaper reported yesterday, all three countries are taking an increasingly hard line on Iraqi refugees who say they fear for their lives if they return to their country.
It's true enough that Iraq is not nearly as dangerous as it was before the Bush Administration began the surge in 2007. Last weekend's elections were the latest sign of improvement in a country that many were ready to give up for lost three years ago. Even so, the haste in Oslo, Stockholm and Amsterdam to ship Iraqis back home carries with it an unsavory whiff of disdain for refugees from a war that many in Europe opposed in the first place.
Rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is one factor in this calculation. In the Netherlands especially, the government is feeling the pressure from Geert Wilders's anti-immigration campaign ahead of elections in June. This, together with a government coalition that recently fell apart over the presence of Dutch troops in Afghanistan, is helping to fuel the drive to deport the Iraqis.
Another factor is the European welfare state, which plays its own role in this potential tragedy. Continental Europe's dismal rate of net new job creation makes it politically necessary to exclude asylum seekers from the job market, lest they be branded as economic migrants out to steal jobs from the locals.
But this policy makes them involuntary wards of the state, driving up the cost of hosting people who might well contribute to the local economy if they were allowed to. This indignity is then compounded by the accusation that they are clinging to refugee status in order to leech off of whatever meager public support they receive while awaiting final disposition of their cases.
Then there are EU rules on asylum, which require applicants to demonstrate that they face danger if they return home. But the circumstances under which refugees have fled their homes often makes the threat difficult to document. No doubt, the threat that drove some of the Iraqi refugees has now receded. But that's little comfort to those who still feel endangered by returning home.
When European countries opened their door to fleeing Iraqis, it was partly as an implicit rebuke to the U.S. and war they opposed. Today, Iraq's progress is something to celebrate. That's a celebration to which Europe can best contribute by looking out for those Iraqis whom they generously welcomed in the first place, and who even now need a place they can still call home.
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