It is an increasingly hard world for those seeking a better life in richer countries. Immigrants are not welcome in most countries, even where demographic trends reflect the need to expand the labor force to levels able to sustain and support aging populations.
While both Europe and the US will have to face the need for younger workers in the coming decades, citizens in wealthy nations, no matter what their ethnic backgrounds, dislike mass immigration and punish politicians who allow it. In Europe especially, immigration is the main driving force for nationalism, for the rise of populist parties and for the decline of the center left.
There are exceptions. Spain, which has had relatively low immigration from North Africa, accepted more than 600 migrants from a stranded rescue vessel the Aquarius, which Italy and Malta had turned away. Ireland has been notably more sympathetic than most to the plight of Syrian refugees — although substantial minorities there worry about strains on health and welfare systems.
Illustration: Yusha
The devolved administration of Scotland — concerned about the country’s aging population and shrinking work force — has for some years proclaimed itself more welcoming to immigrants than the UK government in London.
However, the movement remains towards exclusion. In Germany, Europe’s leading economy and most powerful nation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel differs sharply with Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer on the latter’s call to block migrants already registered other EU countries from entering Germany.
Seehofer is chairman of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), which has been in a permanent coalition with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. The CSU has given her until early next month to come up with a compromise, which most Germans presently believe she will fail to do.
Such a failure would endanger her coalition government, but the CSU is hard-pressed by the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany ahead of October state elections in Bavaria and cannot afford to back away from its threat to unilaterally close German borders.
Merkel hopes to find an EU-wide agreement. An “informal” meeting of several leaders — including those from Austria, France, Germany and Italy, chaired by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker — took place on Sunday to seek some form of agreement before the monthly European Council on Thursday and Friday — a sign that the issue now dominates the politics of all of them.
Merkel’s closest EU ally, French President Emmanuel Macron, has himself hardened his stance on migrants, telling Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte that those requesting asylum should be handled by centers established outside of Europe.
Macron framed his comments in humanitarian language, saying that it is not right for those with no chance of getting asylum in Europe to die on the Mediterranean or live in “unworthy” conditions, but his proposal would mean that France follows Italy in banning entry to migrant ships.
However, at the same time, France criticized Italy’s decision to refuse permission for the Aquarius to dock — and accepted some of the migrants on board.
Insofar as there is European agreement on immigration, it is coming from the anti-immigration wing of the union. Earlier this week, a meeting between Seehofer and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz produced an agreement to create an “axis,” not so much, as Kurz put it, “of the willing,” but of those states — including Germany, Italy and Austria —unwilling to accept more migrants.
Merkel is thus challenged not only by Italy, whose new populist government sees the chancellor’s insistence on open borders coupled with pressure to cut Italian public spending as intolerable, but also by her ally Macron, by her neighbor Austria and by her own interior minister.
This toughening stance begins to move the Western European EU members closer to the Central Europeans — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — all of which have refused to take the quota of migrants decided for them by the EU.
In a powerful essay, former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic argued that for these states, liberated from communism and control by the Soviet Union — and before Moscow, from the Austro-Hungarian empire — are deeply opposed to a migration that would dilute their ethnic homogeneity and newfound national freedom.
“Ethnic heterogeneity would … come from within in the form of migrants, people of different culture, religion and, most scary in the eyes of the locals, people whose birth rates significantly outstrip the anemic, or even negative, growth rates of the native population,” Milanovic wrote. “Migration thus appears as a threat to the hard-won national independence.”
In many minds, “threat” is now an indivisible companion to “migrant.” To opponents, the new arrivals threaten crime; a dilution of national ethnicity and a claim on services paid for by the taxes of the native population. Europeans especially do not like immigration of Muslims, fearing that the new arrivals might include militants planning acts of terror.
The advantages of a young and usually hardworking cohort who will themselves pay taxes, take jobs no longer attractive to existing citizens and provide cultural diversity are either less visible or increasingly ignored.
In France, Malian migrant Mamoudou Gassama, who climbed up to a fourth-floor balcony to save a four-year-old in danger of falling, was granted French citizenship and time with Macron for an act of courage — an opportunity unlikely to come the way of others seeking nationality.
US President Donald Trump is one who sees migrants all but wholly through the prism of “threat.” He is unremittingly harsh, using terms such as “infest” and “animals” in his references to those trying to enter the US without documentation.
His enforcement of a policy that led to children being separated from their families at the US-Mexican border was widely seen, even in his own Republican Party, as an abomination, and — after falsely accusing Democrats of being responsible for the policy — he signed an order ending the separations.
The pressure of the poor on the rich world is one of the sorriest sights of the past few years. The pressure will not go away; neither will the resistance to it. Africa and the Middle East, especially its war zones, will continue to pour forth tired, poor and huddled masses, and they will continue to be pushed back. Leaders, liberal and conservative, will have little choice but to join the pushback party if they wish to remain in office.
These leaders must now get smarter — rather than more reactionary. The poverty and conflict that increasingly divides the world must be addressed more comprehensively than it has been. The effects of its misery can no longer be confined within poorer borders: It more and more becomes the rich world’s emergency too.
John Lloyd cofounded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is a senior research fellow. The opinions expressed here are his own.
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