Across The New Frontier

A hard line on immigration looks like a political no-brainer these days. Politicians throughout Europe have read the writing on the wall and think they’ve discerned there a populist, anti-immigrant scrawl. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s exploitation of the issue helped put him into the second round of France’s presidential elections, though it wasn’t compelling enough to prevent the withering of the National Front in this month’s legislative elections. In the Netherlands, the late Pim Fortuyn’s straight-talking take on the issue propelled his party into a still-nascent government coalition. The new Danish government rode to power astride that issue last fall, and polls suggest that it could help German conservative Chancellor-candidate Edmund Stoiber do the same in September. So, isn’t it only fair to give Europe’s politicians a modicum of credit for finally responding to public concern?

Up to a point, yes. When they convene this week in Seville for their semi-annual European Council meeting, European Union leaders will focus on immigration — especially illegal immigration. When it comes to this, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar declared on a pre-summit tour of European capitals, “the masks of hypocrisy have to drop.” Yet it seems likely that whatever decisions are made at Seville, more than a few hypocrisies will remain firmly in place. Despite the recognized need for a common E.U. policy on immigration, no government is eager to give power over such an explosive issue to unelected mandarins in Brussels. And no number of British warships in the Mediterranean, Italian cigarette boats in the Adriatic or watchtowers on the Poland-Belarus border are likely to reverse this natural law: human beings have always wanted to escape misery, and today many see the European Union as their final destination. “I don’t see any important new developments in migration today,” says Jean-Pierre Garson, the top expert on the matter with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.

In a political sense, though, much has changed. A little over two and a half years ago, when E.U. leaders gathered in Tampere, Finland, to launch a common policy for asylum and immigration, the discussion was suitably noble and not a little vague. The principle, enshrined in the Amsterdam Treaty of 1999, was to make the E.U. a common “area of freedom, security and justice” within five years. Since then the European Commission has put forward numerous proposals to better apply those principles in practice. But with few exceptions, national governments have done more to stymie progress on the European level than further it. Now the leaders’ political antennae have been tuned to a new frequency. In the current environment, freedom appears less important, justice is seen less as an ideal than as a question of enforcement and security has top billing. “The leaders want to take short-term action to show that the illegal flows can be stemmed,” says a top Spanish official involved with preparing the summit. “After that, we’ll proceed to the Tampere ideals.”

For now, the political action on immigration still happens almost entirely on the national level. Laws have been tightened across the E.U., often without regard to the consequences in neighboring countries. The U.K. is ticked off about the flow of migrants from the Red Cross migrant center at Sangatte, by the French end of the Channel Tunnel. The Swedes don’t like the toothpaste-tube effect that stricter Danish laws have had on their rising asylum numbers. And Italy’s tough new proposed immigration laws include no provisions to apply the all but unenforceable Dublin Convention, by which asylum seekers in the E.U. are supposed to be processed where they first enter the Union — instead of being shuffled on to the next country. With all those and more red flags to slalom around, E.U. leaders will be hard-pressed to come up with a meaningful catalog of joint action at Seville. A more precise picture is likely to emerge there of how E.U. countries can work together to tighten controls at the borders, and they will come up with tough language that threatens source countries with consequences unless they crack down on illegal immigrant flows. But those efforts occur at the margins of the Union; core state functions like integrating newcomers are likely to remain under the jealously guarded purview of member states.

No wonder. The only electoral politics that matter are in the nation states. But while political survival is a compelling prod to action, national leaders should not be led astray by immigration myths. They would do well, in fact, to counter some of the following misconceptions:

EUROPE IS BEING OVERRUN BY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
Not really. The typical illegal is, in fact, already here, having overstayed his or her visa or failed to leave after an asylum request was denied. The extent of the new flow of illegals is hard to measure, but most experts believe it is considerably smaller than the flow of family members coming to join relatives; in most European countries, they make up more than half of all legal immigration. What changes is the capacity of the European economy to absorb those migrants and — closely related to that — the psychological state of resident populations. Though the E.U. economy is hardly in dire straits, many Europeans feel the squeeze put on the welfare state, the fear of unemployment and the uncertainty of the post-Sept. 11 world — and see immigrants as convenient scapegoats.

IMMIGRATION INCREASES UNEMPLOYMENT
In most E.U. countries, the rate of unemployment among immigrants is much higher than that among the native workforce. And there is no direct correlation between a country’s unemployment rate and the number of immigrants it hosts. Moreover, most foreigners in the E.U. are working, often at jobs that wouldn’t otherwise be filled. Dick Schoof, head of the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service, has acknowledged that his country’s signature floriculture industry — including the flower that has become something of a national symbol, the tulip, a Turkish import — would collapse without foreign labor. Steel mills, restaurant kitchens and the spanking clean homes of the European bourgeoisie all depend on foreign workers. The need for skilled labor from outside Europe is no less acute. The main association of European employers, unice, comments that “restrictive common criteria are not the way forward in a context where E.U. member states compete on a global scale to attract highly skilled personnel.” Europe’s dilemma, says migration expert Han Entzinger of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, is that “markets need migrants, but the people don’t want them.”

BORDERS CAN BE SEALED AGAINST ILLEGALS
The U.S. has found it impossible to seal off one southern land border; it is a much tougher proposition for a poorly coordinated E.U. that has external land borders with 11 countries, not to mention the Mediterranean Sea. “Governments need to realize that more border controls and tougher visa requirements can have the perverse consequence of encouraging illegal immigration,” says Nicola Rogers, an immigration lawyer in London. “If you cut off legal means, people just turn to smugglers.” The O.E.C.D.’s Garson agrees about the ineffectiveness of efforts to head off illegal flows, but thinks they should be strengthened anyway. “Efforts to stop illegal migrants may be the only way governments have of selling the need to let in the ones we need for employment,” he says.

EUROPE IS FULL
Compared to what? The idea that there is no room left for newcomers became a clarion call for Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands. But that country’s most densely populated region, the urban agglomeration that stretches from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, is less densely settled than southeastern England or Germany’s Ruhr Valley, where politicans have yet to get much traction from the “Enough is enough” slogan. Currently, the E.U. takes in about 5% of the world’s refugee population, according to the unhcr. “What we’re dealing with now are the consequences not of today’s immigrants, but the children of the people we took in the 1960s and 1970s,” says Garson. “These children had better opportunities for education than their parents and grandparents, yet paradoxically they can’t find jobs.” That suggests that Europe’s bigger challenge is integrating its existing minorities, even if politicians prefer to concentrate on the more dramatic business of stopping new ones from coming in.

Every individual’s story is different, but in the accompanying vignettes we chronicle some of the way stations along an immigrant’s path that highlight the risks and the promises of that journey.