Europe's Folly

Lax Security, Phony IDs Surround Europe’s Migrant Flood

AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris

by John Hayward

Breitbart News

The Associated Press has filed an astounding report on the piles of fake documents appearing as discarded refuse along the migrant route into Europe, as the number of people claiming to be “Syrian” for the purposes of securing asylum status surges exponentially.

A Pakistani identity card in the bushes, a Bangladeshi one in a cornfield. A torn Iraqi driver’s license bearing the photo of a man with a Saddam-style moustache, another one with a scarfed woman displaying a shy smile.

Documents scattered only metres from Serbia’s border with Hungary provide evidence that many of the migrants flooding Europe to escape war or poverty are scrapping their true nationalities and likely assuming new ones, just as they enter the European Union.

Many of those travellers believe that using a fake document — or having none at all — gives them a better of chance of receiving asylum in Germany and other western European states. That’s because the surest route to asylum is to be a refugee from war and not an economic migrant fleeing poverty. That fact has led to a huge influx of people claiming to be Syrian.

Serbian border police say that 90 per cent of those arriving from Macedonia, some 3,000 a day, claim they are Syrian, although they have no documents to prove it. The so-called Balkan corridor for the migrant flight starts in Turkey, then goes through Macedonia and Serbia before entering the European Union in Hungary.

“You can see that something is fishy when most of those who cross into Serbia enter January first as the date of their birth,” said border police officer Miroslav Jovic. “Guess that’s the first date that comes to their mind.”

The fake-passport industry is booming, in tandem with smuggling and other migration-related business opportunities. The BBC reports that German police have seized packages filled with Syrian passports, believed to be inventory destined for thriving fake-document sales operations. An official from the European Union’s border agency described the customers for these passports as “economic migrants.” Europe will be incredibly fortunate if that is all they are.

The twisted logic of open-borders “humanitarianism” makes it acceptable to entice migrants across dangerous land and sea routes, increasing the chances of more children drowning in the Mediterranean, because commissioning military vessels, cruise liners, cargo jets, and trucks to haul all the migrants from Libya and Turkey into Europe would be too obviously absurd.


Perhaps the European leaders presiding over this act of regional suicide should reconsider, tap their taxpayers for a few billion more euros, and set up both safer and more orderly transportation networks. If they send trucks and planes to the Turkish border to pick up Syrian refugees, at least they’ll have a fighting chance of knowing who’s really Syrian.

The Associated Press notes that the actual Syrians mixed into the refugee tide resent those with phony passports trying to cash in on their migration crisis.  For an idea of what a staggering security risk this migrant tide poses, just look towards the oil-rich Gulf states. They are taking zero refugees from nearby Syria, even though these nations are located far more conveniently, are already Islamic, and have so much money to burn that they fritter it away on modifying the local geography for artistic reasons.

And yet, in the words of a Syrian refugee recently arrived in Germany, as quoted by Bloomberg News: “In Europe, I can get treatment for my polio, educate my children, have shelter and live an honorable life. Gulf countries have closed their doors in the face of Syrians.”

Bloomberg News notes that “several Gulf countries have offered extended stays to thousands of Syrians, allowing many to reunite with family members and take jobs,” but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Europe is dealing with, and these arrangements are expressly described as temporary. Some of the oil plutocracies have kicked in money for refugee camps near the conflict zones, but pointedly refuse to take more refugees.

They are worried about changing their “demographic balance” as well as “very worried about security threats from Syrian refugees,” in the words of Royal United Services Institute research fellow Michael Stephens.
The refugees, for their part, know what will happen to them if they try rushing the borders of a rich Islamic monarchy, and how they would be treated even if they survived the attempt, so they’re invading Europe instead.

The Washington Post cites humanitarian groups who observe that Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain have offered zero resettlement spots for Syrian refugees between them, even though several of those nations have put money behind Islamist forces in the Syrian rebellion, helping to create the very bloodbath these refugees are fleeing.

Nevertheless, one Saudi official quoted by Bloomberg claimed, “Europeans turned a blind eye to what was happening in Syria until the crisis reached their shores.”

Media coverage is very, very careful to show photos of families with children, and there certainly are plenty of them, but a huge portion of these “refugees” are military-aged males. The same media that was whining about “carefully-edited videos” during the Planned Parenthood exposés is editing footage of the migrant crisis with the care of any Hollywood production—just as they did when President Obama’s executive orders provoked a migratory crisis into the United States from South America, and citizens were surprised to learn that so many of those helpless little toddlers turned out to be teenagers with suspicious tattoos.

Young men are people too, of course, and there are some very specific incentives for them to flee Syria, as the Assad regime, ISIS, and various rebel factions target them for either conscription or elimination. As the UK Guardian put it, “the choice for young Syrian men is leave, or learn to kill.” But that does not excuse media and politicians from obscuring the true demographics of the migrant wave, or the security risks posed by allowing so many young men across the border so quickly, at a speed that makes verifying their identities nearly impossible.