@max There are paths to long-term residency and especially citizenship in both France and Germany but not everybody qualifies or chose to do it. By definition, if your country is safe, you're not a refugee anymore (and I agree it's crazy to consider that Syria is but the same happened for Iraq and Afghanistan…). Germany has always been more aggressive with this. In France, if your status has been recognized you have a 10-year residence permit. Your status will be reevaluated at the end of these ten years but it also gives you time to qualify for something else.

This answer does not seem to address the question as asked and loses itself in free wheeling commentary and wild speculation.

nor is it obvious that removing those of the refugees that are young, well-integrated and productive will be strictly beneficial to their host countries => yes but there's sleight-of-hand there. If the proposal was to require C1 German knowledge (yes, its hard, but that's not Germany's problem), an income above the German median household income, and zero criminal history, almost nobody would be opposed to the plan. But the current calls are to allow 1m people to stay because there are 5k doctors among them, which is ridiculous.

@AlexanderThe1st ~99% will stay even if every single relative of theirs is forced to leave (obviously wives/kids will be allowed to stay for C1 German speakers with great jobs). Germany >>>> Syria if you're that well integrated.

@xeeka “right to enter” is not a “bit of interpretation” of the Dublin system, it's a major misunderstanding with no basis in law that has become the received wisdom in some circles, mostly to create a false dichotomy between those refugees who would have entered through unspecified “legal means” and the rest, who somehow would not deserve X, Y, or Z.

In actual fact, most refugees cross border through irregular means. What distinguishes them from other migrants is that you cannot easily remove them. That's a basic fact, quite apart from any moral or legal consideration. All arguments around good and bad refugees are just lame excuses to blame refugees for their plight, they are useless to understand the issue.

@JonathanReez Where does the 99% figure come from? That's the funny thing about discussion of qualified migrants, family reunion, etc. people who are otherwise opposed to bureaucracy seem to completely ignore the costs the evaluation process puts on everybody including qualified migrants and employers. The argument is not about 5000 doctors vs. the rest as if you could easily sort the “right” kind of migrant apart, it's about the overall benefits of migration.

Decisions are very individual and I am sure many Syrians of all walks of life would prefer to stay in Germany but why would you assume that they would endure anything? That would seem especially questionable for people who have a path to German citizenship or qualification that could allow them to move to another high-income country.

@Relaxed If you can pass the C1 test in German (which is something not 100% of German-born Germans with no immigrant background could necessarily do) and earn more than the median German does, why would you go back to Syria even if your brothers, uncles, parents, etc, were removed? You'd be able to help them a lot more by staying and sending money abroad than by going back. The costs of vetting are ~$0 for the German government: the refugees should pay 100% of the cost of the tests and income validation. Not interested? Fine, off the Damascus you go!

@Relaxed Germany is in a lucky position where there's at least 500M people interested in moving there, more than enough to cover their immigration needs. There's no reason why they wouldn't run extreme vetting of immigrants and have the immigrants pay for the privilege. The current immigration rules are the worst of both worlds: they deter the very best people while allowing the very worst to stay. The fact that you don't need to pass a C1 language test to get Permanent Residency in Germany is just mind blowing to me

@Relaxed just imagine if Germany mandated these policies since 1960: 100% of their Turkish permanent immigrants/citizens would either be perfectly fluent in German and 100% integrated, causing zero tension with the local population. In the modern day era of globalism you could replace that with a C1 English test as a reasonable alternative, but the bottom line is that every single would-be permanent immigrant must be strictly better than the median existing citizen, or else they should be told to go home after their work contract ends.

@JonathanReez You're mixing up so many unrelated things that it's hard to know where to start, don't think that's what comments are for. And I do not believe for a minute this would have any of the effects you imagine.

Of course, German “immigrant needs” are not limited to qualified people, that's the only reason there were many Turkish migrants originally. They weren't refugees, they came under rules very similar to the ones you imagine (restrictions on family reunion, lose your status if you lose your job, etc.), their children speak German alright and this has not prevented anything.

And you do need to speak German to get permanent residence in Germany, you really think the difference between B1 and C1 is the root of all problems real and imagined? Or that English speakers who speak no German do not experience any tension with the local population?

If you can pass the C1 test in German (which is something not 100% of German-born Germans with no immigrant background could necessarily do) and earn more than the median German does, why would you go back to Syria even if your brothers, uncles, parents, etc, were removed? My points is not that they might go to Syria but if the country begins implementing the kind of policies you imagine, why wouldn't you move to the UK or anywhere really?

Believing that individual migrants personal quality is the main factor in all this is incredibly naive but to use your framework, the more bureaucracy you add, the more people who have choices (because they have a diploma, speak English, etc.) would have reasons to consider alternative.

It's the people you consider undesirable who are ready to suffer all this because they have no alternatives and you cannot practically remove in the first place.

In fact, Germany and other countries already do a version of what you wish with non-refugees and that's one of the reason there are twice as many Syrians and three times as many Ukrainians as there are Indians coming to Germany. It's true that, as others have argued, refugees contribute a lot more in the medium to long term than public discourse but it makes no sense to mix that up with other type of migration.

Refugees are refugees precisely because it's not possible to send them back and in spite of what everybody seems to believe, even wir-schaffen-das Merkel was trying to do it as much as possible in 2015.

Finally, note that I explicitly mentioned costs to qualified migrants and employers. It doesn't matter that you think the government could recoup the costs or that you seem to believe immigrants just exist to serve some narrowly-conceived needs of the native population, it's a huge inefficiency in any case.

@Relaxed Turkish immigrants were fine. The problem is that they were allowed to actually settle in Germany without having proved their full integration into German society. NO LANGUAGE TEST AT ALL was necessary up until the 1990s to become a permanent resident and even today you need a measly B1 to become a citizen which is completely ridiculous.

@Relaxed Yes! It's a huge, huge difference - even B2->C1 is a big jump. I know this for a fact because I've done the B2 test in Czech back in the day and then did the C1 just for fun after a few years in the country and it was quite difficult

And like I said, hundreds of thousands of people became permanent residents without even passing a B1 test

@Relaxed yes, that's why you should find ways to filter out people that adapt to the changing global marketplace. I'd grant German permanent residency to any graduate of the world's top 500 STEM schools who can pass the C1 test in English, for example.

@Relaxed OK, sure, its not realistic to send them back en masse without first revamping the ECHR and the founding EU treaties to clearly say that foreigners have no rights on European soil - which would take a massive effort and require some extreme trigger

but you can at least prevent new people from coming in and settling without proving that they're better than the average German

Just look at India - you could steal all of their top people by simply granting German citizenship to any graduate of an Indian IIT, with no other requirements - these are the top 1% of Indian society and would cause zero problems

same with China - give out passports like candy to top university graduate - steal all their bet people

but no - countries like the UK continue issuing permanent residencies to people who will be a net drain on society and scare away the most talented by asinine requirements

OK, sure, the UK cannot control the "boat people" all that well and they don't have the guts to follow through with the Rwanda plan. But why on Earth did they issue 1m legal visas to new people in 2023, most of which will likely never do much good for the British taxpayer?

heck, you could probably get a much better system by simply doing in-person interviews and having smart people judge each applicant completely subjectively by how rational and educated they seem, but that again would require shutting down the ECHR first because someone would complain that its "racist" after having been rejected, despite this happening because they couldn't act nice and polite to the interviewer for 15 minutes

The smartest immigration system in the world is in the UAE where millions of workers come in and out but nobody is allowed to stay permanently without meeting a relatively high bar or bring in their families, plus there's a very clear understanding that as a foreigner your only right is to pack your bags and GTFO unless you're highly desirable and then the system will be nice to you

The Western countries should be completely machiavellian and have an immigration system designed to drain the rest of the world from talent while preventing the bottom ~95% from settling down in the country.

And, heck, you could also do some nice things while being machiavellian: for example allow any single woman under the age of 35 to immigrate freely without any restrictions, as women are 20x less likely to participate in violent crime than men. Let the Afghani and Syrian women flee the people who want to put a veil on them and lock them down.

@JonathanReez Look, there is so many half-truths and nonsense that I won't spend my time debunking them one by one again. The bottom line is this: integration and everything else around this is a social process, whatever problems there are today is not a function of filtering the right people, that's just not how it works.

If Turkish immigrants were fine and good enough to come it makes no sense empirically and morally to retrospectively blame them for what's happening to the second or third generation. This obsession with selection is not only wrong, it's beside the point.

Incidentally, you seem wholly ignorant of the cultural and political dynamics in Germany. This Silicon-Valley-inspired lust for Indian IT engineers is also driving the policy of the German state but there are large parts of the population who don't much care for brown English speakers. And the stats for ethnic German Spätaussiedler aren't that great either, another way in which this filtering fantasy bears absolutely no relationship with the real issues.

The irony is, modulo a little bit of lip service to the rule of law and some compromise of real-life implementation, what you describe is exactly the policy of Germany and other European countries. Interviews for student or highly qualified visa for example are common and perfectly fine with the ECHR, I don't know where you got the idea they weren't. It doesn't seem to be working particularly well, why do you think than doing even more of the same is the solution?