With the Great Recession, the European Debt Crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the past fifteen years have been remarkably difficult for the European Union. In early 2022, the next major challenge emerged: the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the resulting refugee crisis. As of writing, there are currently more than five million Ukrainian refugees in neighbouring European countries. An additional 6.5 million are displaced within Ukraine itself, and as the war progresses, it is possible the situation will worsen, as more and more people cross international borders to find safety. Most deeply affected will be those countries that border Ukraine to the west: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania.
Prior to the invasion, you would have been forgiven for assuming that Eastern European countries would resist a major influx of asylum seekers. After all, in 2015, when the EU was struggling to manage a huge wave of refugees (arriving from primarily Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan), these four countries in particular were hesitant to open their borders. The Polish government, magnanimously, offered to accept just 100 Syrian refugees between 2016 and 2020, hardly an outpouring of support. Not to be outdone, Slovakia offered to take 200, but they had to be Christian, and Romania was willing to accept a few thousand. Hungary’s nationalist government was particularly strict, building a 523 kilometre-long fence to keep migrants out and forcibly removing more than 71,000 asylum seekers who made it into the country anyway. With this historical record, these four countries may have been expected to show a similar unwillingness to grant Ukrainians asylum in 2022.
But this is not what happened. Rather, both counties threw open their doors to those fleeing the Russian advance. In fact, Polish citizens have shown the greatest willingness to host Ukrainian refugees of any country in the EU, including Germany – which hosted more than a million refugees in 2015. Currently, more than half of all Ukrainian refugees (3.5 million) are in Poland, nearly a million are in Romania, and 400,000 are in Slovakia. For its part, Hungary has also shown far more generosity than in 2015 (admittedly, a low bar to clear). Although Hungary did not host a single Syrian, there are now more than 500,000 Ukrainian refugees in the country.
As generous as these four countries have been during the current crisis, it’s easy to see the hypocrisy. Why did Ukrainians receive such openness, while in 2015 millions of Middle Eastern and African refugees aroused little sympathy? Perhaps the most widely discussed explanation is straightforward: it’s an example of racism. According to many journalists and activists, this explains why these Eastern European governments treated refugees so differently in 2015 and in 2022.
I’m going to test this conclusion with values analysis. Within these Eastern European countries, there were very different moral reactions to the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises: tepid in the former and overwhelming in the latter. And when morals are at play, values analysis is the best policy tool we’ve got to understand why and how these reactions arise. So, let’s look at the three main values that were operational in the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises, and discuss all the possible reasons why many Eastern Europeans viewed the situations differently.
Care/harm Value
The care/harm value (i.e. it is right to help people and wrong to hurt them) is one of the major drivers of national refugee policies. Most people, seeing others who are fleeing war and prosecution, feel immediate pangs of empathy that encourage them to help. This is the care/harm value at work.
So, unsurprisingly, the care/harm value was active in the international response to the 2015 refugee crisis. A photo of the drowned three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, lying prone on a beach in Turkey, galvanized international public opinion to increase the intake of Syrian refugees, at least for a time. Donations to the Red Cross exploded, as people rushed to lend aid. Even as far away as Canada, the photo caused the Syrian crisis to become a top election issue. It likely played into Justin Trudeau’s whopping victory, with his pledge to welcome 25,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees, by far the most significant commitment of the three parties that were vying for power in that election. That photo, with all of its moral power, changed policy.
It is important to note, however, that not all victims of violence or oppression will elicit equally strong moral reactions under the care/harm value. All else being equal, the care/harm value is strongest when the subject of our sympathy is considered most vulnerable. Keep in mind, the war in Syria had been happening for nearly five years before the photo of Aylan Kurdi was published, and none of the horrors of that brutal war had captured international attention in quite the same way. It was photographic evidence of the death of a child, a highly vulnerable class of people, that had the greatest impact.
This is an important point to understanding the difference between the responses to the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises. The 2015 crisis was primarily driven by a sudden influx of young, adult men, one of the least vulnerable demographic groups in most people’s eyes. To be clear: I am not trying to suggest that these men were not vulnerable, as many of them were fleeing war, prosecution, and death. But on an emotional level, the plights of young men are less likely to spark a strong care/harm response than those of women, children, and the elderly. It’s just how our emotional hardware is set up. In 2022, by contrast, about 90% of Ukrainian refugees are women and children – largely because the Ukrainian government has prevented fighting-age men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Rightly or wrongly, this group of people is likely to receive more sympathy.
Furthermore, the large influx of young men in 2015 also activated a set of widely held negative moral intuitions. Young men are viewed as a comparatively more dangerous demographic group: if you’re walking home alone at night, are you more likely to feel uneasy when your path is crossed by a young man or a young woman? There is also evidence to back up this bias. Men commit the vast majority of violent crime in every country where data is available. Globally, about 95% of convicted murderers are men. So, it’s no surprise that locals viewed this particular wave of asylum seekers as dangerous, particularly following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and 2015-16 News Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Germany, which both involved asylum seekers. This would have activated the “harm” half of the care/harm value, and many Europeans opposed open borders on public safety grounds.
It should be noted that the 2015 wave of refugees did not turn out to be unsafe at all. In Germany, the country that accepted the most refugees, crime rates barely budged following the influx of a million mostly male asylum seekers. But this was not the perception at the time, and in questions of moral values, perception in everything. People’s reactions are based on their automatic intuitions, and large groups of young men are much more likely to be viewed as menacing. This coloured the discussion of refugee issues in 2015, whether factually accurate or not. It’s therefore predictable that the demographic profiles of the 2015 and 2022 refugee waves generated different moral reactions under the care/harm value.
Fairness/cheating Value
During the 2015 refugee crisis, there were significant violations of the fairness/cheating value (i.e. outcomes should be equitable and/or proportional to contributions) that caused locals to sour on refugees: it was a commonly held view in Europe in 2015 that a large proportion of asylum seekers were actually economic migrants seeking better work opportunities. Economic migrants were almost certainly not the majority of arrivals to the EU in 2015, but they did represent a significant minority. Many people from countries other than Syria arrived, including from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iran, where major conflict was non-existent.
Despite their limited numbers, many Europeans believed that economic migrants were benefitting unfairly from the asylum system, which led to moral outrage. Most people intuitively believe that refugee status should be given only to people who are escaping war and fear for their lives. In fact, it’s written right in the EU’s policies: “The European Union is an area of protection for people fleeing persecution or serious harm in their country of origin.” Consequently, economic migrants were considered to have been playing the system, claiming asylum to circumvent the work permitting process.
Because of the strong moral reaction, economic migrants became a major talking point during the crisis. For example, Hungary’s President Victor Orban, in defending his country’s refusal to accept refugees, claimed that the “overwhelming majority” of asylum seekers were economic migrants, and therefore, national governments (not the EU) should have exclusive power to determine who can come and who cannot. Other Eastern European leaders made similar claims. Even Germans, perhaps the Europeans most accepting refugees in 2015, were upset about the presence of economic migrants in refugee flows – a 2015 poll of Germans found that 75% of respondents agreed that economic migrants should be treated differently than those fleeing violence. As such, the German government worked hard to deport those who had weak claims to persecution. Overall, economic migrants undermined a more open response to the 2015 crisis, as many Europeans, lacking confidence that supposed refugees deserved their status, became more hostile to open borders.
Similar concerns have not reappeared in the context of the Ukraine crisis. Although little data is available on the home country of people fleeing out of Ukraine, it appears that most of them are indeed Ukrainians, who are escaping war almost by definition. Of the non-Ukrainians who have crossed the border, many seem to be foreign students who were studying in Ukraine, and some of them have subsequently returned to their home countries. As a result, unlike during the 2015 refugee crisis, there is no palpable sense in the media that some “undeserving” people are taking advantage of the asylum process purely to improve their economic situation. This helps explain why a continued open-door policy to those fleeing Ukraine enjoys higher levels of public support in Eastern European countries.
Loyalty/betrayal Value
The final value of relevance to understanding the difference between the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises is the loyalty/betrayal value (i.e. people have special moral responsibilities to those in their group). First, let’s dig into how this value functions more deeply. The loyalty/betrayal value is inherently exclusive, meaning that not everyone can be part of the same “in-group.” People don’t have an endless reservoir of loyalty that can apply evenly to all other humans. Some people must get more loyalty than others. That’s just how the value works.
In addition, everyone is a member of several “in-groups”, and these can layer on top of each other. To illustrate this, imagine you had $100 to give away, and there were five equally needy people in front of you. They have the following identities (from your perspective):
- Your sister
- Your best friend
- Your co-worker
- A stranger from your country
- A stranger from a different country
Now, people may disagree about how the $100 should be distributed, but it would be a very extreme position to suggest that all five people should receive an equal share, and an almost indefensible one to suggest that the foreign stranger should receive all the money. Giving more help to a foreign stranger than to your own flesh and blood is, to most people, perverse. That’s the impact of the loyalty/betrayal value. You have different moral responsibilities to each of these individuals, and it’s primarily based on their identities.
Expressed differently, have a look at the diagram below for a rough outline of a set of in-groups that the average person may value. This “loyalty pyramid” shows that people have the most moral responsibilities to the groups at the top – and fewest responsibilities to the groups at the bottom:
If someone’s morality aligned with this pyramid, they would have the highest moral responsibilities to their family, then to their friends, then to members of their nation, then to everyone else. Going back to the $100 example, they would provide the majority of the money to their sister and lesser amounts down the line. The foreign stranger would likely receive little or nothing. Although this is an obvious example of “in-grouping” (which gets a bad rap among left-leaning people), I’d argue that it contains at least a grain of truth for most people.
Loyalty Pyramids
Okay, so we can accept that some amount of in-grouping is natural and morally tolerable. However, some criteria (e.g. family and national ties) may be seen as a more legitimate basis for separating people than others (e.g. race, sex, gender, sexual orientation), which could be considered illegitimate, discriminatory, or worse. How do we distinguish between in-groupings that are healthy and those that are not?
To explore this question, here are three possible loyalty pyramids that some people in the world probably have: the racist pyramid, the international democrat pyramid, and the Europhile pyramid.
Should these be deemed legitimate? About 150 years ago, when racial eugenics was considered “good science”, it would have been easy to find people who explicitly favoured their racial group, so the racist loyalty pyramid would have been fair game. Thankfully, this view is going extinct, so the racist pyramid is no longer publicly acceptable in much of the world (and for good reason). We are on a long road to combatting such racist beliefs; much has been done and much more remains to do, but it is fair to say that open subscription to this loyalty pyramid is on the decline.
What about the international democrat pyramid though? Should it be politically legitimate? I think many people living in the West would be sympathetic to this view, and their governments have historically been more supportive of democratic-leaning victims of oppression. As an example, consider the reaction from Western governments during the Government of China’s suppression of civil society in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. It was far from the most brutal crackdown that was occurring in the world at the time, but it captured the attention of Western governments, in part because Hong Kong was a fellow democracy. The UK, led by a strong anti-immigration Conservative Party, launched an extremely permissive program to grant citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers. Reports from the Cabinet discussions suggested that Ministers held strong moral views on the topic, believing that the UK needed to offer asylum to these people. No doubt, the loyalty/betrayal value played a role in this decision.
And the Europhile pyramid? Alt-right groups often accuse the EU of attempting to promote this loyalty pyramid in order to replace national in-groups with a broader, pan-EU identity. Such a loyalty pyramid is often considered cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and maybe even “woke.” Whether it is desirable is up for debate. Brexiteers and other right-wing populists would sneer at it, while Eurocrats would more likely describe it as utopian. However, it is a possible loyalty pyramid that people could hold, and that’s all I am seeking to prove.
What About the Refugees?
With the inner workings of the loyalty/betrayal value explored, we can turn our attention back to the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises. It’s no secret that the refugees in these two events had significantly different identities across a range of factors. From the perspective of Poles, for example, major differences between Middle Eastern and Ukrainian refugees could include:
- Geography (both Poles and Ukrainians are European; they’re neighbours)
- History (large sections of Ukraine used to be part of Poland; both countries have experienced Russian oppression)
- Political systems (Poland and Ukraine are both democracies)
- Language (Poles and Ukrainians speak Slavic languages)
- Religion (most Poles and Ukrainians are Christian)
- Cultural interchange (more than a million Ukrainians live and work in Poland)
- Ethnicity (both groups are Slavic)
- And, of course, race.
Any number of these identity factors may be driving people’s moral reactions to the flow of Ukrainian refugees, depending on the loyalty pyramid they hold. Most likely, they are all important to different extents. To some people, perhaps it’s the shared history of Russian oppression that prompted a greater outpouring of support for Ukrainian refugees. For others, it could be a belief that fellow Christian Slavs need to protect one another. Even still, for a third group, it could all come down to race.
In fact, let’s review the three possible loyalty pyramids that I described above. People who hold these three pyramids would be expected to have higher moral responsibilities to Ukrainians than to the broadly Middle Eastern and African refugees of 2015. The racist would prefer Ukrainians because they’re usually white, the international democrat because Ukrainians could be perceived as more democratic, and the “woke” Europhile because Ukrainians are members of a European in-group. There are hundreds of other loyalty pyramids that exist that could have similar effects – as well as some that would cause the opposite effect (i.e. cause people to prioritize helping the 2015 refugees over the current group of Ukrainians).
The point is that race is only one of a wide range of identity factors that help explain why the moral reaction under the loyalty/betrayal value was much stronger for Ukrainian refugees than for other asylum seekers. To be clear: not every identity factor is an equally valid or acceptable criterion for privileging one group of people over another. But at the same time, all identity factors are not invalid without question. In-grouping is part of life, and humans are hardwired to do it. It’s pointless to try to create a completely identity-free morality, no matter how egalitarian such an approach would appear.
Instead, the key question should be which in-groupings are legitimate in a just society. Many Western democracies have determined that race is not a just basis for in-grouping, and rightfully so. But what about commitment to democracy? European-ness? Familial relations? Something else? These aren’t questions that have obvious answers.
Conclusion
Values analysis helps explain why the moral reaction in Eastern Europe differed so significantly between the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises. Simply ascribing the difference to racism alone is weak analysis, as people’s moral reactions are complex and varied. No doubt, there are racists in Eastern Europe, and they have a hand in driving refugee policy. But, as I’ve noted on this blog before, finding the lowest possible motivation for a belief does not mean you’ve found the correct one. This point should always be front of mind when discussing sensitive issues like immigration and refugees.