In Calais (France), checking trucks for migrants being smuggled into Europe.
An assembly in the teeming quarters of a hostel for immigrant workers on the outskirts
of Paris.
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The
road to asylum
For most migrants
arriving in developed countries, seeking asylum remains the only way to secure a
right to stay. Last year, 390,000 people applied for asylum in Europe. A similar
total is expected for 2001, with figures from the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees suggesting that Germany and Britain will remain the principle receivers,
while Afghanistan, Turkey and Iraq continue as the main countries of origin.
Western European countries have responded with strict border controls and rejection
of up to 90 percent of asylum claims, often arguing that the migrants are driven
by pure economic necessity. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has even called
for the 1951 Geneva Convention to be amended in light of these supposed abuses.
But the migrants have not stopped–from the 16 Romanians found under a Eurostar in
early August, to the 908 Kurds whose boat grounded on the French Riviera in February,
to the dozens who cross from Morocco every day. Once in Europe, the migrants can
expect possible detention (1,000 asylum seekers are in British jails), illegal work,
administrative indifference and public contempt. According to Arun Kundnani of the
London-based Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, official “demonization of asylum
seekers” has fostered “a new, popular racism.”
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I
am the colour of those who are persecuted.
Alphonse
de Lamartine, French poet (1790-1869)
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Europe’s
governments are struggling to stem the flow of migrants from poor countries while
opening the gates wide for the best of the world’s workers. Is their policy tenable?
When Huzefa Hundekari
decided it was time for a change of scene, the doors of Western Europe swung invitingly
open. Helped by some very co-operative immigration officials and the promise of a
hefty salary, this 29-year-old Indian manager in a multinational IT firm glided into
his new posting in Frankfurt. “They have a defined process laid out. They require
a set of papers, then you get your green card. It does not take more than 15 to 20
days.”
From the perspective of a vast squat in central Paris, Hundekari’s experiences seem
closer to a work of fiction. Ten years ago, Mamadou Traore, now aged 35, fled for
a new life. Coming from Mali, he crossed several thousand kilometres of desert, ventured
through Algeria just as civil war was beginning, crossed the Mediterranean in a perilous
dinghy, and arrived in Paris three months later, penniless and not knowing a soul.
Unfortunately for Traore, French immigration officials rarely give visas for effort.
His applications for legal residency have been refused three times. Now he lives
frugally with 350 others, all in similar straits. “At any time we could be arrested
or deported. You always have to prepare for the worst.”
Wanted:
“the best brains”
To
judge from these rival experiences, no single account can now be given of immigration
to Europe. Whereas Hundekari has profited from a desperate effort by the German government
to reinforce the new economy, Traore and an estimated four million other illegal
migrants in the European Union live hand-to-mouth, shunned by governments and by
the citizens of their host countries.
Open to the skilled, restricted for the poor and even the persecuted, Western Europe
is conceiving a new model of welcome. “We do not consider immigration to be just
a burden any more, but an enrichment,” declared Rita Süssmuth, head of an official
German commission that has called for up to 200,000 visas to be handed out each year,
preferably to the “best brains.” For the first time in 30 years, governments are
championing the economic utility of non-Europeans. But the question remains: if migrants
are gauged on their use, then what becomes of their status?
“Europe has not escaped from what seems to be the destiny of all areas experiencing
rapid growth: the need to bring in labour supplies from outside,” wrote the American
sociologist Saskia Sassen in her book, Guests and Aliens (New Press, 2000). Indeed
the past 200 years of European history have been rich in mass movement and its usual
companion, xenophobic hatred: Poles, Slavs and Jews moved West in number in the 19th
century, earning a wary reception from host countries that showed much less reluctance
in peopling colonies and dispatching 50 million migrants across the Atlantic prior
to 1914. Following the devastating racial politics of the next three decades, Europe
resumed its normal labour-absorbing course, this time recruiting workers from Asia,
Africa and the Middle East in unprecedented quantities–around 70 million, including
those who returned to their countries of origin–for the job of postwar reconstruction.
The downturn of the 1970s put a swift end to all that. Workers were no longer free
to come, only relatives of those already settled and asylum-seekers. Unemployment
and prejudice in turn nurtured a virulent right-wing backlash in France, Germany
and Britain, the main countries at risk of being “swamped.”
For today’s political elite, the lessons of those decades are still fresh. Buoyant
economic performance may well have blunted the extremists’ appeal, but containment
of numbers remains a critical part of immigration policy. For EU ministers, this
means whittling down the 390,000 asylum applications made last year and halting the
unregistered human cargo–if only, as they claim, to protect immigrants’ well-being.
“Those who co-operate on this issue at the European level are from interior and justice
ministries,” explains Virginie Guiraudon, an expert in migration policy from the
University of Lille. “For them, immigration policy means immigration control. As
long as these people control the agenda, there’s no reason to see any change in the
repressive policy, meaning most decisions are about illegal migration, human smuggling,
barrier sanctions or restricting asylum.”
Yet despite the ministers’ best efforts, the flow of people does not seem to have
relented. The world counts an estimated 21 million refugees, mostly displaced by
war or political breakdown. Only a tiny proportion are now in Europe, but the spread
of global media, means of transport and sharply widening inequality between the developing
world and Europe–historically the most fundamental cause of mass migration–promises
to deliver many more people like Traore to the shores of affluence.
The danger of opening the doors to this exodus, politicians maintain, lies in Europe’s
perennial spectre–the draconian right. Vlaams Bok is one such political force. Founded
in 1977 as a Flemish nationalist party, its policies towards Belgium’s migrant population
call for total closure of borders, immediate deportation of all illegal migrants,
summary expulsion of any foreigner who has turned to crime. “Immigrants don’t adapt,”
declares Philippe Van Der Sande, spokesman for the party in Antwerp, where it won
33 percent of the vote in 1999 elections. “They don’t want to learn the language.
They are not interested in our culture but just winning easy money.”
The
far right’s new clothes
Opinions
like these can be heard in all European countries, and have even risen to government
rank in Austria. Yet in place of the boisterous nationalism that characterized the
previous generation of far-right parties, groups like Vlaams Bok take a defensive
posture: the party is not racist, Van Der Sande says, but only wishes to preserve
what Flemish society has laboured to achieve. “We Europeans are a minority in the
world, and we are considered to have a good welfare system. If we give the impression
that everyone is welcome here, millions of people will want to come.”
For modern Europe’s far right–and for sizeable minorities of the population in France,
Belgium, Germany and Scandinavia according to surveys–the immigrant may be avaricious,
bedridden, criminal or simply a job-stealer, selfishly milking the society that happens
to be richer. As critics point out, the far-right’s rhetoric on immigration now differs
from that of governments only by a matter of degree.
The irony is that the debate has moved back into the economists’ camp: far from crippling
a high quality of welfare, immigrants are now touted as possibly the way to preserve
living standards in an ageing Europe. The UN Population Division claims that 13.5
million new migrants are needed each year to keep Europe’s ratio of workers and pensioners
steady.
Until now, certain businesses have clamoured for unimpeded access to the global labour
market. Shortages in new technological industries have already toppled Germany’s
30-year freeze on foreign labour. The rest of Europe is chasing alongside, while
bumped-up quotas for the exceptionally computer-gifted have been brandished by Australia,
Japan and the United States. Recession in Silicon Valley, however, may have slammed
one door shut: 400,000 foreigners are believed to be at risk of losing their jobs.
Each sacked worker will have 10 days to leave the country.
Closed
borders, an invitation to slavery
Yet
it is not only high skills that Europe has been searching. As expectations of comfortable
desk-jobs have become the norm, workers to fill more gruelling vacancies are also
lacking. And it is here that the current immigration policy shows its deepest contradictions.
Several countries now run quotas for these jobs: Italy plans 83,000 visas this year
for farm labourers while Spain indulges migrant house-cleaners. But there are few
illusions as to where the bulk of this cheap labour is going to come from. “In construction,
packaging and agriculture it’s the same all over Europe. Nobody wants to pick up
asparagus who’s not an illegal migrant any more,” observes Guiraudon.
Cheap, utterly unprotected by the law and willing to work in the most menial conditions,
illegal migrants are some employers’ ideal candidates. Though Traore has been refused
his visa three times, never have the French authorities sought to stop him from working,
nor, he insists, from paying social security contributions for services he was never
eligible to use.
“Closing the frontiers serves above all else to make slaves,” argues Jean-Pierre
Alaux, an official at GISTI, a Paris-based NGO that helps immigrants. “People are
going to arrive all the same: all the interior ministers know it, and all the bosses
know it.”
The critical question for Europe’s governments and peoples is whether this opening
of borders, sotto voce and driven by purely economic criteria, is the best way to
create well-integrated societies. Riots in several northern English cities have proved
in the last few months that even communities dating from the post-war migrant influx
can continue in utter segregation. For many pro-migrant activists, the danger is
that the new economic opening will simply reinforce a deep-seated racism. “In some
part of our collective cultural mentality in the West, we’ve kept a certain number
of values which are the same as from the time of slavery,” argues Alaux. “For us,
the South is a sort of raw material.”
A chilling demonstration of these prejudices came last year, when the murder of a
native woman by a mentally disturbed Moroccan labourer triggered anti-migrant riots
in the Spanish town of El Ejido. For years, workers have come from North Africa to
farms that have brought an unprecedented wealth to this desert region. Necessary
or not, these illegal labourers live apart, often in shacks without water and electricity,
paid pitifully little and despised by the local agricultural elite. “There’s an expression
local people use: they say let [the migrants] cross the straits, take a wash, so
long as they throw away the water and become Spanish,” reports Antonio Puertas, president
of the local NGO Almeria Acoge.
“How do you get accepted here? Even if you could, do you really want to drop your
sense of self, whiten your skin and become a Christian?” wonders Traore.
Though Europe has managed to create a few urban centres of multi-racial harmony,
cultural discrimination and economic segregation, shown at its extreme in El Ejido,
have proved much harder to overcome. In closing borders, referring all justification
for immigration back to economics, establishing quotas and limiting rights to permanent
settlement–even for the highly skilled–governments might appear to be accentuating
the view that foreigners are second-class citizens and potential parasites. As Guiraudon
points out, one country that has heavily depended on quotas of short-term foreign
labour is Switzerland, also one of the last countries to pass a law on racial integration.
But there are many other imponderables. Will the pension crisis be as severe as the
UN expects? Could an enlarged Europe with freedom of movement for a largely white
population harden prejudices against non-EU migrants or assuage them? Might recession
trigger a violent anti-migrant movement that even reaches the professional echelons
(as occurred during the Jewish exodus from the Nazis)? Only one thing is certain,
namely that an old adage will be relived in one shape or form: “We asked for workers
but got people instead.” |
