Voter Suppression Comes to Europe

Jan 9, 2020 Federico Fubini, Project Syndicate

Federico Fubini, an economics journalist and editor-at-large at Corriere della Sera, is the author, most recently, of Per Amor Proprio, a reflection on Italy’s identity crisis in its relations with the EU.

Recent national and EU-level election results show that while intra-EU migrants tend to support more liberal, pro-EU parties, their participation in elections lags far behind that of their domestic counterparts. Worse, populist and illiberal governments are increasingly exploiting expats‘ lower turnout for their own benefit.

ROME – Voter suppression first emerged in the United States between 1885 and 1908, when 11 southern states enacted laws designed to discourage or hinder former slaves and their descendants from voting. Since then, similar strategies have been tried in Canada, Australia, and Israel. And now, electoral discrimination may be coming to Europe, with several European Union member states exploring ways to block or discourage key constituents from voting.

Officially, there are around 17 million EU citizens living and working in another EU country (the actual tally of intra-European migrants is surely higher). Most of these intra-EU migrants are younger and more educated than the European average, and hail from economically weaker countries that are more prone to populist jingoism. In fact, many have emigrated precisely because they have more pro-EU, cosmopolitan leanings.

Where the migrants of 2020 will go

Date: 06‑01‑2020

Source: The Economist

Migrants in 2020 will end up in poorer places

IN 2015 A RECORD number of migrants, hoping to escape violence and poverty, entered Europe illegally. Five years on, the picture will look very different. It is impossible to know how many people will migrate in 2020, but easier to predict where they will end up. America, Australia and EU countries have beefed up their borders, so relatively few would‑be migrants will be accepted compared with the numbers wanting to come. Instead, countries around the edges of the rich world (such as Egypt and Turkey), and ones farther away (such as Bangladesh and Colombia), have been taking in more.

Migrants out of sight will not be out of mind, however. Funding for border patrols in rich countries will rise, but not as steeply as funding to keep migrants from setting out in the first place. In the past five years, the European Union has pledged nearly 50 times more to discourage people from leaving poor countries—with aid, jobs and border surveillance—than to guard its own boundaries. Such programmes will grow and multiply in the year ahead.

How migration makes the world brainier

Date: 15-11-2019
Source: The Economist
Hyperconnected migrants accelerate the spread of ideas

Migration spreads ideas. Often, good ones. Sometimes as simple as warm cassava buns stuffed with cheese.

Cristina Talacko moved to Australia because she married an Australian. Her foreign law degrees did not allow her to practise there so she started her own business. She noticed that her friends loved it when she served pão de queijo, a light, fluffy, buttery snack from her native Brazil. So she went back to Brazil and studied how to make the buns in bulk. She could not find the right machinery in Australia, so she imported it from Brazil and started selling what for Aussies was a novel (and gluten-free) treat. Business boomed. Now Ms Talacko exports tasty tucker to 25 countries.

Everywhere, immigrants are likelier than the native-born to start their own business. People who pack up and fly thousands of miles to start a new life obviously have get-up-and-go. Also, many countries do not recognise foreign qualifications, as Ms Talacko found, so migrants often become entrepreneurs. A survey in 2015 found that the most common surnames for founders of new firms in Italy were Hu, Chen and Singh, with Rossi a distant fourth.

How the media contributed to the migrant crisis

Date: 03-08-2019
Source: The Guardian By Daniel Trilling

Disaster reporting plays to set ideas about people from ‘over there’.

When did you notice the word “migrant” start to take precedence over the many other terms applied to people on the move? For me it was in 2015, as the refugee crisis in Europe reached its peak. While debate raged over whether people crossing the Mediterranean via unofficial routes should be regarded as deserving candidates for European sympathy and protection, it seemed as if that word came to crowd out all others. Unlike the other terms, well-meaning or malicious, that might be applied to people in similar situations, this one word appears shorn of context; without even an im- or an em- attached to it to indicate that the people it describes have histories or futures. Instead, it implies an endless present: they are migrants, they move, it’s what they do. It’s a form of description that, until 2015, I might have expected to see more often in nature documentaries, applied to animals rather than human beings.

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