Bias is behind different treatment of refugees: China Daily editorial

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", these famous lines from the Declaration of Independence are often put forward by US politicians as the fundamental principles of the United States and the shared values of the West.

The implication being that the US-led West upholds equal rights for people of different religions, ethnicities and nationalities.

Inequality can be seen everywhere and a double standard is often the root cause of the inequality suffered by different groups of people. That refugees from different parts of the world are received in different ways is a case in point.

In the current Russia-Ukraine military conflict, refugees from Ukraine are well received by its neighboring countries and are treated well by other Western countries. Almost 2 million refugees from Ukraine have been received by Western countries.

However, in sharp contrast, quite a number of countries are hostile to refugees from the Middle East and African countries.

Indeed, European countries have hosted more than 1 million of the 6.6 million Syrian refugees. But the vast majority are hosted by only two countries — 59 percent in Germany and 11 percent in Sweden according to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The Europe Union provided financial support to Turkey to slow the flow of migrants and asylum seekers crossing into Europe by returning "irregular migrants" attempting to enter Europe through Greece to Turkey, as Turkey works "to prevent new migratory routes from opening", according to the Migration Policy Centre.

There have been reports of instances of nonwhite refugees fleeing from Ukraine being discriminated against on the borders of Ukraine.

A leader of a European country when referring to refugees from Ukraine said: "These are not the refugees we are used to … these people are Europeans," and "These people are intelligent, they are educated people … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists …" Some Western journalists described refugees from Ukraine as "middle class people".

Behind the different treatments for refugees and rhetoric tinged with racial and religious discrimination are the double standard Western politicians have long adhered to.

Many in the West also employ a political bias on the question of refugees. They consider refugees from Ukraine as those fleeing from a war while they regard refugees from the Middle East and African countries as those trying to illegally enter European countries.

In their frame of minds, all men are never created equal, and they consider white people as being superior to nonwhites. They consider the wars they have launched against other countries as just ones, and wars launched by other countries not in their clique as unjust ones.

Western politicians must give up their double standard and truly show that everyone is created equal.