YP Letters: Aid to refugee crisis raises moral questions

From: J G Riseley, Harcourt Drive, Harrogate.
A woman holds a placard as a vessel transporting migrants from Greek island of Lesbos arrives to dock in Dikili port, Turkey, on Monday.A woman holds a placard as a vessel transporting migrants from Greek island of Lesbos arrives to dock in Dikili port, Turkey, on Monday.
A woman holds a placard as a vessel transporting migrants from Greek island of Lesbos arrives to dock in Dikili port, Turkey, on Monday.

OXFAM, while commending the UK’s outstanding financial contribution to supporting Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, has condemned our resistance to settling substantial numbers of such refugees here. There is at least some recognition that these are both approaches to the same problem. Isn’t it reasonable then that money for the two strategies should come out of the same pot?

This raises the question of how to share out that finite resource. What would be the ethical basis for our directing higher per capita spending to refugees in the UK than those in Lebanon or Jordan, or maintaining them in less austere conditions?

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The emotional basis is one of narcissism; that the significance of suffering depends upon how visible it is to us. There is a social argument that provision for refugees here must be comparable with local living standards. Yet we are told that supporting migrants at the lower end of the economic spectrum has been the root cause of intense and violent disaffection in France and Belgian. If this is to be avoided by rapidly integrating them across that spectrum of affluence, then the diversion of funds from the great majority kept on survival rations at a distance becomes so damaging as to be morally indefensible.