Fewer People Seek Asylum in Europe

Date: 17-03-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal

Mediterranean crossings have fallen sharply as EU authorities and national governments have clamped down on migration routes

ROME—Asylum applications in European Union countries have dropped to levels seen before the migration crisis erupted in 2015, showing the effects of European governments’ efforts to slow the inflow of refugees and other migrants that has caused political friction across the continent.

Around 580,000 people made a first claim for asylum in the EU in 2018, an 11% drop from the previous year, according to the bloc’s statistical agency Eurostat. In 2014, Europe received 560,000 first-time applications, before a peak of more than 1.2 million in 2015 and 2016.

The trend of asylum applications has tended to follow, with a time delay, the numbers of refugees and other migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea and reaching EU countries outside regular channels. Mediterranean crossings to Europe have fallen sharply as EU authorities and national governments have clamped down on migration routes, particularly those from Turkey to Greece and from Libya to Italy.

Renewing Europe

Mar 4, 2019 Emmanuel Macron, Project Syndicate

Emmanuel Macron is President of France.

European citizens need to learn from the Brexit impasse and apply those lessons ahead of and after the European Parliament election in May. That means embracing reforms that advance the three goals that lie at the heart of the European project.

PARIS – Never, since World War II, has Europe been as essential. Yet never has Europe been in so much danger. Brexit stands as the symbol of that. It symbolises the crisis of Europe, which has failed to respond to its peoples’ needs for protection from the major shocks of the modern world. It also symbolises the European trap. That trap is not one of being part of the European Union. The trap is in the lie and the irresponsibility that can destroy it.

Who told the British people the truth about their post-Brexit future? Who spoke to them about losing access to the European market? Who mentioned the risks to peace in Ireland of restoring the former border? Nationalist retrenchment offers nothing; it is rejection without an alternative. And this trap threatens the whole of Europe: the anger mongers, backed by fake news, promise anything and everything.1

We have to stand firm, proud and lucid, in the face of this manipulation and say first of all what today’s united Europe is. It is a historic success: the reconciliation of a devastated continent in an unprecedented project of peace, prosperity and freedom. We should never forget that. And this project continues to protect us today. What country can act on its own in the face of aggressive strategies by the major powers? Who can claim to be sovereign, on their own, in the face of the digital giants?

How would we resist the crises of financial capitalism without the euro, which is a force for the entire European Union? Europe is also those thousands of projects daily that have changed the face of our regions: the school refurbished, the road built, and the long-awaited arrival of high-speed Internet access. This struggle is a daily commitment, because Europe, like peace, can never be taken for granted. I tirelessly pursue it in the name of France to take Europe forward and defend its model. We have shown that what we were told was unattainable, the creation of a European defence capability and the protection of social rights, was in fact possible.

Dangerous Alliances on Migration

Date: 12-12-2018
Source: YaleGlobal by Lena Riemer

European nations that once promoted human rights are slinking away from these obligations and forming agreements with some third parties that have terrible records on human rights. “The European Union’s migration control policy relies on fortification and deterrence, contributing to massive human rights violations beyond its borders,” explains Lena Riemer, a 2018-2019 Fox International Fellow based at Yale’s MacMillan Center. “Creation of migrant slave markets in Northern Africa, life-threatening attempts to cross border fences into Spanish territory as well as more than 2,000 reported deaths in the Mediterranean this year alone can be traced back in part to the EU’s externalization of migration policy, in force since 2010 and becoming more extreme in 2015.” Opposition to migration is fueling populist demands for tough border policies regardless of horrific conditions, desperation and increasing deaths. Still, the numbers of migrants fleeing war, persecution and climate disasters are climbing worldwide, reports the United Nations. Riemer urges humane border control with comprehensive policies that address the root causes. – YaleGlobal

Cooperation between the EU and third parties on migration control and detention is contributing to human rights violations

NEW HAVEN: The European Union’s migration-control policy relies on fortification and deterrence, contributing to massive human rights violations beyond its borders. EU funding supports detention centers in Turkey, Libya, Morocco, Niger and other countries, some unknown, as part of a global strategy.

A heroic sailor faces expulsion from Italy’s Five Star Movement

Date: 22-11-2018
Source: The Economist

Captain Gregorio De Falco shows the cracks within the ruling coalition

Seldom has the morale of Italians fallen as low as in 2012 when the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship, was wrecked near the Tuscan coast and abandoned by its Italian captain. Thirty-two passengers and crew died. The giant capsized hulk seemed to symbolise the failure of a country that months earlier had almost sunk the euro. But one man preserved Italy’s self-respect. Recordings surfaced of a coast-guard officer, Gregorio De Falco, furiously rebuking the skipper. His (unheeded) order to Captain Francesco Schettino to “Get on board, for fuck’s sake” became a national catchphrase.

Captain De Falco has since entered politics. In March he was elected a senator for the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (m5s), which has pledged to clean up Italian politics. Yet barely eight months on, this national hero is facing expulsion from the movement’s group in the upper house, having twice put his conscience ahead of his party. On November 7th Mr De Falco was among five m5s senators who refused to vote for a decree on security and immigration backed by the government, a coalition between m5sand the hard-right Northern League.

How language problems bedevil the response to crises

Date: 15-11-2018
Source: The Economist

To solve them, interpreters must grasp cultural differences as well as linguistic ones

Sitting on a muddy floor beneath a tarpaulin roof, Nabila, a 19-year-old Bangladeshi, fiddles with her shoelaces as she listens to Tosmida, a Rohingya woman in her mid-30s. Both are crying. Nabila, a student-turned-interpreter, says awkwardly: “She had it from all of them in her secret place.”

The struggle to tell the story of Tosmida’s gang-rape is not just an emotional but a linguistic one. Since some 700,000 Rohingyas escaped persecution in Myanmar and fled to Bangladesh over a year ago, many Bangladeshis like Nabila have suddenly found themselves with new jobs, as interpreters. Tosmida’s Rohingya and Nabila’s Chittagonian are related but not identical. Interpreters, quickly trained, must try their best to understand another language, and fill in the gaps left by cultural differences—including taboos about what victims can say.

The biggest practical issues concern health, says A.K. Rahim, a linguistics researcher working with Translators Without Borders (twb), a group that helps humanitarian agencies. In Chittagonian, health terms come from Bengali and English; scientific knowledge and vocabulary have trickled down from educated elites. But among the relatively few educated Rohingyas, health terms come from Burmese. Most—especially women, who tend to be cut off from the outside world and denied education—have not been touched by that learning. Instead they have developed their own lexicon. They avoid haiz (menstruation) and say gusol (shower). Diarrhoea, a common camp ailment, was routinely misdiagnosed in the first few months. Many Rohingyas reported, “My body is falling apart” (“Gaa-lamani biaram”), baffling health-care workers.

40 Prozent der Wiener Unternehmer haben Migrationshintergrund

Regina Bruckner, 13. Oktober 2018, 12:00 derstandard.at

Die Zahl der ausländischen Entrepreneure in Österreich steigt. Nicht alle nehmen freiwillig diesen Weg

„Als Friseur musst du ein bisschen verrückt sein. Ich will wie Zohan sein.“ Noch ist Hasan Ali Duran nicht so weit, dass die Damenwelt vor dem eigenen Salon Schlange steht wie bei Zohan – seinem boratähnlichen Vorbild aus dem aberwitzigen Klamaukfilm Leg dich nicht mit Zohan an. Noch hat er Lehrjahre vor sich – bei Joel’s Dreamhair im fünften Wiener Gemeindebezirk. Bis er, wie sein vom US-Blödler Adam Sandler verkörpertes Vorbild, Frauen mit seinem „silky smooth“-Stil glücklich macht, wird der 19-Jährige wohl noch viele Haare vom Boden aufkehren. Schicke schwarze Maojacke, aschblondes, akkurat geschnittenes Haar, fein säuberlich gestutzter Schnurrbart, seine Profession trägt der junge Mann schon jetzt mit Stolz und Lausbubenhaftigkeit vor sich her. Kunden hält er mit überschwänglicher Geste und angedeuteter Eleganz die Tür zur Gasse auf – Zohan lässt grüßen.

Sein eigener Herr

How Europe Can Reform Its Migration Policy

An essential article! (hfk)

Date: 06-10-2018
Source: Foreign Affairs By Alexander Betts and Paul Collier

The Importance of Being Sustainable

Three years since the start of the European refugee crisis, the continent’s politics are still convulsed by disagreements over migration. This is despite the sharp decline in the number of people crossing the Mediterranean into Europe—60,000 between January and August 2018, compared with over one million in 2015 and 350,000 in 2016. The crisis, in short, is not one of numbers but one of trust: European publics believe that migration is out of control and that their leaders have no real plan for handling it.

Among the new arrivals, some are refugees with no choice but to flee to Europe, while others are refugees who might have found protection closer to home. But many are aspirational migrants, leaving poor but not necessarily dangerous countries, such as Morocco and Tunisia, for better jobs and opportunities in the EU. Europe’s problem is that it currently has no effective way of distinguishing between these groups or of forcing EU member states to share responsibility for legitimate refugees. And with some countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, which return less than half of rejected asylum seekers, migrants without a real claim to asylum have an incentive to apply for it anyway, knowing they will probably be able to stay regardless of the bureaucratic outcome. The absence of rule of law in the admission of migrants, coupled with haphazard integration policies, undermines public confidence, in turn fueling a populist backlash with devastating consequences for both migrant welfare and European democracy. From Brexit to the rise of the populist Alternative for Germany party, divisions relating to migration have poisoned politics.

Fortress Europe versus Eurafrica, that is the question

Date: 20-09-2018
Source: The Economist: Charlemagne
Subject: Why Europe should focus on its growing interdependence with Africa

Sealing the Mediterranean will not work

IT IS a peculiarly modern habit to think of the Mediterranean Sea as a boundary. For over two millennia, civilisations bled across it and intermingled. Roman, Carthaginian, Moorish and Venetian empires expanded primarily along maritime routes. It took four days to get from imperial Rome to today’s Tunisia, but 11 days to reach Milan. The Sahara restricted contact between this Mediterranean Eurafrica and the regions to the south, but not entirely. A study of 22 skulls from Roman London found that four were African, for example. The medieval wealth of desert trading cities like Timbuktu and Agadez spoke of extensive north-south commerce. Later European colonialists penetrated, pillaged and parcelled up the continent; African troops fought in the trenches of the first world war; Europeans fought in Africa in the second.

Three subsequent events curbed this trans-Mediterraneanism. European powers left Africa with decolonisation; many African states sought to be neutral during the cold war; Europeans turned towards Asia’s booming markets as globalisation took hold. Tellingly, the geopolitical buzzword of the moment is “Eurasia”. Europe and Asia are integrating along old Silk Road routes, especially under China’s Belt and Road infrastructure splurge, yet “Eurafrica” remains relatively little discussed. Europe is too busy rushing into Asia’s arms to embrace a continent on its doorstep which may be even more significant in the long term.

Today’s waves of African migration are merely a prelude. Of the 2.2bn citizens added to the global population by 2050, 1.3bn will be Africans—about the size of China’s population today. And more of them will have the means to travel.

Date: 10-09-2018
Source: The Economist
Subject: The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats fail to achieve an electoral breakthrough

Their vote rose at the election on September 9th, but far less than they hoped

VOTERS have a funny habit of wrecking pundits’ storylines. The election on September 9th in Sweden was supposed to be a rebuke of the country’s generous refugee policies during the migrant crisis of 2015, and yet another signal that European populism is on the rise. The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats were to become the country’s biggest or second-biggest party. The governing Social Democrats would fall victim to the malaise that afflicts centre-left parties around the world. And the Moderates and their bloc of centre-right parties, the Alliance, were expected to win a solid enough plurality to unseat Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and form the next government.

Instead, the Social Democrats won, or at least did not lose. Polls had shown them with as little as 23% of the vote, but they ended up with 28.4%, just 2.8 percentage points less than four years earlier and still the largest party by far. The Moderates’ 19.8% was also better than most recent polls, but still 3.5 percentage points less than in 2014, not a resounding mandate for their leader, Ulf Kristersson. The Sweden Democrats went from 12.9% to 17.6%—a hefty increase, but not enough for them to become the second-largest party, as they had hoped. The result fell well short of predictions; some pollsters had put them in the low twenties, and one or two had even suggested that they would end up as the largest party. A high turnout, partly driven by fears of just such a breakthrough, may have helped hold their share down.

Sex and Populism

Sep 5, 2018 Daniel Gros, Project Syndicate

Daniel Gros is Director of the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies. He has worked for the International Monetary Fund, and served as an economic adviser to the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the French prime minister and finance minister. He is the editor of Economie Internationale and International Finance.

Even as the flow of refugees into Europe dwindles, anti-immigrant sentiment continues to rise, and is now being expressed violently in some areas. Economic factors probably play an important role, but to understand opposition to immigration also requires taking evolutionary psychology into account.

BRUSSELS – The rate at which migrants are arriving has diminished considerably almost everywhere in Europe since the huge inflows seen in 2015. Yet migration continues to dominate political debate throughout the European Union. This suggests that populist, anti-immigrant sentiment is not actually being driven by claims that mainstream politicians cannot defend Europe’s frontiers.

The decline in new arrivals to Europe began well before anti-immigrant political leaders took power in Italy or immigration pressure nearly toppled Germany’s ruling coalition. It is largely the result of EU efforts, such as the agreement with Turkey to prevent Syrians from crossing into Greece, its cooperation with Libyan militias, and the massive pressure it has placed on the Sahara transit states to close their borders. Thanks to these measures, Europe has become a de facto fortress against migration.

So why does immigration remain at the top of many Europeans’ minds? The answer could be economic: those who arrived in 2015-2016 have already created labor-market imbalances, with low-skill immigrants increasingly competing for jobs with low-skill citizens. And it is true that in most of Europe, hostility toward foreigners runs deepest among low-skill workers.