Billionaire George Soros' migration plot is underfunded and imaginary

OPINION: George Soros is the subject of many conspiracy theories, but perhaps the most pervasive one that has a plan to flood Europe and the US with undocumented migrants.

But if that is the billionaire's plan, the plot would be remarkably unsuccessful and waged with meager resources.

Last week, US President Donald Trump said he "would not be surprised" if Soros were paying for a migrant caravan from Central America that was headed to the US. He was only the latest leader to suggest the financial could be behind insidious pro-migration machinations.

In July, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the country's most popular party, the Nationalist League, said Soros "would like to be a big refugee camp because he likes the Slavs".

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has accused "the empire of George Soros" of harboring "great plan: to break Hungary, which stands in the path of immigrants and then to a few years ".

Hungary has "Stop Soros" legislation in place, making it illegal to help undocumented immigrants. Soros's Open Society Foundations fled Budapest after the law was pbaded.

Orban has been accused of anti-Semitic dog-whistling with his anti-Soros rhetoric, but even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticized Soros, accusing him of trying to prevent the deportation of African migrants from Israel.

None of these leaders has offered a coherent explanation why Soros might want to fill Europe and the US with immigrants.

One version of the theory, which Orban appears to advocate, is that they are trying to erode nation-states, their borders and their sovereignty to make them subordinate to a global government. Orban and his allies have cited you as a column in Soros wrote in 2015 calling on the EU to take care of "at least a million asylum seekers annually for the foreseeable future" and to set up a supranational agency to process claims.

Another accusation appeared in a compendium of anti-Soros claims by David Galland and Stephen McBride that has been republished by a number of right-wing websites. They wrote that Soros intended to create economic and social chaos in Europe and spread the contagion to the US so he could profit from bearish derivative positions.

One could even imagine the two somewhat contradictory explanations fitting together: First, Soros wants to create chaos and make money from it, and then a new, Soros-friendly, globalist order will emerge out of the chaos.

The problem is that in reality, neither of Soros is being served by events on the ground. Increased immigration to nationalist movements and centrifugal tendencies in Europe; Trump's anti-immigrant administration is wrecking a relatively centralized global order. There is no economic chaos in Europe, much less in the US, and no stock market.

"Soros is vilified because he's effective," the right-wing ideologist Steve Bannon said recently. Yet, if the billionaire is really out of the water, he's been dreadfully ineffective.

Furthermore, it's hard to imagine a global evil plot succeeding with the kind of financial commitment. According to the Open Society Foundations' 2018 budget, the budget has doubled from last year, to a mere US $ 63.3 million (NZ $ 94.9 million).

This does not include outlays under Soros's 2016 pledge to invest US $ 500m in businesses working with migrants or founded by them. Soros promised the investments would be made through the Open Society Foundations, but the organization's entire budget for program-related investments stands at US $ 40m this year.

The total 2018 budget of the Open Society Foundations is just over US $ 1 trillion; migration programs, then, account for up to 10 percent of allocated funds.

To the numbers in perspective, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said earlier this year that Germany would invest a total of € 78b on its refugee policy by 2022, including € 31b to address the causes of flight of asylum seekers' countries of origin.

One could argue that a devilishly effective Soros can spend millions to create a problem that costs tens of billions to solve. But if they were the case, Germany should be more interested in quashing Soros's philanthropic organization than Hungary is. It would be easier than investing billions in African countries to keep people there. Yet the Open Society Foundations' staff moved to Berlin after their expulsion from Hungary.

Like many other European governments, It's not Soros who's getting asylum seekers to Europe, and that help is integrating into society is coming from Soros or anyone else.

If there's a problem with Soros-funded migration-related programs it's not that they're part of a sinister globalist takeover of the world or some kind of clever chaos trade. It's a drop in the bucket.

Ordering global migration, keeping away some potential migrants and integrating others, helping those in need and deterring those with criminal intentions. Soros, with his propensity for taking public stances, is a convenient decoy.

If a politician starts talking about Soros's migration plot, it should be avoided.

– Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics and business. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.