Slate – How Europe Deals With Immigration
For Slate Magazine Alexandra Starr has made an overview of the integration and immigration policies in six European countries: Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Poland, Ireland and Spain.
Germany: History’s Long Shadow
BERLIN, Germany—”Turks are nice!” declared posters plastered all over the Berlin subways during the 1980s. There are no touchy-feely directives on the walls today, but political correctness is still pervasive here. The Holocaust casts a long shadow in this country, and part of the atonement is an unspoken rule against bashing the country’s 7.8 million residents of foreign descent.
In the fall of 2007, Arigona Zogaj became such a well-known figure in Austria that people referred to the 15-year-old by her first name. Her prominence wasn’t due to a hit record or a modeling triumph—some of the more common reasons teenagers become famous. It was because she defied the Austrian government.
[…]
Austria has some of the toughest immigration laws in Europe. The country’s rules for entry are a Russian doll of quotas. The federal government caps the number of non-EU citizens who can move to Austria every year. (In 2006, the limit was 7,000 people—that figure included both skilled professionals and immigrants wishing to join family members already living in the country.) Then the nine provincial governments set limits on the number of foreigners who can live in their geographic regions.
Failure To Integrate in the Netherlands
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands—When Dutch politician Geert Wilders announced in November 2007 that he was releasing a film about the Quran, the government girded itself for potential catastrophe. Wilders, who sports a bleached-blond bouffant hairdo, has likened the Quran to Mein Kampf and called for it to be banned. His film was sure to offend Muslim sensibilities—and the Dutch had already experienced, in a visceral way, what a provocative film about the Muslim faith can unleash.
Four years ago, a radical Dutch-Moroccan murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh after he released a short documentary criticizing the treatment of women under Islam. Pinned to van Gogh’s chest with a knife was a letter threatening the filmmaker’s collaborator, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Wilders received his own share of “you’re next” warnings; both he and Ali have been under heavy police protection ever since.Van Gogh’s brutal killing prodded a fundamental change in the Netherlands’ immigration laws. It came just two years after another convulsive event—the murder of populist politician Pim Fortuyn, who had advocated halting all immigration into the Netherlands. It was the first political assassination in Holland in more than 300 years, and it deeply shook Dutch society. Conservative parties were swept into power in the national election immediately after the killing of Fortuyn. The vicious attack on van Gogh bolstered the government’s mandate to crack down—and former Minister for Immigration and Integration Rita Verdonk (popularly known as “Iron Rita”) made the most of the opportunity.
Declaring the days of “cozy tea drinking” with Muslim groups to be over, Verdonk ushered in a series of reforms that stanched immigration from Morocco and Turkey. Holland had imported workers from those countries in the 1960s and early ’70s, and although the guest-worker program was discontinued in the mid-1970s, family reunification and, more recently, marriages between Dutch residents and people from their ancestral homelands sustained the migratory flow. Approximately 10 percent of Holland’s 16.4 million inhabitants have non-Western roots, and about 1 million of these residents are Muslim.
One impact of Verdonk’s reforms over the last two years has been to change the profile of immigrants to the Netherlands. The country is now a net exporter of people. Of the 117,000 people who settled in the country in 2007, the majority were either returning Dutch citizens or citizens of countries like Poland, Germany, and Bulgaria. As EU citizens, these men and women have an automatic right to live in Holland, although Bulgarians do not, as yet, have permission to work there.
WARSAW, Poland—An odd commercial appeared on Polish TV in early 2008. It ostensibly shows English actor John Cleese rehearsing a pitch on behalf of a Polish bank. But once he hears the specifics of the offer, he trashes the script and insists on signing up for a loan for himself. The director demurs; Cleese lacks Polish citizenship and so cannot qualify. The British icon counters that he loves pirogi and speaks Polish. As proof, the actor yells out “Guten Morgen!”—revealing he has mistaken German for Polish.
It’s not hard to see why this spot (which is almost entirely in English with Polish subtitles) would appeal. For the last four years, Poles have served as one of the British press’s favorite whipping boys. When Poland joined the European Union in 2004, the United Kingdom was just one of three countries, along with Ireland and Sweden, that granted Poles and other new EU members the right to work. The British government estimated that about 15,000 Poles would move to England to work every year. Instead, a total of about 1 million have spent time in the United Kingdom. And while there are signs that they buoyed the economy, they also depressed wages in low-skill sectors, and some British parents have groused about Poles crowding their kids’ schools. Against that backdrop, the sight of a Brit dying to join a club only Poles can, and looking like a rube in the process, must bring a frisson of satisfaction.
When it comes to migration, Poland occupies an unusual position. While most Western European countries are figuring out how to handle the arrival of foreigners, Poland has dealt with the opposite quandary: By some estimates, 2 million of its 38 million citizens have worked abroad in the last four years. Some were gone for short stints, and there are signs that many who left for longer periods are returning, but nonetheless, their absence has left a hole back home. Thousands of Polish doctors have decamped, which means the queues at Polish health clinics are growing. The iconic “Polish plumber” was deployed in a French anti-EU ad campaign, but the term has gained currency in Britain as well, in part because, well, there are a lot of Polish handymen in the country. Households in Warsaw would love to catch sight of one. Poles complain that it’s impossible to find a trained electrician or building contractor, and if you do snag one, prices are sky-high.
In 2007, Irish writer Roddy Doyle published a short-story collection that serves as a sequel to his novel The Commitments. For those unfamiliar with the earlier book and film, it follows the trajectory of Jimmy Rabbitte*, a Dubliner bent on managing a great rock ‘n’ roll band. His group is on the verge of breakout success when ego clashes lead to the group’s disintegration.
Walloping economic growth made the so-called Celtic Tiger one of the richest countries on the continent and an immigration magnet. After centuries of emigration—particularly to Great Britain and the United States—Ireland has attracted thousands of newcomers. While the economy has cooled, foreigners have not, for the most part, headed for the exits: Approximately 10 percent of the country’s 4.1 million residents are now foreign-born. The diversity of this group becomes apparent as you stroll around Dublin: Filipino restaurants stand next to Polish grocery stores and African hair-braiding salons.
The ethnic pot
pourri can be explained by Ireland’s immigration laws. Before the enlargement of the European Union four years ago, the Irish government allowed businesses to hire workers from around the globe with few restrictions. More than 100,000 people arrived from approximately 150 different countries between 2000 and 2004. Ireland was one of just three EU countries to allow citizens of the new member states to work within its borders. (The others were Great Britain and Sweden.) Since then, the government has encouraged businesses to fill low-skill jobs with citizens from the new EU member states. According to 2006 statistics (the most recent available), about 70,000 Poles have successfully landed work in Ireland. The third-largest group of foreigners—after British and Polish—are Africans. There are about 50,000 Africans in Ireland, and many of them arrived as asylum seekers.This almost-overnight transformation to multiculturalism seems to have left Irish residents dazed. In some Dublin schools, more than 50 percent of the student body is now foreign-born. This has, understandably, engendered tension. According to a 2006 report by the Irish-based Economic and Social Research Institute, more than one-third of immigrants reported being insulted, threatened, or harassed in public because of their ethnic origin.
Still, many of the immigrants I encountered said they had felt mostly welcomed. […]
More significant than the anecdotes, of course, are government policies that promote immigrants’ integration. Noncitizens who have lived in the country for a minimum of six months, for example, are eligible to vote—even run—in local elections. The policy, which was adopted in 1972, was not crafted with an eye toward enfranchising immigrants but rather as a way to show up Northern Ireland. In the North, laws restricting voting rights had the effect of disenfranchising Catholics. This rankled predominately Catholic Ireland, and using residency as the basis for the right to vote was a way to set the country apart from its northern neighbor.
It wasn’t so long ago that Spain was considered one of the most immigrant-friendly countries in the world. In 2005, the nation’s European neighbors looked askance when the Spanish government instituted an amnesty program that granted residency papers to more than 500,000 foreigners. It was a potential first step to acquiring Spanish citizenship and, by extension, an EU passport. That wasn’t the only chance non-EU citizens had to settle in the country through legal channels: The government has also allowed businesses to recruit for so-called hard-to-fill positions—ranging from medical technician to domestic worker—by hiring abroad. Last year, more than 200,000 foreigners arrived in Spain this way. Upon arrival, newcomers both legal and illegal could access Spain’s health care system at no cost by registering at the local town hall.
It was a mix of economics, politics, and Spain’s colonial past that helped attract the masses. The economy took off in the 1990s, spawning millions of low-wage, low-skill jobs in construction, hotels, and domestic work in Spaniards’ homes. Until three years ago, most newcomers arrived in the country without permission to stay. Even so, the vast majority found jobs building homes, waiting tables, cleaning houses, and looking after old people.
[…]
The real turning point, however, was not the specter of violence but the financial downturn. While Zapatero’s Socialist Party triumphed in the March 2008 general election despite a sputtering economy, the Conservative Party showed gains in some working-class regions that have traditionally been socialist territory. The conservatives’ promise of reducing immigration appealed to Spaniards who felt most economically vulnerable—and put the socialists under increasing pressure to demonstrate they have a handle on the flow of immigrants. The cash-to-leave offer came a few months later.
[…]
There are signs that the integration process may not be smooth. Even when the economy was on sounder footing, many of the immigrants I spoke with in Spain said they felt alienated from their new home. That was true even when they spoke the language and had acquired Spanish citizenship. The comment of one Ecuadorian woman I met seems prescient in retrospect, given the government’s emphasis on reducing the number of foreigners in the country as the economy contracts. “Immigrants here aren’t seen as people,” she said. “They are viewed as instruments of work.”