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It most certainly can. While the earth hosts more refugees than ever recorded, and while many refugees need more humanitarian aid and resettlement spaces, and while many host countries need more support, overall, international migration seems to have remained fairly stable for decades at an approximately three per cent share of the world’s growing population. Besides, countries with falling birthrates need more people to cross their borders and stay there. Whether the Afghan men in Serbia walked for 216 or 217 days, we should be so lucky that people so courageous might eventually board a plane headed for Canada.

So if international migration hasn’t increased per capita, and if migrants — including refugees — are necessary for many economies, why do some Western governments insist that it is and that they aren’t? Accountability evasion, I would bet. By repeatedly, relentlessly insisting that migration trends are impossibly overwhelming and that individual migrants range from useless to dangerous, governments can absolve themselves of their responsibility to do more and do better.

If voters believe refugees might sink their ship, they won’t hold their representatives to account for whether and how they bring refugees on board. Their governments don’t have to make asylum-claim processing efficient and humane. They don’t have to give people the employment, health care and language-training opportunities that will help them engage with their new communities. They don’t have to show enough respect for the concept of humanitarian aid that they might refrain from mocking the need for blankets or show enough regard for rescue operations that the names of drowned migrants wouldn’t stretch 100 meters down the corridors of the European Parliament. And they certainly don’t have to make anything-close-to-sufficient resettlement commitments, or implement anything-close-to-responsible resettlement policies, or discuss refugees in terms that preclude words like “bogus” or “swarm,” and or avoid suggesting that war survivors are as good as dead.

But if they acknowledge the realities and possibilities of migration, more governments could serve their countries’ interests and the interests of the people who want to join them. At a waypoint in Serbia, one priest got back some of the bread that he gave. Western democracies stand to gain much more.

Shannon Gormley is a Canadian journalist.