It was meant as a critique of media and how they inform the public, but across the board.
Your comparison with 1920 through to 1945 and national socialism is absolutely spot on. Throw in a bit of Stalin's excesses in the Soviet Union and it is as close as spitting. Jack Werner's story is interesting at this point in time, as too the Kindertransport from 1938-40. That rescue operation brought about 9 -10,000 children from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland to the UK. About 7,500 of them were Jewish, eventually the UK had around 10,000 Jewish refugee children. A few hundred other children arrived before all of the European mainland was occupied or impassable although some did manage to get across Spain into Portugal and on to the UK. Private citizens or organisations had to guarantee payment for each child's care, education, and eventual emigration to another country. In return, the British government agreed to allow unaccompanied refugee children to enter the country on temporary travel visas. The understanding was that once the 'crisis' was over they should return home.
There is no actual reason why that basic principle should not be adopted with families and unaccompanied children given priority as then. Men travelling alone, and to an extent the few women also doing so, have many more options so should be lower down the list. Austria and Germany do fairly strict checks and issue ID cards that must be carried at all times. Whoever is caught without will have been warned they are likely to be expelled. The UK with its reluctance to have ID cards, which given how often we need more than one form of identity to do various things is nonsense, no system for processing people as simple as other countries find it to introduce one and seem to have some kind phobia about expelling/deporting people although they do it seven days a week and have done so for many years. Mechanisms, methods and so on need to be put in place, fair enough, but despite this having been happening for a long time nothing has been done. Way back as far as Jim Callaghan the UK had people advising (within the UK, not 'foreigners') that that should be done. I have a sneaking suspicion they are still not listening. All along the situation is getting worse. It may not lead to WW3 but something nasty perhaps, however the equivalent of 1933 has already been unleashed.
Finally, most of the refugees at present come from countries at war. The migrants seeking new countries for economic reasons are now less than 5% of the people on the move, some of those actually have good reason to go elsewhere but if there were proper checks and controls that would be done with for the greatest part. As for helping people in their own countries during conflict, it is always happening but is somewhere between difficult and impossible. I have been involved in going to front lines for such things as trying to do something about the street children stranded in a city with street fighting all around them. The fighting is one thing but the chaos it causes is almost worse when trying to work on the ground because who you try to work with needs to keep moving in order not to become a sitting target... Pragmatically, I doubt it really possible in many cases.
