Governments Give Migrants a Disastrous Mix of Social Welfare and Bureaucracy

On August 27, 2015, seventy-one refugees were discoveredsuffocated in an abandoned, locked transport truck in Austria just across the border with Hungary. These individuals, reported as refugees fleeing from the civil war in Syria, made a trek of over 1,000 miles. This is just a long string in the growing refugee and migration crisis hitting Europe over the past few years, with 2,500 estimated deaths from capsizing ships in the Mediterranean alone, of the nearly half million people crossing into Europe over the course of 2014 – 2015.
The problem is not unique to Europe. Many of these same migrants find their way to Brazil then die through the various jungle crossings attempting to reach the United States. This was true for five migrants from Ghana, an African nation, found dead in the jungles along the Panama-Colombia border This is a terrible loss of life and while most agree that ‘something’ must be done, we have to question first what the underlying cause of this migration is and what that ‘something’ should be.
Underlying Cause of the Migration Much has already been written by the degree of instability caused by foreign war policy and the distorting effects of foreign aid that usually props up corrupt military dictatorships. The more interesting observation of the latest migration crisis is not that it is happening, but where the migrants are headed.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on SEPTEMBER 14, 2015.