Refugees bring great prosperity and are a great
asset to their adopted countries.

Britain has a proud tradition of welcoming refugees and has
now become a highly successful multicultural country
with no official language where everyone is welcome.
"All the languages of the world are spoken in London"

Therefore Britain is the best place
to base your international business.
Return to Britain from the International allied
border Forward Operating Base and Lounge.

Learn more about the British Welcome from:

Tony Benn and Caroline Lucas - I Love Migrants

Join the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

Click to Visit the International Office of Migration website.

Over time nations are increasingly recognising the
prosperity and happiness that migrants and refugees
bring as Internationalism replaces nationalism.

However, there is stil much work to do. In central
Europe, unfortunately, nationalism has not yet been
defeated and ignorance persists. Official languages
are wrongfully imposed on migrants which causes
difficulties and additional barriers to the social
mobility of the children of migrants. In some places
in central Europe you will still find backward attitudes
such as "you are here so you must speak German" in
the context of children being deprived of educational
recognition of achievements in their
mother tongue language.

Indeed Switzerland has not always provided the welcome
hospitality for refugees that has led to the prosperity
of Switzerland during the post war years. And inded the
inteligent and compassionate Swiss officials often had to
contend with nationalistic opinion. Read this from 1942:

Independent Commission of Experts

Switzerland – Second World War

http://www.uek.ch/en/publikationen1997-2000/fb-e.pdf

124 Chapter 4
4.2.3 Escape help by Swiss officials

On a «brilliantly sunny day in the Jura» in early August 1942, three high-ranking officials of the
EJPD, the director of the customs service, and an official of the Bern cantonal police
department, accompanied by a delegation of border guards, traveled along the border to
occupied France. Their purpose was personally to inspect the locations where increasing
numbers of refugees had been crossing illegally in the past days and weeks. Heinrich Rothmund
described to Federal Councillor von Steiger what the high-ranking officials had seen and heard:
«Early Saturday we drove along the border as far as Les Verrières and visited the most important
checkpoints. We had just left Grandfontaine, when we received a report that five people had arrived
there. Upon returning, we found the wife of a Belgian man already living in Switzerland, with her
child and her mother, as well as a young Belgian with a woman who was allegedly his wife.
Obviously, they were Jews .... Meanwhile a call had come from Boncourt that three families with
children, a total of fifteen persons, had arrived. We drove there and found Polish and Belgian Jews, all
from Brussels .... In both cases, they were less than pleasant company. I thought about instructing the
guards to expel them, since it seemed to me that fifteen people who were able to enter together, should
also be able to find their way back without being caught by the German police. However, I didn’t want
to make a hasty decision, and frankly, I did not have the heart to expel them since there were two cute
children, and I did believe that their lives would have been in danger if I had done so.»142
On the same day he wrote these words, Rothmund decided to close the borders to asylumseekers,
a decision that had fateful consequences for thousands of refugees. There is an
obvious discrepancy between Rothmund’s behavior on the spot and his basic decision not to
accept any more illegal refugees. Although he saw human beings marked by their flight as
«unpleasant company», the presence of «cute children» moved him to accept the Jewish
refugees, although in his opinion they had no right to asylum.143 Torn between the reassuring
assumption that the group could return to Belgium without being discovered by border guards
and police, and the fear that expulsion would plunge the refugees into disaster, Rothmund
made a humane decision, because he could not take responsibility for having sent children into
an uncertain future. But as soon as Rothmund sat at his desk in Bern again, the faces of the
people paled, displaced by «fears of excessive foreignization» and the fear of «excessive Jewish
influence» in Switzerland.144 Refugees became numbers, the dozens arriving now and the
hundreds who might arrive tomorrow.