The weirdness of immigration controversies in European politics

The immigration issue continues to be exploited by far-right radical and anti-EU groups in Europe. The situations in Germany and Austria are the ones with which I'm most familiar.

What I continue to find astonishing is how divorced from pracitcal and realistic solutions the public debate often is.

The current solution to the mass immigration problem originating from the Middle East and North Africa was established by Angela Merkel in early 2016 in negotiations with Turkey's authoritarian President Tayyip Erdoğan. The deal in simple terms was that Turkey would hold the refugees coming across the Mediterranean in exchange for the EU paying them to do so.

The EU outsourced its most difficult border control problem to Turkey, which currently holds three million or so refugees in conditions that are very likely not the best. A smaller number are also held in Italy and Greece.

In politics, a "solution" that holds for two and a half years is easy to count as a success. But this was always a delicately balanced arrangement that could fall apart at any moment if, for instance, Erdoğan's government decides it serves them better to start sending massive numbers or refugees north than to keep holding up their end of the deal. Italy's new government, in which the far-right Lega party led by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini controls immigration policy, is already posturing against EU agreements and international law to show how much his party hates foreigners.

It's a standard Angela Merkel extend-and-pretend solution.

And it can be thrown out of kilter by a Syrian military push into the Idlib province. Michael Peel reports (EU steps up planning for refugee exodus if Assad attacks Idlib Financial Times 09/14/2018):

The situation in and around Idlib, which borders Turkey, has added urgency because several million people are estimated to be gathered there.

The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this week that 30,000 people had been displaced from their homes by air and ground attacks by the Syrian regime and its allies on the opposition enclave, while a full assault could drive out 800,000.

Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president, this week warned that the “impending humanitarian disaster” in Idlib must be a “deep and direct concern to us all”.

So it's not as though the EU governments and leaders don't know that they are facing a longterm, ongoing immigration crisis. But, as Peel also reports, the immediate goal is to clear current immigration camps in Greece by accelerating settlement of their current occupants to make way for new refugees.

But from his report, it appears that even that preparation is something ongoing for other reasons, "The proposal is primarily aimed at dealing with what 19 non-governmental groups on Thursday branded 'shameful' conditions at the island migrant centres." Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is meeting next week with the EU "migration minister" to discuss ways to free up 3,000 spots in the current camps.

Yes, with the imminent prospect of up to 800,000 refugees coming out of Syria to Turkey in the next few weeks, Greece and the EU are looking to free up 3,000 spots in current camps. The current camps that NGOs are criticizing, with good reason, for already bad conditions.

If this were a problem that appeared suddenly due to, say, an asteroid striking the Middle East, the EU's lack of preparedness might be more understandable. But the asteroid was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent destablization of Iraq and Syria, along with the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 which left Libya a failed state. That meant that Libya, which had previously absorbed large numbers of African refugees as workers, was no longer able and willing to do so. By virutally all Western news accounts, conditions in the current camps in Libya are genuinely horrific.

Since 2011 - the year of the NATO intervention in Libya - there has been a visible crisis of large numbers of refugees making their way on the very dangerous trip across the Mediterranean toward Europe. That was seven years ago. In 2018, the EU is struggling to free up 3,000 places in Greek refugee camps in face of the impending exodus of up to 800,000 refugees from Idlib.

That's what an extend-and-pretend solution looks like.

There is actually a practical, resonable, and humane way for the EU to handle this problem. Its basic elements are well known and have been discussed for years:

• Establish individual country quotas for the reception of non-doucmented immigration flow. In the case of an Idlib situation, that could mean parceling out hundreds of thousands of refugees in a few months time. In less acute years, like most of 2016, 2017, and 2018 to date, the numbers would be radically lower.
• Set up pro-active training programs and recruitment of immigrants for jobs which are not being filled by already-legal EU residents. In Germany and Austria, home assistance for the elderly is a job of which there is and will continue to be a growing demand. They are currently being filled mostly by immigrants, many of them from eastern EU countries. And for the same reason that agriculture in the US is completely dependent on immigrant labor, including massive numbers of undocumented workers: they can't get native workers to do it at any feasbile wage level.
• Provide expanded development assistance to African countries in particular to provide local opportunities for people there.

Another measure that is much discussed is establishing asylum centers in Libya or other places outside of the EU borders where refugees can apply for asylum in Europe. This is known as the "Australian" solution.

But we don't need to know much about what Australia is doing to see that the latter proposal is only barely more than pure fantasy. And that's probably putting it too generously. No African country has agreed to such a scheme, and none are likely to do so. The proposal as it is being discussed runs into all sorts of problems in international and EU law. The only way the EU could insure that such camps would provide minimally humane and secure conditions in countiries like Libya would be to run the camps themselves. The PR problems of the EU setting up camps in Africa in which refugees could be, uh, concentrated, is actually the least serious problem involved.

The rightwing nationalist parties in EU countries are flatly opposed to a new system of refugee settlement and assimilation ("integration" in the official jargon in Germany and Austria). The weakened center-left parties have also been timid at best in validating this approach.

In Austria and Germany and other EU countries, the native birth rate is below the replacement rate, which means that population is expected to decline in coming decades. In order to have growing economies in the sense we currently understand economic growth, they will need significant numbers of immigrants. Several former Eastern Bloc countries are already suffering serious negative economic impacts because so many younger workers have already immigration to other EU countries.

Expanded developmental aid to African countries like Niger is certainly a worthy goal. Also a difficult one to pull off. And that talking point does nothing to address what will happen if another 800,000 refugees come into Turkey in the next few months. Politicians advocating this typically don't bother to reference the fact that the biggest development aid some African countries are currently getting comes from their citizens working in Europe who send money back to their families. And since those amounts are going to individual famililies, much of it presumably gets spent on consumption which boosts their economies. And is also, I assume, less vulnerable to massive diversion of funds than some traditional aid projects might be. In other words, African workers in Europe are a major foreign aid provider.

Much of the actual political rhetoric around immigration, though, is frivolous. The Austrian government has been taking various measure to make life for asylum-seekers in Austria more difficult, which does have the real effect of hurting real people. The rest is largely posturing. In one sense, Austria is a "free-rider" on border issues, because it doesn't have a Mediterranean coast. The current Chancellor Sebastian "Wunderwuzzi" Kurz likes to talk about boosting the presence of the border patrol Frontex, which the EU is currently doing. But if a situation like 2015 occurs again, which could happen at almost any time, and refugees are sent north to Hungary and Austria, what is Chancellor Wunmderwuzzi actually going to do? Gun them down at the border? And, if not, he's going to need a whole lot more than empty rhetoric about asylum centers in North Africa.

He rose to be Chancellor at age 31 because he skillfully exploited and fed xenophobic fears and, as Foreign Minister in 2015-16, did a lot of posturing against Germany and Angela Merkel which in the context, had no real downside for him politically. But if the current -house-them-all-in-Turkey solution doesn't work, he's like to find that chest-beating is a limited practical use in a new acute phase of the immigrantion crisis.

Meanwhile, Putin's government in Russia currently sees an advantage in weakening the US and a very useful instrument to promote it in the immigration issue. Viktor Orbán's government in Hungary is currently the main European model for the anti-EU parties from Austria to Czechia, Solovakia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and France. Some of those parties like the FPÖ in Austria have formal friendship/cooperation agreements with Putin's United Russia party, an arrangement that seems to be a rightwing reflection of the arrangements the Soviet Communist Party had with affiliated Communist parties in Europe. Not surprisingly, the Putin-allied parties are agitating over immigration issue, which they polemically call a "migration" crisis, in ways that align with Putin's foreign policy goals.