Blinded on the right: Missing the boat on immigration
Rocca, Francis X.
"Blinded on the right: Missing the boat on immigration" Blind Spots on the Resurgent Right Europe's newly empowered center-right parties doomed to fail unless they change their tune on immigration BY FRANCIS X. ROCCA is a woman in her...
...Austria has not significantly tightened its immigration policy, however, perhaps because of the international opprobrium and diplomatic sanctions that greeted the current government's formation in February 2000...
...She'll also be eligible for Italy's state-subsidized health care and in return will pay taxes on her income...
...Germany's Christian Democratic leader Edmund Stoiber calls immigrants a "heavy additional burden" on his nation and wants to halt their admission indefinitely...
...Luckily for Olga, a law passed in July provides for the "regularization" of domestic workers like herself, so she'll soon have a residence permit and be free to travel legally between Italy and her native land...
...Italy isn't the only E.U...
...Any solution to the aging of Europe will have to include immigration...
...The Netherlands now requires a resident alien who wants to bring his wife or child into the country to show an income at least 30 percent higher than the nation's minimum wage...
...Getting tough on immigration is even catching on with the center-left: Aznar's proposal was coSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37 sponsored by none other than Britain's Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, to the chagrin of some of his cabinet...
...People desperate enough to risk their lives in overcrowded boats or trucks will not be deterred by the threat of deportation...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39...
...In Italy, where immigrants are only 2.5 percent of the population (compared to over 9 percent in Germany—the highest proportion in the E.U.—and 10 percent in the United States), a quarter of prison inmates are illegal aliens, typically picked up for theft, drugs or prostitution...
...As anyone who has spent time in Europe can tell you, the people—almost always women—providing these services are overwhelmingly "extracommunitarians" like Olga...
...Others like Olga come for longer stretches to meet certain financial goals...
...for the foreseeable future...
...Terrorists, too, like every sort of criminal, will find it easier to infiltrate European populations as part of a clandestine mass, rather than as participants in—or conspicuous exceptions to—a bureaucratic system in which most immigrants are documented and tracked...
...in half a century, a startling scenario to say the least...
...Europe needs foreigners to do the jobs that natives scorn, such as cleaning its streets, shops and offices, and picking its crops...
...would need to increase annual immigration to 15 times the 1990s rate, according to a study by the United Nations Population Division...
...Labor unions are shrinking yet still strong, and voters' expectations are deeply shaped by the statist past, so instant reform is not politically realistic...
...But workers don't contribute to a nation's pension system nor fully share the burden of its taxes unless they work legally, which makes forcing immigration into illicit channels a waste of potential resources...
...Nowhere is this relationship clearer than in the case of immigrants who labor in private homes, freeing those with small children or elderly relatives to pursue gainful work outside...
...Blaming immigrants for crime, unemployment and high government spending, they are passing laws to make it harder for foreigners to enter and stay...
...country this year to pass severe anti-immigration laws...
...Silvio Berlusconi in Italy campaigned on a platform of lower taxes, more generous pensions, safer streets, better schools and a freer labor market...
...won't get an entry visa without a work contract in hand and will have to leave the country when the con-tract expires...
...leaders to withdraw development aid from poor countries that don't help stem the flow of their citizens to Europe...
...Most candidates have focused instead on reducing unemployment, crime and taxes, and on improving the quality ofpublic services such as health and education...
...Migration is a wrenching process, permanent migration even more so, and few would abandon their families and cultures except out of material necessity...
...CLAMP DOWN We can be sure that immigrants will find their way in, as long as there is a market for them...
...Blind Spots on the Resurgent Right Europe's newly empowered center-right parties doomed to fail unless they change their tune on immigration B Y F R A N C I S X R O C C A 1ga is a woman in her mid-40s with a husband, three children and a farm in one of the former republics of the Soviet Union...
...One way to preserve the support ratio without immigration, according to the United Nations, would be to raise the retirement age (now as low as 57) to 76...
...Not only are immigrants thus employed not taking jobs from Europeans, they are actually making possible the jobs that Europeans want...
...The need for people to look after the aged is growing particularly urgent, since Europe has some of the world's oldest populations and lowest rates of fertility...
...Europeans are becoming inured to disasters like last March's death of 50 Kurds, who drowned after their rubber dinghy capsized off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa—or the case two years ago of 58 Chinese, suffocated in the back of a refrigerated truck being ferried from Belgium to England...
...As the traditional party of law and order, only the right can reassure voters that increased immigration will not mean a rise in crime...
...Social workers report that thousands of European prostitutes are essentially slaves to gangs that lure them from their home countries with promises of honest work, then force them with threats of violence to sell their bodies on the street...
...The largest single issue in the German elections turned out to be unemployment, whose steady rise has mocked the pledges of Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder...
...Last winter she handed over the scrounged equivalent of $5,000 and boarded a bus for Italy, with a tourist visa and enough luggage for a 10-day visit, but like all the other passengers, with plans to stay much longer...
...An aged or infirm Italian who wants to a hire an "extracommunitarian" will have to meet minimum-income requirements—as high as ˆ45,000 ($43,700) per year for a resident of Rome or Milan...
...Olga has no intention of settling in Italy...
...While families are no doubt grateful for the money, it's impossible to believe that a few thousand dollars in a rich Western economy can make the difference in deciding whether or not to have a child...
...Such accusations are often unfair and never persuasive...
...Newcomers must take a 500-hour course in Dutch language and culture costing ˆ7,000 ($6,800), half-reimbursable upon completion...
...Such a system, of course, depends on making it worthwhile for people to declare their presence rather than sneak in, and that means letting in most people who ask...
...Every year, citizens of African and Balkan nations come to work on farms in southern Europe, then go home at the end of the season...
...Portugal's Jose Manuel Durao Barroso vowed to shrink the number of public workers, whose salaries consume 1.5 percent of the gross national product, the highest proportion in the E.U...
...will not have abundant jobs till the law makes it easier to lay off, and thus also to hire...
...Indirectly, the French Neo-Gaullists owe their huge new majority to the anti-immigration campaigner Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose unexpectedly strong showing in the May presidential race ended the career of the left's most prominent leader and drove mainstream political opinion toward the party of President Jacques Chirac...
...Austria pays parents ˆ436 ($423) a month for the first three years of a child's life, a pro-gram championed by Haider for the same reason...
...Navy gun ships will help the coast guard to patrol Italy's shores...
...By espousing patriotism and abjuring multiculturalism in education—something of which the European left seems constitutionally incapable—the right can counter worries that immigration will break the continuity of national culture...
...The streetwalkers in Paris and Berlin seem to be almost exclusively African or Eastern European...
...National identity is far more threatened by the E.U: s economic and political integration, but that is the subject for another article...
...With the tightening of immigration policy, such deaths will become even more common...
...Some of these leaders may genuinely believe that reducing immigration is a necessary measure to ensure their nations' stability and prosperity...
...Crime, poverty and increased estrangement between natives and the foreign-born: these will be the fruits of harsh immigration policies and their accompanying rhetoric of "invasion...
...These laws only exacerbate the problems they purportedly solve, and envenom society in the bargain...
...The average Italian or Spanish woman now has only 1.2 children in her lifetime, the average German or Greek only 1.3...
...With the money she sends home, she and her husband are building a house and sending their daughter to university...
...Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to Italy have received amnesty over the last 16 years, but—if those responsible for the July law are to be believed—Olga and an estimated quarter-million others in her position will be the last...
...For nearly a year, she's worked as the live-in caretaker of an elderly Italian woman, doing housecleaning and ironing for other clients in her spare time...
...Already almost a quarter of Italians, Greeks and Germans are over 65 years of age...
...In Bangladesh, Professor Harris reports, such foreign remittances have equaled more than half the country's own annual export earnings...
...For bet-ter or worse, no one is predicting the sort of economic growth that could draw and absorb such an influx...
...Illegal aliens will be expelled more swiftly...
...Spain's moderate conservative Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar this summer tried to convince fellow E.U...
...In order to preserve the current support ratio—the number of working-age persons per retiree—the E.U...
...Yet the center-right has deemed antiimmigrationism a necessary ingredient in the recipe for victory...
...High unemployment in the major economies of the common-currency "Eurozone" provokes resentment of foreign-born competitors for scarce jobs, and of supposedly idle immigrants sponging off the welfare state...
...she will stay only as long as she must to help her family...
...Denmark—like the Netherlands, a country once famed for its liberal immigration policies—has extended the waiting period for permanent residency from three to seven years and raised to 24 the minimum age at which a citizen may marry a foreigner...
...This short-sighted opportunism will discredit and undermine the urgent economic reforms that are the center-right's worthy cause...
...The politics of immigration has thus proved key to the rise of the European center-right, which regardless of the result of the September 22nd German elections, is set to dominate the E.U...
...It includes the many millions paid to smugglers and the unquantifiable suffering of their human cargo...
...The only way to allay voters' doubts and fears about immigration is to address those doubts and fears directly, andthis is something the right is uniquely well suited to do...
...Paying poor countries to keep their citizens at home would prove even less effective, since no foreign aid package could match the amount of money that emigrant workers send back to their native lands...
...Clamping down on immigration 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 foments criminality and misery inside a nation's borders too...
...And who will pay the pensions...
...anyone who arrived without permission after November 2001 will be deported...
...Even some leaders without populist coalition partners to appease are taking a hard line on it...
...Multicultural propaganda does nothing to mollify them...
...Olga misses her family, but hasn't been back to visit them because it would cost too much to be smuggled into Italy again...
...That would mean more than tripling the population of the current E.U...
...Yet the policies they are promoting are disastrous for Europe and for the right...
...As for the fear that immigrants will steal jobs fromnatives, some on the center-right—notably Italy's Berlusconi—are now pointing out what even the neo-liberal center-left still dares not: that the E.U...
...But in the case of immigration, courage is overdue...
...It is especially shameful that they are the work of the newly resurgent center-right, the political force most capable of bringing Europe around to the open immigration policy that it needs...
...In the process, she is providing services that her Italian clients, especially the old woman, could not otherwise afford...
...The longer the center-right remains nativist, the worse for it and the worse for Europe...
...Not just the computer programmers and other high-skilled workers for whichgovernments often make exceptions—though these, too, are wearing out their welcome, even with mainstream parties like Germany's Christian Democrats...
...These laws reflect Europe's recent and marked shift to the right...
...An aspiring immigrant from outside the E.U...
...Yet the cost of illegal immigration is even higher than lost tax revenue...
...A former managing editor of The American Spectator, he has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly and The Jerusalem Post...
...Portugal will now favor the immigration of skilled workers and make newcomers wait eight years for residency...
...Yet Europe needs immigrants, in far higher numbers than it has been taking them...
...GO AWAY I is not surprising that many Europeans resist the idea of continued immigration...
...Though the impact of 9/11 was far less powerful here than in the States, it has unsurprisingly raised Europeans' suspicions of millions of foreign-born Muslims living among them...
...It's a sad irony that an anti-immigrationist is Italy's labor minister, trying to liberalize the labor market with one hand as he protects it from international competition with the other...
...Mean-while, crime has risen steeply in European cities, and foreigners make up a disproportionate share of the culprits...
...Nigel Harris, an economist at University College London, notes that the more sophisticated and well-paying occupations depend for their existence on the humbler tasks with-out which business could not be done...
...The easier it is for people to come, the more likely it is that they will go, knowing that they can come back if they need to earn more money...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 All across the European Union, politicians are treating Olga and millions like her as threats to their nations' survival...
...It was blocked by Chirac, no doubt anxious to disassociate himself from any policy smacking of Le Penism...
...The next generation of Europeans will not be numerous enough to care for their own parents...
...They will slow economic growth, contribute to the rise in crime, make life harder for both foreign-born residents and natives and imperil the financial security of future generations...
...Defending immigration in Europe is currently the self-assigned brief of the left, whose primary tactic is to cry "racist" at anyone who betrays qualms about open borders...
...Germany's Stoiber has called his country's low fertility rate a "ticking time bomb for the social security system and our whole economy" and has proposed tripling the monthly kindergeld child allowance—now ˆ200 ($194)—to encourage bigger families...
...This is how illegal aliens from Mexico helped save the Los Angeles garment industry, making more work for everybody from designers on down...
...The shrinking of European families has complex social causes, and demographers do not foresee an imminent reversal...
...Under anti-immigration regimes, these people are much likelier to stay put where they are (officially) unwanted...
...Francis X. Rocca is an American writer in Rome...
...Chirac promised Frenchmen a five-year, ˆ30-billion ($29.1-billion) income tax cut, lower employment taxes and more spending on police and the military...
...Taking their lead from the likes of Germany's Free Democrats, who want to cut unemployment benefits as an incentive to work, the right can dispel fears of immigrants abusing the welfare system...
...People resent being called racists for worrying about the security of their jobs, the safety of their children or the survival of their ancestral culture...
...In battling for economic liberalization, Europe's center-right must often strike a balance between courage and prudence...
...In Austria, the center-right governs with the participation of Jorg Haider's anti-immigration Freedom Party...
...The shift now underway in Europe's ethnic composition is the biggest it has ever experienced, rendering the effects of all previous migrations and invasions marginal by comparison...
...Yet alternative remedies will not be an easy sell to voters...
...Populist parties that make stopping or slowing immigration a central point in their platforms now provide crucial parliamentary support to center-right governments in Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark and Portugal, all of which came to power in the last year and a half...
...From now on, Italy's version of the golden door will open far more selectively...
...Such policies are not worthy of the center-right's Christian Democratic tradition, with its emphasis on social "solidarity," nor of the smaller (though increasingly influential) European tradition of free-market liberalism...
...At the increasingly common sight of dark-skinned men and head-starved women in historic town squares, Europe's ethnically homogenous and still highly traditional societies fear the erosion of national identity...
...Immigration is hardly the center-right's only issue...
Vol. 35 • September 2002 • No. 5
