but they are also suffering from supra-national problems that are too big for them to handle by themselves, even with the best governance in the world. In the case of Latin-America, I'm obviously referring primarily to the drugs and drug gangs, largely funded by American or European buyers of said drugs, as well as armed in considerable part by American guns. And in countries all over the world, climate change already has a major impact today and will only get more of an impact in the decades to come - how much will depend on how quickly we can reduce emissions, but that the problems will grow bigger is inevitable.

It would be one thing to say 'I don't care about your problems, solve them yourselves and keep your people there' if the US, or European countries, actually had nothing to do with said problems. But since our contribution to the creation of these problems has been rather substantial and undeniable, that's not a very tenable position and certainly a reprehensible one. And that's without even getting into knotty questions of colonialism and neo-colonialism and who bears what historical responsibility for that - simply looking at the direct consequences of our actual greenhouse gas emissions and drug consumption.

That being said, then there's countries like Afghanistan or Eritrea, strongly over-represented among asylum seekers here in Europe, where the primary 'push' factor really just is a tyrannical regime that treats its population almost as badly as North Korea does, except they do allow people to flee. Those are not problems that can be solved or even much improved by the West taking more responsibility for the consequences of its actions. Obviously we've seen what happened when the West tried to 'solve' Afghanistan. So yeah, of course it's complicated.