The Best in German (Social) Engineering

About that migrant crisis, Germany wants the rest of the EU nations to take in their fair share of migrants.

All of the goings on in Europe seem insane to me, who normally takes the realist perspective in international affairs. The proposed solutions just raise more questions.

Just how will these quotas be determined? Is it based on some kind of metric like how much a nation can realistically hold or is it arbitrary amounts? Land size?

Supposing a nation is assigned a certain number of migrants, which migrants will it get? Are they going to shuffle the migrants that have already arrived around or is it new arrivals?

Suppose a migrant wants to stay in Germany but gets assigned in some other country, what's to stop that migrant from just packing up and leaving for his preferred country? Could the EU realistically force migrants to stay put in certain countries to meet a quota?

This is all very interesting. If only something like this happened when I was still in my Political Science days. Globalization was the trend back then and it got pretty stale.

We shall see.

A Human Wave

The migrant crisis in Europe is intriguing. The news stories are all focused on the scale of the human catastrophe; people fleeing and children drowning.

It's surprising that the Europeans are rather tolerant of all of this. You'd think that such a large number of people moving about through the continent would be a huge cause for concern but perhaps the use of force would look bad on TV. Nobody is talking of the consequences. It's naive to think that an event like this won't have grave socio-economic consequences in the future. 

Europe can commit suicide if it wants but it will be very interesting to watch it all unfold.