The EU's 7.4 billion euro aid package is intellectual dishonesty

Intellectual dishonesty, according to Wikipedia, is dishonesty in thought or communication. This includes advocating for a viewpoint that one knows to be false or misleading, or advocating for something whose veracity one has not bothered to ascertain, or omitting relevant facts that one knows to be essential.

According to the same source, rhetoric is intellectual dishonesty when it is used to reinforce one's own agenda or important beliefs despite evidence to the contrary. This comes to mind repeatedly when I read news related to humanitarian immigration.

Today, it happened when I came across a headline stating, "EU will soon pay Egypt to contain the migration flood – concern over two borders." These borders are the borders with Sudan and Libya, through which people travel through Egypt towards Europe.

Behind this are the human rights treaties signed by European countries, according to which all people in the world have the right to seek asylum if they manage to reach the border. If and when this happens, asylum must be granted whenever there is no evidence of its undesirability.

And that's not all, because after granting asylum, the receiving country must provide various services to the arrivals, from maintenance to healthcare. Instead, they are not obligated to undertake specific duties themselves, such as financing their own lives through work or adopting the language and culture of the receiving country.

In other words, through the international agreements they have signed and their practical measures towards asylum seekers, EU countries have done everything they can to make themselves as attractive as possible to developing country migrants seeking a better standard of living. And at the same time, they intellectually dishonestly spend money to ensure that these people could not present their asylum applications.

Otherwise, this wouldn't matter much, but bribery of transit countries to keep borders closed is costly (in Egypt's case, €7.4 billion by the end of 2027), there are still plenty of arrivals despite the bribery, and they cause exorbitant costs in their destination countries. And most importantly, the intellectually dishonest Union could change its immigration policy by its own decision, so that it would not attract economically motivated migrants who are unable to adapt to society.

Key points here could be 1) transferring the burden of proving the need for asylum to the applicant, 2) limiting positive decisions to those who have personally experienced persecution (and not, for example, due to general chaos in the country of origin), and 3) making maintenance contingent on work, learning the language and culture of the receiving country, and giving up harmful aspects of previous lifestyles. Additionally, it should be ensured that applicants with rejected decisions are either returned to their home country or isolated from the receiving society in other ways.

Previous thoughts on the same topic:
Strong statement or intellectual dishonesty in COP27?
Most useless organisations of our time
Should forbidden questions be answered or not?