ArcaMax

What is to be done? Europe's tragic refugee crisis raises the same false dilemma that we often hear in America's immigration debate: Should they help asylum seekers or try to seal the borders? There's a better question: Why not try to do both?

That's the espoused goal of the emergency summit meeting that the EU convened in Brussels last week. But their draft agreement looks stronger in its crackdown on human traffickers than aid to refugee resettlement. Even if the funding for search and rescue operations is doubled, as the EU plans, the program would be only about two-thirds as effective as Italy's discontinued Mare Nostrum.

The EU also would work with African and Middle Eastern governments to control migration flows and set up a pilot resettlement program for 5,000 refugees.

But that's only a fraction of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who are expected. Francois Crepeau, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, has proposed that we -- including the U.S. and his home country of Canada -- think bigger.

Crepeau suggests that we learn from our experience with the larger flood of refugees from the former French colonies of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after communist governments took over in the mid-1970s.

More than 2.5 million Indochinese were resettled, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, most of them in North America and Europe over a 25-year period. Another half-million were repatriated, either voluntarily or involuntarily, back to their home countries.

That's a much larger number than the million new Mediterranean refugees that Crepeau estimates over the next five years. If the burden were evenly distributed, we could resettle asylum seekers and repatriate those who don't qualify in an orderly fashion.

But Europe and, judging by our own immigration stalemate, the United States are experiencing a more economically anxious and even xenophobic moment these days, compared to the days of the Southeast Asia refugee crisis.

Perhaps we should rewrite the Statue of Liberty's poem for these times to something like, "Give me your tired and your poor -- unless we're in an economic slump."

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.