The staggering scale of Germany's refugee project

The United States has close to four times the population of Germany and is almost 28 times bigger territorially. In fact, Germany is much closer in size to California than it is to the United States—a bit smaller in terms of land, but about twice as populous, with a larger economy. In terms of GDP per capita, California was ahead of Germany as of 2014.

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So imagine civil wars breaking out in Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Imagine between two and three times as many undocumented immigrants as enter the United States each year all heading into California, asking for asylum.

In such a scenario, California would probably benefit from a federally coordinated approach to the Central American implosion, as well as an effort to disperse the migrants across U.S. states. And that’s in a way what Germany is hoping for now in calling for a common European response to the refugee crisis. There’s more than one reason Merkel thinks the refugee issue “will decide the future of Europe.” Either the European Union will establish a unified system for sharing this burden, or it won’t, in which case efforts to build a more federalist Europe will be dealt another severe blow, on the heels of the euro zone crisis. Although the European Parliament voted 432 to 142 on Thursday in favor of relocating 120,000 asylum-seekers in Greece, Hungary, and Italy across the EU, the vote was non-binding, and the quota plan remains very much hypothetical.

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