Migrants and refugees
I am disappointed to see the Guardian adopting the terminology of the BBC – and the conservatives – and referring to the desperate people seeking safety in Europe as “migrants” rather than as “refugees” (21 August). I am a migrant. I travelled by ship from the UK to Germany with a lot of luggage. Even moving from one stable, prosperous country to another was not an easy decision to make. Anyone who leaves their home with next to nothing, crosses hazardous terrain and then climbs into a leaky overfilled inflatable is not just doing so by choice. That person is fleeing for his or her life and seeking refuge. The least we can do is recognise the fact.
Anne Humphreys
Agethorst, Germany
• Why, when asked about the refugee crisis of today, do most British politicians ritually refer to “Britain’s proud tradition of granting refuge to the persecuted from across the sea”, but never think of calling for actions today that will make future generations of Britons equally proud of their forefathers’ exemplary hospitality to the desperate fleeing their home countries in 2015 – or, at least, honouring the ones killed in the process?
H Doerry
Tübingen, Germany
• The world is watching with horror the refugee crisis affecting Europe. There are some countries that invaded Iraq, sent troops to Afghanistan and helped destabilising Libya and Syria in the name of democracy and freedom. Are all these countries helping in the proportion of their previous participation? This is the time for them to step forward.
Juan H Vera
Montreal, Canada
No more babies, please!
Your 28 August front-page story (continued on page 4) entitled Europe needs many more babies to avert a population disaster bemoaned outmigration from parts of Europe, and announced a desperate need for more babies. On page 5 there was a story about Europe’s need to cope with refugees.
Yes, there are hundreds of thousands risking death for the chance to live and work in Europe. Many of them are well-trained technicians and professionals. Neither article referred to the other. Was this juxtaposition provocative irony or sheer gormlessness? Why is there a need for more babies?
Peter Krinks
Waverton, NSW, Australia
• I haven’t read a more deeply misguided article than Europe in need of a baby boom in a long time. Ashifa Kassam and his informants bewail what is actually extremely heartening evidence that in some parts of the world, the human animal is perhaps regaining a sense of its natural limits and acting on it. The only alternative is to continue expanding past what the Earth can sustainably support – a marker we have already passed – and running up an ecological bill that our descendents, not to mention remaining fellow creatures, will have to pay in suffering.
More babies is the problem, not the solution. So is more immigration. The new arrivals soon adopt the energy-hungry lifestyle of the locals, and while those places fill up (leading unavoidably to social fractures and friction) it does nothing to relieve the overpopulation of the countries they have left, since they are quickly replaced.
In any case, what will happen when those who are young now become old? Does Kassam seriously think the process he recommends can continue indefinitely? Humane population reduction, urgently and on a global scale, is the only sane option.
Patrick Curry
London, UK
• Europe’s demographic crisis would look less threatening if we allowed ourselves to consider some unconventional ideas. In my country, Germany, retirement payments are at present linked to and dependent on the incomes of the working population. Roughly a quarter of Germany’s working population are stuck in precarious employment, which means they neither contribute to today’s pensions nor have the means to provide for their own retirement. All of this will exacerbate the future crisis considerably.
In such a situation, I think a sensible approach to the looming demographic crisis should involve a shift from a contributions-based to a tax-based pensions system, which could absorb fluctuations in the population more flexibly and reduce the individual risk of poverty in old age after a life of poorly paid jobs. The German civil servants (the “Beamten”), a sizeable chunk of the working population, have enjoyed the privilege of such a pensions arrangement for a long time, so the idea is hardly revolutionary.
In fact, it could even make sense to detach taxation from incomes when the percentage of working people in the population keeps shrinking. Instead, tax should perhaps be imposed primarily on the consumption of energy and all the other natural resources that we keep wasting as if they were in unlimited supply. I’m sure such a system of taxation would have all kinds of interesting positive side-effects, it could be very simple, make life harder for tax evaders, encourage people to share etc. etc.
I concede that a number of tax collectors and consultants would probably be made redundant but, really, would that be such a bad thing?
Egbert von Steuber
Lingen, Germany
• Worldwide, a human-caused catastrophe is unfolding for biodiversity and climate stability, and the catastrophe is accompanied by increasing pollution. This is affecting humanity’s ability to provide adequately for the expanding global population, increasingly housed in crowded slums and soulless apartments with resulting social instability. In a few places in Europe, population is stabilising and without migration would be falling, but not as fast as it rose in the previous century.
Even where the population is falling, there is neither the economic arrangements nor the resources to fully employ young people wanting to enter the workforce. To respond by calling for birthrate increases demonstrates stupidity and wickedness.
It is stupidity if the authors are so blinded by the growth-at-all- costs mentality that they cannot recognise that capitalist growth is in effect planetary cancer. It is wickedness if the authors hope to gain as investors in that growth: if in effect they are standing on an economic heap and want to move up by making the heap bigger without regard for the social and environmental pressure they are inflicting on the poor people and planet underneath them.
David Kault
Townsville, Queensland, Australia
The decline of handwriting
Simon Jenkins, in his back page piece on the decline of cursive handwriting (28 August), hopes it won’t disappear entirely because, as he suggests, it often “conveys real beauty”. Recently I carefully handprinted a passport application, which, like similarly important documents, I had filled in neatly with a wide-nib fountain pen whose ink is clear and bold, and hence easier to read. When I submitted it in person, I was surprised when I received compliments for my handwriting efforts from not one but two clerks, one of whom even thought I was an artist.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• I work in arguably the last bastion of handwriting – day-to-day hospital care. You learn to recognise a person by their handwriting, especially if it is illegible. Some create two pages of well proportioned, well spaced prose. Others a few centimetres of scrawl, where hard consonant landmarks barely peek above the wavering vowel baseline. Occasionally the same authors scratch out an ink-blotched diagram only Franz Kline could interpret.
Computer note systems I have used are sold as time savers, but they are also less informative, less flexible and less able to transmit the “je ne sais quoi” of medical practice.
Sean Mitchell
Flemington, Victoria, Australia
Briefly
• Florence Evin (Was Sardinia home of Atlantis myth?, 21 August) matter-of-factly locates the Pillars of Hercules as “the strait between Sicily and Tunisia”– which would be convenient for the Sardinia/Atlantis link. But I’ve only ever heard of the Pillars of Hercules corresponding to the Strait of Gibraltar. Has wishful thinking taken hold?
Lee Hartman
Carbondale, Illinois, US
(Editor’s note: The Pillars of Hercules have long been synonymous with the Straits of Gibraltar: the western end of the known world in ancient times. However, for writers such as Plato, who first referred to the Pillars in his dialogue Timaeus in the fourth century BC, the end of the world might well have been east of Gibraltar. As the sites described in Sardinia date from the bronze age – 12th to 16th century BC – the placing of the Pillars between Sicily and Tunisia seems plausible.)
• I was delighted to see Australians making headlines in your recent sports pages (21 August). In a hat-trick of successes, Jason Day led the field to win the 97th US PGA. Our netballers dominated to win their third World Cup in a row, and the Oz women cricketers retained the Ashes in England.
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi, Oi, Oi!
Regrettably, Australia trails miserably behind the rest of the world on issues of climate change, refugees and same-sex marriage.
Carmelo Bazzano
Melbourne, Australia
• Your account of the destruction of the Temple of Bel in Syria’s Palmyra makes depressing reading (4 September). Some years ago my wife Julie and I visited the treasured Palmyran antiquities and found them magnificent. This wanton cultural vandalism is an ominous sign. Once more barbarians beat at the gates of Rome.
Terry Hewton
Adelaide, South Australia
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