Despite the UN’s stalemate with peace negotiations for Syria and continuing turmoil in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, attitudes towards refugees are hardening throughout Europe. Denmark recently passed a law allowing the seizure of cash and valuables in excess of 10,000 kroner. Greece has come under pressure for undermining the Schengen agreements for intra-European travel by not enforcing immigration regulations strictly enough. Sweden is set to reject the 80,000 asylum applications – roughly half of the total received in 2015 – and its police force is getting ready to begin mass deportations. Finland will presently deny nearly two-thirds of its 32,000 applicants. Political will in other parts of Europe is also starting to favour equally severe curbs on the influx of new migrants.
This apparent change of heart in the face of a humanitarian crisis seems much less surprising if Europe’s evasive and muddled approach to mass migration, for at least a generation, is taken into consideration. In many EU states the public has long been fed a contradictory message about immigrants. Simultaneously they have been presented as a welcome stimulus for Europe’s economic growth and cultural diversity and as the first wave of cultural and religious forces that threaten to undermine its historical traditions, if not erase them altogether. The tension between these views has greatly increased during the last few months as the media narrative has presented refugees as both victims of war and human trafficking, bravely trying to sneak into Fortress Europe, and as menacing foreigners such as the North African and Middle Eastern men who allegedly perpetrated widespread sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.
In large part these contradictions have arisen from a failure to establish a consistent long-term approach to the need for open borders and the movement of people. The confusion goes back to the political elites who oversaw the first wave of postwar immigration, on the assumption that it would be a small, temporary fix for labour shortages. Germany, for example, thought its Turkish guest workers would return home after a brief stay, much as Britain believed its Asian and West Indian migrants would take up the menial jobs other citizens avoided and remain quietly on the periphery of the culture and society. When, however, the scale of immigration turned out to be much larger than anticipated, and the new arrivals took root in the host countries and began to assert their identities, the ensuing reactions revealed a great deal about how one-sided the process was always intended to be. As the migrants moved further into the society, learned its languages and sought to advance themselves educationally and institutionally, nationalist parties began to cultivate a xenophobic backlash in order to further their political ambitions.
The British writer Kenyan Malik astutely observes that in recent years European politics has shifted away from traditional left-right divisions and into narrower issues of “technocratic management”. This tighter focus has made EU politicians much less effective at giving voice to the identities of their constituents. This has meant that although the current migration has little or nothing to do with the wider changes, nor with the “transformation of social democratic parties, or the imposition of austerity policies” it has become a lens through which many Europeans perceive these changes. Consequently immigration has “become symbolic of the distance between ordinary people and the political class” with the result that many ordinary citizens reflexively blame recent migrants for changes that have nothing whatsoever to do with their arrival.
This confusion of policies and politics has produced a climate in which refugees and immigrants are treated welcomed by some parts of the society — mostly those who have had positive experiences of assimilation (revealingly Britain’s UKIP party has most support in the areas with least immigration) — but frequently scapegoated for other social and economic pressures that make a large part of the electorate uneasy. As cultural and religious changes which are no longer articulated within mainstream politics reappear within the context of immigration, it has become increasingly difficult to arrive at a consensus on national policy, much less one that will work for the entire EU.
It is worth looking at the current crisis with a proper sense of the numbers involved. In 2015 a million migrants applied for refuge in Europe, less than 0.1 per cent of its total population. By contrast, Lebanon has accepted no fewer than 1.3 million Syrian refugees — a staggering 20 per cent of its population. Nevertheless European politicians often refer to the “flood” of refugees as though it were a genuine demographic threat. The political fog which has enveloped so much of the immigration debate, both in the EU and the US is a cautionary tale of how easily a society can misinterpret its challenges by politicizing them too hastily.
