European Affairs
c/o The European Institute
1001 Connecticut Avenue
NW, Suite 220
Washington, DC
20036-5531
Tel: (202) 895-1670
Fax (202) 362-1088
info@europeanaffairs.org
|
|
|
|
|
|
Europe has become the destination
of many of the world's emigrants and
thus the scene of a vast influx of immigrants
over the last 20 years. This development,
in a relatively short time span,
reflects a convergence of events and
trends that drew people toward Europe:
- The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989
opened the way to human flows to
the West. The numbers were particularly
big from three eastern European
states with large and growing
populations: Poland, Romania and
Ukraine. Two million ethnic Germans
(Aussiedler) came to Germany
from Russia and other places in the
former Soviet empire (from the
Baltic States to Kazakhstan). Hungarian
minorities in Romania moved
to Hungary, Turks went home from
Bulgaria, Finns from Karelia.
- Groups of displaced populations
gravitated toward Europe after being
uprooted by political crises in the
1990s including ethnic strife in the
Great Lakes region in Africa (including
Rwanda and Burundi), in the
former Yugoslavia, in Kurdish-populated
areas in the Middle East and
in trouble spots as varied as Haiti,
Algeria, Lebanon, Chechnya, Afghanistan
and Iraq.
- European media give people in less
developed parts of the world images
of a Europe that seems to offer not
only freedom and security but also a
higher standard of living, including
access to consumer goods.
- The black market in human trafficking
(generating big profits for getting people
across borders illegally) became a
bigger, more lucrative business.
- Immigrants often were prepared to
take work and low wages spurned by
the indigenous labor force.
This situation – with its push-and pull
dynamic – has emerged in particularly
acute terms across the Mediterranean
because of the gap between the
European northern rim and the North
African southern rim. The imbalance in
demographic pressures is reinforced by
the contrasts in economic, political, social
and cultural levels on opposite sides
of the Mediterranean.
As a result, the European Union is
now experiencing an unprecedented
massive intake – roughly two million legal
entries a year – that is larger than the flows
to traditional immigration magnets such
as the United States and Australia. The effect
is unsettling in Europe because Europe
has never thought of itself as a place
for immigration. Traditionally, Europe has
been a place of emigration, not immigration.
National identities – and indeed the
"European" identity – do not include a
constituent belief that immigration can
contribute to the process of building and
redefining these identities.
In other words,
Europe seems to have become a region of
immigration largely in spite of itself.
In trying to cope with this challenge,
Europe has tried a range of measures
aimed at containing or at least managing
the largely unwanted influx.
The first reaction was an attempt to
virtually close the borders to new immigration
and step up the fight against illegal
immigration and tracking, starting
with the 1985 Schengen agreement,
which includes all EU member states except
Great Britain and Ireland. This
agreement (now a convention) was designed
to open internal European borders
to the free movement of people
while reinforcing the EU's external borders
with a visa system applying to most
non-European countries. (Labor immigration,
encouraged on a comparatively
limited scale in the post-World War II
period, had been shut off a decade earlier,
in 1974.) The next step in this policy was
an attempt to coordinate asylum policies
among EU countries via the Dublin
agreements in 1990 (completed by a second
agreement in 2003). Finally, a 1997
Amsterdam agreement restructured the
EU's decision-making process in this sector
to try to ensure that a common "EU
approach" was applied to all the member
states' policies of entry and asylum. This
approach culminated in conferences on
illegal migration and treaties designed to
institute a regime of "zero immigration."
(An exception was left for unavoidable
flows arising from asylum, family reunification and humanitarian acceptance,
which are safeguarded by international
treaties and codes of human rights.)
In practice, these remedies have
proved only partially effective because of
the reality gap between the rules and the
actual pressures of the new immigration.
Even though the EU has experienced
high unemployment over the last 20
years, the ranks of would-be immigrants
have swelled at the EU's borders. In a
now-familiar pattern, especially in
southern European countries such as
Italy and Spain, many such people manage
to enter the EU as illegal immigrants
– where they expect they will eventually
benefit from a national amnesty for illegals
and get permission to stay.
A second response to the problem
takes the form of EU efforts to put forward
development programs in emigrants'
countries of origin in hopes that
development at home would keep some
of them from leaving. In this context,
there are also "policies of return" that
started in the mid-1970s and involve incentives
for immigrants to go home –
such as "reinsertion measures" and,
more recently, support for decentralized
development aid, often managed in cooperation with organizations set up by
the migrants themselves. The "Euro-
Mediterranean Partnership" (also known
as the MEDA program) includes plans
for subsidizing immigrant associations'
work on development programs in their
countries of origin – notably Morocco,
Turkey and Mali, which have traditions
of collective involvement in development
projects. Other solutions involve
helping to ensure that immigrants' remittances
from Europe (€14 million in
2005) are increasingly channeled
through banks instead of informal networks.
These measures have had good
results in the sense that they have helped
immigrants' families in their countries of
origin. But they have not had their intended
effect of stopping emigration or
even significantly curtailing it. In fact,
they have sometimes created fresh dependence
on migration in the very regions
that have benefited from this emigrant-
related help.
The third idea has been to negotiate
with some of the countries that produce
the biggest outflows of Europe-bound illegal
migrants (Morocco, Mali and Senegal
to the south and Ukraine, Belarus and
Moldavia to the east) about a bargain
aimed at controlling the traffic. The "exporting"
countries are asked to agree that
repatriation accords can be enforced regarding
their nationals and to reinforce
their control on their own borders. In exchange,
the Europeans are offering inducements
in the form of subsidies for
stepped-up border controls, for temporary
settlements or internment camps at
Europe's periphery (for example, in Libya,
Malta and Morocco) and for the costs of
repatriating people to their countries.
Illustrative of this trend are a July
2006 meeting in Rabat between the EU
and Morocco; similarly, after illegal Senegalese
immigrants started arriving in
large numbers during the summers of
2005 and 2006, Paris started talks on the
problem with Dakar. The results of this
approach have been meager so far. One
problem is that these countries themselves,
with their poor governance, corruption
and disregard for human rights,
can easily be seen as lacking legitimacy in
trying to prevent their citizens from seeking
better lives for themselves elsewhere.
Another aspect of coping with immigration
has now emerged: the integration
of "foreigners" who are already in the EU.
They number 20 million if you include
five million East Europeans who have
"migrated" westward. This immigrant
population is distributed very unevenly
through the EU. Officially, Germany is
the leader in this category with roughly
7.5 million "immigrants," but this number
is artificially high in the sense that
Germany was long reluctant to grant naturalization
to Turks and other foreigners
on the ground of being born on German
soil or living there a long time. The relevant
legislation was only changed in 1999
to move away from an exclusive view of
rights based on ethnic origin (jus sanguinis)
and give more weight to residency (jus soli). Behind Germany, France has 3.5
million immigrants in the country, followed
by Great Britain with 2.5 million
The impact is even greater in some
respects in southern Europe, where
countries that were traditionally sources
of emigration – Italy, Greece, Portugal
and Spain – recently have been getting
the brunt of the new arrivals. All have
"legalized" large numbers of illegal immigrants
in the last few years. Spain is
the country where the increase of immigration
has been the highest in Europe
over the last five years: today, it hosts 2.3
million immigrants. (In comparison,
northern Europe has a relatively small
immigrant population because the countries
there do not have legacies of transnational
links with developing countries
that are liable to foster immigration and
also because these economies do not
have big sectors with jobs where illegal
workers can be readily absorbed.
In this new immigration, Islam has
grown fast in Europe as a major complication
and challenge. Estimates of the
number of Muslims in the EU had risen
to 12 million by 2000. France is the first
country where the number of Muslims
has reached five million. In many EU
countries, immigration has made Islam
become the second religion, a change
that has raised practical questions about
public life: the veil, Islamic meat standards,
the status of the religious calendar
(notably the month-long Ramadan fast),
special places in cemeteries, arranged
marriages involving boys and girls imported
from the countries of origin, divorce
and other sexually-related issues
such as female circumcision. In France,
consultations between the authorities
and these Muslim associations have been
proposed to solve such questions, with
little significant progress so far.
Different European nations are reacting
in very different ways to this challenge.
A common thread is the effort of
most immigrant Muslim groups to negotiate
the terms of Islam's place and status
in the European countries where they
have settled – an effort in which an important
role is being played by Muslim
associations subsidized by the Gulf
States. In many EU nations, the urban
landscape is changing as mosques are
erected: these are often considered offensive
by parts of local public opinion,
which view them as an attempt to alter
Christian culture by a religion that these
groups see as the faith of poor, uneducated
people from Europe's former
colonies. These groups cannot comprehend
conversions to Islam by Europeans
or decisions by young people, from the
second generation in immigrant families,
to become more assertively Muslim.
(This more assertive trend seems to result
partly from failures at integration in
societies that assimilate Muslims poorly
and partly from fanaticism imported
from abroad, propagated by militant
sects such as the Salafists. In reality, most
Muslims in Europe want to practice their
religion quietly without any radicalism.)
In a broader perspective, all these EU
countries of the new immigration have
had to redefine their notions of citizenship
to make room for greater multiculturalism
and to facilitate social co-existence. Two
models have emerged: the "integration
model" epitomized by France (which puts
total emphasis on the social contract binding all citizens, without any reference to
ethnic origins) and the "community"
model applied in Britain. These "models"
have been challenged by violent rioting in
France's minority-populated "suburbs" in
November 2005 and by the ethnic-linked
domestic terrorism in Britain.
Multiculturalism and the limitations
of the communitarian model have
aroused severe criticism recently for
their shortcomings, notably in Britain
and the Netherlands. But some convergences
are emerging between the two
models. Most EU countries have modeled their nationality codes to give
stronger weight to the jus soli in countries
that have traditionally emphasized
jus sanguinis. Many European governments
are engaged in "best-practice" exercises
in comparing their inclusion
policies. Anti-discrimination policies
were imposed at the EU level in the 1997
Amsterdam treaty (whose article 13 denied and prohibited several special
forms of discrimination). Immigrants in
EU countries are gaining voting rights in
local elections, and their children and
grandchildren, even if they remain dual
nationals, are gaining voting eligibility
(with rights in Europe by jus soli and in
their countries of origin by jus sanguinis).
This is a new phenomenon that may
have an impact on relations between
countries of origin and European host
nations in negotiations on matters such
as Islam, visas and terrorism.
A nation's appetite for immigration can grow if it believes that it needs more people to be
stronger against other countries, according to Christopher Rudolph, a professor at American University
in Washington. He puts forward a "threat-rally" hypothesis: an internal community will rally
– and, crucially, accept more diversity – if it feels the presence of an external threat. As empirical evidence,
he uses the post-World War II period when Western nations felt threatened by Communism:
from his national case studies, he identified these patterns:
- Germany imported "guest workers" partly to rebuild the economy, to reinforce itself against Soviet
pressure and to show a liberal face to the world, particularly the United States. As the
threat abated, immigration became a more complex domestic political issue.
- Britain was more liberal to immigration from its ex-colonies in the war's aftermath, but in the
last two decades racial tensions have emerged in the absence of any external threat.
- France imported workers, mainly from its former colonies in North Africa, to rebuild its postwar
economy. But starting in the mid-1980s, Islamic issues inside France overrode concerns
about Communist threats.
- The United States took in post-war migrants fleeing Communist regimes as a symbolic act, a
factor tipping the scales in an uneasy ambivalence between the desire of businesses for more
manpower and social resistance to ethnic changes.
In all these countries, immigration from European countries was preferred because it offered
population growth with minimal risk of opposition on racist grounds. (Turks in Germany were an
exception to this pattern.)
The context has changed dramatically since the era on which Rudolph concentrates, amid
today's sense of threats arising mainly from "terrorism" both inside and outside a country's borders.
But Rudolph's thesis is a useful reminder that immigration debates are decided not just by economic
arguments but also by more diffuse perceptions of a nation's political course. His book, National Security
and Immigration (Stanford University Press) documents the complexity of this inter-relationship
in Western democracies.
Brenton Quinn, The European Institute
|
|
|
|
