Professor David Ingleby, presented the MIPEX health results and analysis in the Symposium "Flucht und Migration: Herausforderungen für Gesundheitsversorgung und -forschung" in Berlin on the 2nd December 2015.
For a more comprehensive understanding of his analysis, watch Dr. Ingleby's remarks at the “Integration policies: Who benefits?” Final Event on the 30th June in Brussels (Dr. Ingleby's intervention begins at 1:22:00).
In the Berlin symposium Dr Ingleby presented his paper The refugee crisis: a challenge to health systems.
Summary of the paper:
Current panic about ‘the refugee crisis’ tends to overlook recent history. In 1992, as a result of violent conflicts in the Balkans, the EU also experienced a drastic rise in asylum applications, which it managed to deal with without political, cultural or financial collapse. The current influx via Greece has been building up since 2011, but only now are serious measures being taken to deal with it. Unfortunately, most of the solutions proposed are either purely rhetorical, unworkable, or illegal.
The popularity of Germany as a destination country is structural: it owes little to anything that Chancellor Merkel might have said in August 2015. It is asylum seekers themselves who choose their destination country, and international law prevents governments from denying them the right to claim asylum on arrival. In that sense, borders cannot be ‘sealed’ – though reaching borders can be, and is, systematically obstructed.
Numbers of asylum applications can be predicted with reasonable accuracy from a country’s population size and wealth. There seems to be a balance between the demand for asylum and a country’s capacity to provide it. Statistical analysis can reveal which countries are receiving fewer or more asylum seekers than would be expected from their population size and wealth.
Concerns about health relate not only to asylum seekers, but also to the large number of undocumented migrants that will result from the rejection of many asylum claims. The MIPEX results show that as long as Germany maintains its exclusionist policies, it cannot hope to deal adequately with the health needs of all these newcomers. The same applies in most EU countries to undocumented migrants.
