We have all been witnesses to the unfolding of the 21st century’s economic crisis. Yes, we all know that these are the times of a global economic recession and each of us needs to find the best way to deal with it. In such situations, one of our basic human instincts requires that we take care of ourselves first.
But let us see how such processes of protecting ourselves first start to look like on a larger scale when a large number of people take on this task: According to survey results in the Financial Times and a prognosis in the German weekly Der Spiegel, the economic crisis has hit migrants residing in the Europe Union especially hard. According to both studies, Europe has tilted its rhetoric on migration and is now ready to tighten immigration laws, hoping to keep new migrants away while ousting those that happen to be unemployed but still residing in Europe. Thus, Eastern Europeans are encouraged to pack up the few things they had brought with them and return to their home countries, and in turn, the immigrants from the developing countries living in the Eastern part of the Union that had traveled here from as far as Asia shall follow this homecoming trend.
According to Der Spiegel, in many countries across Europe, people now blame the immigrants for taking their jobs. The Spaniards and Poles that used to be the sought-after construction work force in the U.K. are now a target of protests by the British blue-collar workers. With the unemployment rate reaching almost 20% in Spain, its citizens hurry to apply for seasonal jobs, like picking olives and strawberries in Andalusia, formerly done solely by immigrants. The poll by Financial Times/Harris clearly shows that approximately 70% of the citizens in each Western European country want the jobless immigrants to leave. Interestingly enough, Britons go so far as to call for a moratorium on issuing work permits for EU citizens who would like to work in the U.K.
Some EU member state governments ask us not to raise our eyebrows when they put new (meaning stricter and harsher) regulations in place against immigrants. It is, as they say, in everyone’s national and personal interest, after all. Some of the measures are quite severe, with Italy being a prominent example. Silvio Berlusconi is pushing for laws that would require fingerprinting of the homeless and for doctors to report people without proper papers. Der Spiegel further adds that the new security laws in Italy will also include a residency permit fee and proof of a minimum level of income.
The Spanish government offers as much as $590 to immigrants to compensate for their travel expenses if they agree to return to their home countries. President Nicolas Sarkozy might go as far as setting quotas on immigrants from different regions, while he already succeeded in passing law for DNA testing in order to prove genetic ties for immigrants who try to find their families in France. Other countries even offer monetary gifts for the immigrants who agree to leave the host country. Eastern Europeans and their governments have not arrived with anything specific aimed at immigration for now; however, sentiments among the populations of these countries are again swaying toward intolerance and racism. These feelings may never really have disappeared, though, as we have not truly dealt with them nor have we really wanted to uproot them.
The reasons are systemic. The school systems and other institutions have not yet been reformed to fully embrace immigrants, for we have not suggested that these people be accepted not only as a temporary workforce that shall one day leave but also as legitimate citizens whose children may be able to consider themselves as the host country’s nationals. We might become “truly” nationalistic in such times and decide to ignore the needs of the “others,” who may thus never become “us.”
Thus, it is actually not that surprising to hear and see the natives in EU countries turning intolerant, in a lot of places even racist and discriminatory, toward immigrants. However, just because we choose to live under old ways but also to accept migrants from around the world only when that’s seen as advantageous will never be the right way to achieve any long-term success. It is not too late to avoid “Europe’s Next Immigration Crisis” as Alkman Granitsas anticipated on Yale Global Online in 2006, but are we able to reverse it?
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