The Opp case for " heavily restricting the intake of refugees to transfer more funds refugee camps"
Note: The following piece was originally posted as a reply to a debater who asked what the opp case was for "THBT it is more humane and responsible to heavily restrict the intake of refugees to EU countries and transfer more funds to UNHCR projects providing aid to refugees in the geographical neighborhoods of conflict zones"
I guess the standard prop line here is as follows. We only have a fixed amount of money. That money can be used either to provide a lot of services to a few refugees who are granted citizenship and hence healthcare,social security, etc or it can be used to provide a few basic such as food and water services to a far greater number of people in refugee camps. Hence, as money is subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns, it's better to give a lot of people the basics they need to survive (refugee camps) then to give a few people a western standard of living(citizenship).
The main line I would take as Opp would be to contest the grouping of citizenship and aid as the same resource. After all you could plausibly argue that we have/choose to give citizenship to a large number of people annually for economic reasons such as shortages of people willing to work in low paid jobs or to make up for low population growth. Hence, even if it were more efficient to spend money on refugee camps, it does not necessarily follow that we have to restrict the entry of refugees into the EU as we could accept more refugees in place of economic migrants without having to spend any more money than we otherwise would have had to spend anyway. Hence we could increase the number of refugees we accept without in any way reducing the funds available for refugee camps.
That's the basic opp. If you want to have fun you can always run refugee camps are bad (displaced, unemployed people = trouble, free ethnic cleansing) or, for extra fun, that the UNHCR is not a good organization as, due to being an arm of the UN, it is too politicized to be as effective at distributing aid as compared to less political NGO's such as refugee action which would help more people with the same amount of money. (A starting point on this: http://migrationinformation.org/.../unhcr-and-ngos...).
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