Refugee Lessons from Europe

by Newt Gingrich: The media debate about Western countries accepting “refugees” has been full of more assertions than facts. Here, then, are a few facts.

Sweden is planning to deport between 60,000 and 80,000 refugees. That would be about 45 percent of the refugees who came to Sweden last year.

This is not a completely new phenomenon. In 2014, Sweden received 81,000 refugees and rejected 56 percent, about 46,000 of them.

In Denmark, the government has drastically cut welfare payments for refugees and run newspaper ads in the Middle East warning that benefits are being shrunk and that people should not come to Denmark. The Danish government has also adopted new rules to seize valuables from refugees to help pay for the cost of their stay in Denmark.

According to Reuters, Austria is also announcing the deportation of 50,000 refugees.

A new study estimates Germany will spend more than 50 billion euros on refugees in 2016 and 2017, according to the Cologne Institute for Economic Research. Some estimates that indicate Germany is likely to spend more on refugees than it does on its military.

According to the BBC, in Cologne, Germany, more than 500 women have filed complaints about attacks by foreign migrants on New Year’s Eve. More than 40 percent of the complaints involved sexual assault, ranging from groping to rape. A crowd of more than 1,000 foreign men had gathered around the train station in Cologne that night and systematically harassed German women.

The American news media and American politicians have not had much to say about the alarming news coming out of European countries regarding refugees from the Middle East. We are witnessing a conspiracy of politically correct silence. Our elites do not want to acknowledge that the wave of refugees brings with it a lot of serious problems.

In Germany, this politically correct silence meant the police and the news media downplayed the New Year’s attacks until the stream of complaints on social media overwhelmed their attempt to hide the truth.

In the Scandinavian countries, there has been a consistent policy of ignoring or minimizing refugee or migrant violence against Swedes.

There is danger that we in the United States are only a few years behind Europe in having our society inundated with people who do not share our customs, understand our values or feel that violence is inappropriate. Americans need to take a careful look at the painful experience of the Europeans before we follow them down that path.

The next time someone tells you the United States has nothing to fear from accepting tens or hundreds of thousands of refugees, ask them to explain what is happening in Europe. Why are so many European nations rejecting refugees?
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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