Thread by @MattCarr55

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp Ok, let's start with Holocaust survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn's famous observation " How you are to the one to whom you owe nothing, that is a a grave test. I always think that the real offenders at the halfway mark of the twentieth century were the bystanders, the ones who did nothing

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp because it didn't affect them directly. I believe that the line our society will take in this matter on how you are to people to whom you owe nothing is a signal. It is a critical signal that we give to our young, and I hope and pray it is a test that we shall not fail."

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp Rabbi Gryn's 'test' first became an international moral/political problem after WW1, when the Soviet Union began stripping Soviet citizens abroad of their citizenship - a policy that was also adopted by the Nazis.

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp In a 'bordered' world where political and civil rights derived from the possession of a passport, these procedures rendered hundreds of thousand of people stateless. They also raised wider questions about how states should respond to people forced to leave their national borders

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp because of war and persecution. Should they be considered permanently 'illegal'? What countries could they belong to? What rights could they have in crossing borders and settling in other countries? What obligations - moral and legal - should states have towards them?

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp In 1922 Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for refugees introduced temporary 'Nansen passports' w/ for example, helped persuade France to accept Russian refugees after WW1. However this was a temporary improvised expedient.

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp Though democratic 20th states recognised the moral obligation to help refugees in principle, in practice they didn't always do it. At the League of Nations Evian conference in 1938, various states refused to accept any more Jewish refugees because they were 'saturated.'

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp This reluctance closed escape routes for Jews seeking to escape the Third Reich and helped trap them when war broke out. After the war, the allies recognised this, and they were also faced with the largest refugee exodus in history in 1945.

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp In 1951 the Geneva Convention on Refugees w/ obligated states to accept refugees who left their countries 'owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.'

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp This was a result of pragmatic political considerations (the stabilisation of Europe/the fact that people were fleeing Soviet occupation), but it was also part of an attempt create a new legal and moral framework that would prevent a repetition of past disasters.

@Nick_Pye @its_iansharp That's why we don't - or shouldn't - ask ' what 'value' refugees bring to 'us.' If you're asking that question, you have already failed Rabbi Gryn's test, and it is very likely that your country has already become a meaner, less generous place.
Hope that helps.