Former National Intelligence Council Middle East and Africa specialist Graham Fuller has called for the United States to launch a gigantic Marshall Plan for the South, to solve the burgeoning refugee crisis, that will see billions of desperate people flooding into the North unless genuine development is achieved.

“Fences, patrol boats, walls, checkpoints, buying off countries to serve as refugee halfway-houses, more draconian immigration laws, feel-good invective against the immigrants lurking just outside our gates—all this is fantasy, just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” he wrote.  Instead, Fuller calls for a full 50% of the bloated Pentagon and intelligence community budget to be put into a Marshall Plan fund.  “The problem,” he concluded, “is self-evident and multi-faceted, and no, money won’t do it all. But a couple of hundred billion ‘wasted’ in Africa and Latin America on infrastructure projects, schools, clinics, roads might actually improve things a lot more than our non-stop wars.”