Migration

The big story in Europe this week was Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to Germany and the controversial speech he gave to 20,000 of his expat voters regarding integration or assimilation into their host nation. A separate commentary on that question will follow shortly on this blog. In the meantime, Australia is stepping up its efforts to attract highly-qualified migrants, while the red tape currently tying up existing green card applications could be turning away the migrants the United States wants to bring in. More from migration related stories from around the world below:

• The Editorial in the New York Times’ weekend edition highlights modest improvements in clearing up the backlog of green card applications, that has built up over recent years. The authors rightly imply, that a way a bureaucracy treats its would-be citizens is indicative of the whether they are truly wanted or not. While that is undoubtedly true, the red tape applicants face in the US with respect to background checks by the FBI is nothing compared to the caveats future European citizens face.
• The NYT has also published an in-depth interview with Philippe Legrain, the author of Immigrants: Your country needs them, which is an extremely worthwhile read, especially alongside the views of George Borjas, whom we have quoted repeatedly in this blog for this economic arguments against low-skilled or illegal labor migration. The interview provides a good synopsis of Legrain’s book, though I would recommend you read it in full.
• The International Herald Tribune rebukes Republican presidential candidates’ views that “attrition” could be the ultimate weapon to drive out undocumented migrants.
• While other immigration countries are debating how to curtail the movement of people, Australia has announced it will increase the number of entry permits for migrants, given the high demand for their labor.
• The IHT covers a clash of immigration titans, as Marine Le Pen, the heir-apparent of the right-wing Front National in France takes on Muslim intelletual Tariq Ramadan. While their viewpoints are less than surprising, the fact that they agreed to face off in such a manner is worth reporting. Katrin Bennhold has the full story.

Like Canada and Australia, Britain has sought the adoption of an immigration points system in order to limit the number of unskilled workers entering the UK and promote highly skilled workers coming in to support the British Economy. While this idea is a logical one, it often leads to dozens of smaller issues which while limits the number of low-income immigrants, also makes life fairly intolerable in the process.

While not on a points system, the City of New York has set out to conquer an issue which is also prominent in cities like Toronto, Canada. New York has always had an issue with illegal immigrants being victims of unreported crimes because upon contacting legal officials, often the immigrant would be simultaneously placed into the removal process since they did not reside legally in New York and the US. In Toronto, while three years ago and prior to that police did not have powers to enforce immigration orders, since then they can now check someone’s legal status in Canada and detain them when responding to criminal investigations. The problem in immigrant cities like Toronto, is that due to the points system, people who used to come in as middle income workers often now come as illegal migrants. In Toronto as well as New York, immigrants not able to be personally secure because it will surely result in the end of their lives in their resident country.

Growing in great numbers due to its booming economy, the city of Calgary in Canada shows an example of how the lack of law enforcement for many illegals can lead to some undesirable situations. In the North-East part of the city, dozens of illegal Asian migrants were found working in an illegal brothel which takes advantage of many people in similar situations entering Canada without a proper legal status. Many similar organizations exist across the country, and due to the new police powers to enforce immigration rules, many more underground operations have the roots to keep them beyond the law.

The UK is likely to have many of these issues plaque their cities in the near future. While trying to crack down on immigration, there is a real threat that society as a whole will lose in the long run.

So much news this week and much of it not good: In Iraq, local authorities grappling with the large number of internally displaced people, as sectarian violence exacerbates. Still no light at the end of the tunnel for Zimbabwe, which has seen a mass exodus of its citizens to South Africa. Meanwhile, authorities there are trying to come to grips with how to categorize these migrants - as refugees? As economic migrants? Where to house them? What to do? Politicians and authorities in Germany have spent the week looking for answers on another pressing question: How to address overt racial violence in Eastern Germany? The attacks on eight Indian migrants in the tiny Saxon town of Muegeln is cause for more than just concern. Thank goodness, there’s positive news from Denmark, where a new integration scheme seems to be pedalling things in the right direction.

• The International Herald Tribune features a new series of articles on those internally displaced as a result of continued fighting in Iraq. We have covered the tenuous situation these migrants face in numerous stories on this blog, including the unwillingness of many European countries to accept additional Iraqi migrants or offer them protection in the first place. Now, it seems, certain Iraqi provinces are doing the same: “governmental and relief offices (report) that some provinces have refused to register any more displaced citizens or will accept only those whose families are originally from the area.” Read the IHT’s coverage here, here and here.
• In an somewhat related story, the United States has been forced to pay $250,000 in compensation to a recognized Iraqi refugee for wrongful detention back in 2003.
• In last week’s news roundup, we featured one of the many stories about Elvira Arellano, who quickly became a figurehead of the immigrant rights movement in the United States, when she staged a protest against her deportation while seeking refuge in a church. She has since been deported to Mexico, where she was subsequently arrested. Her young son - an American citizen - remains in the United States. Hundreds of supporters took to the street in LA to rally for her cause and those of thousands of other migrants like her.
• Following up on another of last week’s stories, the UN refugee chief has said that setting up refugee camps for Zimbabweans fleeing their country to South Africa was not the answer. In an Associated Press article, Antonio Guterres said that “only those who had never lived in camps would advocate such a solution.” He also said that action had to be taken, despite the fact that the majority of these migrants were economic, rather than political refugees. The South African government has been under increasing international pressure to react to this exacerbating situation.
• European governments are arguing their strategies toward reducing African migration to the continent are working: an article in this weekend’s New York Times reports that the number of migrants landing on European shores has been cut by a third. EU leaders link this decline in part to the launch of FRONTEX and to a number of legal changes that facilitate access to Mediterranean countries. These claims, of course, must be set against a recent news from the UNHCR, according to which at least 10,000 people have died trying to reach Europe’s “safe haven”. UNHCR representative Paolo Artini delivered his assessment to a hearing at the European Parliament in early July, where he criticized Member States’ inability to agree on burden sharing mechansims. Additional information can be found here (in German) and here.
• As we recently reported, a number of trade unions in Germany have been putting pressure on the government to ease up on labor mobility restrictions to allow qualified personnel to fill currently existing gaps in the labor economy. Following the European Union’s 2004 enlargement wave, the German government (along with a number of others) had insisted on a ban on workers from Eastern Europe moving to Germany, in part because of the high unemployment rate. The government has reconsidered this earlier decision, perhaps in part due to rising public pressure, but largely, because of economic necessity, as Judy Dempey reports in the New York Times.
• Those of you lucky enough to subscribe to the Financial Times will be privvy to a full article on European immigration flows, published early last week. The article refers to recent Goldman Sachs research on population mobility to Europe’s “core”, i.e. the old Member States. Seemingly flying in the face of those that the adverse effects of demographic change cannot be weakened by immigration, the article notes that migration to the EU15 had added “an estimated 8.7m people to their populations. Between 2001 and 2005, relative to the population, these 15 countries experienced net migration of 0.5 per cent per year on average – more than the US and far higher than the rate over the previous 40 years. But net migration into the larger EU25, which includes newer central and eastern European members, was slightly higher over the period at 8.8m. This suggests the underlying impetus came from workers entering the market from outside Europe, rather than from new EU members.”
• Australia has introduced a new citizenship test, which includes specific questions to test “mateship”. What’s that, you ask? It is a heavily criticized concept encompassing “tolerance, compassion, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and secular government, equality of men and women and peacefulness”. The test goes on to say that “Australia has a strong tradition of mateship in which people help and receive help from others voluntarily, especially in times of adversity.” According to the BBC, the idea of “mateship” caused a stir in 1999, when voters rejected an attempt by Prime Minister John Howard to have the concept written into the preamble to the constitution. It was criticised as too sexist, or inappropriate for a formal document.
• Integrating into a new society can be as easy as riding a bike, at least in Denmark. Riding a bike is a quintessential to being Danish as speaking the language and so the country’s Red Cross has taken to teaching immigrants how to cycle, the SPIEGEL reports (in English). “Students come to learn to ride a bike not only for convenience, but also to help them get jobs. For example, the Danish Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs has a program in place that encourages and subsidizes immigrants and refugees who would like to become social health workers, and work in places such as elderly homes. One recent change in the government’s program is a requirement that the job applicant has a certificate saying that he or she can ride a bike.”
• And much to my disliking, I have to end this week’s newsroundup by featuring a number of links on the racist hate crimes in Eastern Germany, which have not only shocked the country, but the world. Last Sunday, in what can only be described as a manhunt, eight Indian immigrants were driven through the streets of the tiny East German town of Muegeln, verbally harassed and beaten to a pulp by a suspected group of neo-Nazis. Police intervened and a number of suspects arrested. Politicians and authorities have spent much of the week looking for answers as to the identity of the perpetrators of this heinous crime, as well as to the question why nobody intervened. The English edition of Der Spiegel has full coverage of the story here and a roundup of reader reactions to the crime here. Commentary from the national and international press can be found here.