BERLIN – It is about 300 kilometers (185 miles) from Tunis to the Italian island of Lampedusa, as many current Tunisian migrants could tell you. From Alexandria, Egypt, the closest EU point is the Greek island of Crete, about four times as far. But immigrants departing Egypt would be ill-advised to head there. Rather, they should join the Tunisians in Lampedusa if they want to have a better chance at claiming refugee asylum in the European Union.

After the upsurge of immigrants from Tunisia to Italy, the EU will most likely see increased migration from Egypt due to the breakdown of Egyptian border controls after the revolution—a lack of law and order that is likely to get worse before it gets better. This poses two challenges for the EU. First, the need to reevaluate how the EU treats refugees and asylum-seekers, as epitomized by the dysfunctional Greek asylum system. Second, the question of how the EU can control Mediterranean migration inflows through targeting the root causes of migration.

Currently, policymakers in Italy and the EU are trying to get things under control on Lampedusa, more or less successfully fending off a larger discussion about adjusting the EU asylum and refugee system. Northern European countries like Germany conveniently hide behind the Dublin II agreement, which holds that irregular migrants have to file their asylum claim in the first EU country they entered, which for most North African migrants means in Greece or Italy. So these countries are at the forefront of protecting the EU’s external border.

It is no secret that immigrants try to steer clear of entering through Greece due to miserable conditions there for refugees and asylum seekers. Reports about physical abuses while in Greek policy custody and detention centers abound. The hardships they face in Greece was confirmed in a January ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which concluded that returning asylum seekers to Greece from any other EU country violates the European Convention on Human Rights because of the inhuman conditions and treatment returnees face in Greece. Immigrant rights advocates hope that it will not be long before Italy faces similar charges due to Italy’s dubious border-control agreements with Libya, which frequently result in the mistreatment of refugees. If the EU cannot guarantee that fundamental rights are respected in their member states for refugees and asylum-seekers, it is time to face this challenge squarely. Top priorities should be burden-sharing within the EU and better support of Southern EU member states that are clearly overstrained in dealing with migration flows in a humanitarian manner.

Alleviating the inhuman conditions facing immigrants is only a short-term solution, however. Migrants will try time and again to cross the Mediterranean, and traffickers will find alternative migration routes. If the EU wants to fight root causes of migration then it should emphasize the Euro-Mediterranean trade partnerships. Helping to support political and economic stability in Tunisia and Egypt through greater European trade and investment will be the key, as those countries have not only been sending and transit countries but have become major destination countries for Sub-Saharan migrants. More coordinated efforts for aid effectiveness and business cooperation are needed, and sticking to the assistance pledges made at the 2005 G8 summit by European Union members would help. So far, only the United Kingdom, despite heavy austerity measures, has kept the target, and Italy is far behind. It might very well be that, for a short time, migration flows would go up with increasing stability and prosperity in the region as it is never the poorest who take on a migration journey. But a larger concept of migration and development policies needs to be employed alongside border management. In the end it is jobs and secure livelihoods that lets people stay where they want to live.

Maybe policymakers should follow on the surprising findings of the public opinion poll Transatlantic Trends: Immigration, carried out by the German Marshall Fund and its partners, which found that large pluralities of the public in the surveyed Mediterranean countries of France, Italy, and Spain see increasing development aid to poorer countries as the most effective policy to reduce irregular immigration, more so than increasing national border controls.

It seems that geographic proximity does let the Southern European public see a bit clearer what the real challenges are and how they could be tackled. It’s time for the rest of Europe to listen to those on the front lines.

Astrid Ziebarth is Program Officer with the German Marshall Fund’s Immigration and Integration program in Berlin

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BERLIN — On September 11, Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician who likened the Koran to Mein Kampf, will speak in New York on the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, warning about the supposed dangers of Islam and the building of a “ground-zero mega-mosque.” That the proposed structure is neither a mosque — it is a community center with a prayer room — nor at ground zero — it would be two blocks away — does not matter much to Wilders. His goal is to convince the American public that Islam — not just extremist political groups using Islamic rhetoric — intends to become the dominant religion in the United States as well as Europe. He will warn that the building of new mosques and all immigration of Muslims should be stopped immediately because Muslim immigrants’ main aim is to establish the rule of Islam, using the mosques as the beachhead for their invasion.

Although Wilders has often been lampooned in the press, he can no longer be ignored — not in Europe, and now not in the United States.

In the Dutch elections in June, Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) was swept into parliament on an anti-Islam, anti-immigrant agenda, coming in third in the election. While the main parties have refused to include him in a new government, his electoral support is undeniable.  Wilders plays on public fears of the erosion of Western values and the use and misuse of Islamic rhetoric by violent extremist groups. He portrays himself as a fearless knight opposing an army of Muslim migrants. And he fends off criticism by also defending rights for women and gays and by being a staunch defender of the state of Israel.

Wilders’ planned New York visit has, so far, gone largely unnoticed in the United States. But there might be reasons for Americans to be concerned.

Wilders carries in his European backpack — along with a strong, cultural anti-Islamic sentiment that is tied to his anti-immigrant views — plans for a “Geert Wilders International Freedom Alliance,” a proposed grouping of anti-Islam activists initially from five countries: the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and Germany. In Europe, he draws followers from those who believe Islam threatens Western culture and secular norms, concerns that have already fueled minaret and burqa bans in Switzerland and France. In New York, Wilders hopes to find similar support among those who oppose the Islamic community center near ground zero, a debate that has confused facts and myths about Islam and the U.S. Muslim population with fears of terrorism. Moreover, Wilders enters a fragmenting political landscape in the United States that is now dominated by the rise of popular conservative movements with opportunistic leaders fighting to prevail in the November Congressional elections. President Barack Obama’s wobbly stance on the community center and mosque, aptly described by the American comedian Jon Stewart as “Yes, we can! But should we?”, has only complicated matters.

To attract American followers for this anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant transatlantic alliance, Wilders must bring together moderate conservatives and far-right-wing groups. His most effective tool may be his populist style, honed in the rough-and-tumble of Dutch politics, which plays off of us-versus-them public sentiments, reinforcing existing black-and-white American thinking about Islam. Such rhetoric would only reinforce alienation of moderate Muslims and Muslim immigrant groups living in the United States, poisoning constructive dialogue about immigration. This, in turn, could leverage local and state governments in the United States to enact a more right-wing and anti-immigrant agenda.

Of course, Wilders’ anti-Islamic screeds may fall on deaf ears in America. In Europe, Wilders’ support has been fueled by integration debates, or rather debates about failed integration of Muslim immigrants. However, the situation of Muslim immigrants in the United States could not be more different than that in Europe. While in most European countries there is a sizeable and very visible Muslim population — not all of whom are immigrants — the Muslim share of the population in the United States is relatively small. Only about 2.35 million American Muslims are part of the general U.S. population of about 310 million in 2007, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center on Muslim Americans. About two-thirds of those are immigrants and are, Pew asserts, “middle class and mostly mainstream.” In Europe, in contrast, the socioeconomic background and educational level of Muslim immigrants and their offspring largely differs from mainstream society. Fierce debates abound about cultural-versus-structural reasons for the difficulties Muslim immigrants have in integrating into European society. The United States has not, and most likely will not, see these debates in the future, simply because of the small size and socioeconomic makeup of the American Muslim community

For years, press commentators have labeled Geert Wilders a one-man show and predicted that the “phenomenon Wilders” would soon flame out. But, in just a few years, the fiery anti-Islam activist has gained an important and unexpected role within Dutch society thanks to his rhetorical skills and immigrant- and Muslim-skeptic sentiment in the Netherlands. If he proves similarly effective in New York and is able to forge a transatlantic alliance of anti-Islamic activists, then the chances for a real constructive dialogue about immigration, Islam, and Islamic extremism will be seriously endangered.

Astrid Ziebarth is a Program Officer, Immigration and Integration, with the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

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BERLIN — The roughly 2.7 million immigrants of Turkish origin in Germany have been at the center of the country’s debate on immigration and integration as long as the debate has existed. Now, almost 50 years after the first Turkish guest workers arrived, a new phenomenon gains attention: University-educated children of those immigrants increasingly leave Germany to settle in their parents’ homeland. According to a study by the research institute Futureorg in Dortmund, 38 percent of Turkish-descent university graduates in Germany are planning to emigrate back to Turkey. Surely not all of them will, but many have already left.

Reliable figures on the dimension of this phenomenon do not exist; statistics on migration generally do not include levels of education. However, since 2002, a significant increase of German nationals migrating to Turkey has been reported, approaching 5,000 individuals in 2008. The true number of migrants might be even higher, as many cannot be expected to report their move to the authorities as their families are still in Germany and they maintain the option to return.

These high-skilled, Turkish-origin professionals are feeling both push and pull factors  between the two countries. As for the push, a study by the University of Konstanz published in February 2010 revealed that university students of Turkish origin experience significant discrimination in the German labor market. Using fictional profiles of German university students with Turkish and non-Turkish names and identical qualifications, the researchers found that a Turkish name reduced the chance of being invited to a job interview by 14 percent. While this level of discrimination should not prevent qualified Turkish-Germans from entering the workforce in Germany, it does leave them with the impression that they have fewer opportunities here than their non-immigrant classmates — that even though born in Germany, they somehow still do not belong here. Of those wishing to emigrate, 42 percent claimed that it was primarily due to not feeling “at home” in Germany.

The pull for these same individuals is provided by excellent job opportunities in Turkey. For many years, Turkey’s economic growth has outstripped that of Germany and other European countries. As Turkish businesses expand and modernize, highly-skilled, multilingual Turkish-German professionals are welcomed and highly regarded by Turkish employers.

The emigration of these young professionals in significant numbers represents an obvious case of brain drain for Germany. This is especially worrisome considering that few children of Turkish immigrants reach a high level of education in the first place in the German system, which is notorious for allowing little social mobility. In addition to losing the formal education of graduates, Germany also loses the social capital of individuals who could contribute most to the successful integration of their ethnic minority within German society. The fact that the well-educated leave their less-educated brothers and sisters behind, many of whom rely on Germany’s welfare system, is bad news for the future relations between Germany’s majority population and the Turkish-German minority.  

Cornelius Fleischhaker contributed to this piece.

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According to Adam Fier, portrayed in last week’s article by Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post, New Zealand is the place to go if you want to evade the impacts of global warming. Fier, a former computer security professional at NASA, has packed up his family and belongings and moved from Montgomery County, Maryland, all the way to New Zealand, where he believes that effects of climate change will be least drastic in comparison to other countries of the world.

Vedantam describes Fier as one of the many “Ecomigrants” that the world should expect to see in the future decades. While the term Ecomigrant might be sound a lot like Ecotourism — a comfortable way for affluent individual travelers to enjoy the outdoors in foreign places — ecomigration has no such “comfortable” connotation. Rather, it describes the process of people forced to leave their original environment that has because uninhabitable because of climate change. Some figures predict that 25 million up to one billion people worldwide could be forced to leave or flee their homes over the next 50 years due to water shortages, droughts, deteriorating pasture land, or rising sea level. That is not to mention those that flee severe weather conditions or natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

As with every debate involving academics, politicians, and governments, the frantic search for reliable numbers and terminology begins, which can cause media to overlook an issue as too dry. Can we call these people ecomigrants? Environmental migrants? Climate Refugees? Environmentally displaced persons? It is not surprising that the UNHCR does not want to use the oft-heard term “Climate Refugees” because the category of refugees, as set forth in the Geneva Convention, only accounts for those that have fled across country borders. Most climate-induced migration is likely to occur within country borders. Agreeing on the term “Refugee” would imply that the UNHCR should actually be mainly responsible, but faced with a limited budget, this seems unlikely. Now, one could ask why this debate about terminology is so important — does it really matter for those that have to leave their homes? Certainly not directly, but if politicians, national governments, and political entities like the UN or the EU start this debate on terminology, they will not be able to steer clear of what is inadvertently and ultimately tied to terminology: the question of responsibility and governance of the phenomenon. As one member of the European Parliament put it, “As long as there is no agreed-upon terminology, we cannot really say who should be doing what!”

The poorest nations will be the ones hardest hit by effects of climate change, yet they are the ones least responsible for it.   Thus, it is not surprising that they call for a supranational way, or even a supranational financial fund, to support affected regions and countries. No matter what we call it, it is time that the topic of environmental migration is adequately addressed in the political sphere so that further actions and steps can be taken.

In the meantime, 75 Tuvaluans are generously accepted to New Zealand every year, not as “ecomigrants,” though, but under a labor migration scheme.

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