In Hoyerswerda, a small city in the German state of Saxony, skinheads attacked a dormitory for refugees from Vietnam and Mozambique. Terrified and bleeding, the foreigners fled for their lives-only to run into a crowd of local residents who had turned out to cheer the neo-Nazis. In Bologna, a young Gypsy couple was shot to death and a 4-year-old girl was wounded in what police called a racist attack. In a small Swedish town, the home of an Ethiopian refugee and his Swedish wife was burned to the ground a month ago. Such scenes are no longer isolated incidents in Europe. Ultraright parties in France, Belgium and Austria are scoring large gains on antiimmigrant platforms. Italy and Sweden have cracked down on asylum seekers, prompting Germany, France and Britain to do the same.
“Fortress Europe” is giving way to Fortress Mentality. On the eve of next week’s summit in Maastricht, the Netherlands, where the 12 European Community nations will present at least a facade of unity in preparation for the creation of a single market in 1992, Western Europe has found something new to agree on: too many outsiders want in. Some EC members are terrified by the thought that a Europe without internal borders will allow millions of refugees to run wild. But the complexion of the Continent is already changing. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav civil war, the West is bracing for the largest migration from the East since World War II. At an EC meeting in Luxembourg in June, British Prime Minister John Major warned his fellow heads of government to control immigration or face a “right wing” backlash.
That backlash is already well underway. Much of it is directed against the roughly 10 million legal immigrants from developing countries. They began arriving by the planeload during the early 1960s, when low-wage jobs in Europe were a salvation to the victims of civil war, poverty and oppression in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. They were largely ignored until growth rates slowed in the ’80s.
Now the threat of uncheeked illegal immigration has reinforced xenophobia.
So far, the tide is only a trickle. Italy has given the EC a brutal but efficient lesson in deportation. The first Albanians who arrived in March were treated as victims of communism. But when the July deadline for finding work passed and few of the 24,000 Albanians had done so, the public rapidly lost sympathy. By the time the second wave of 18,000 hit in August, Italy got tough, eventually sending every Albanian back to Tirana with only a pair of jeans and a few lire.
The Soviet refugee problem, mainly the product of ethnic and nationalist tensions, has so far been confined within the borders of the former union. Russia is now a haven for 90,000 Azerbaijanis seeking refuge from conflict with Armenia and some 80,000 Ossets escaping repression in Georgia. There may be more resettlement by ethnic Romanians if, as expected, the Ukraine declares independence: Bucharest warned that it will reopen the question of disputed territory seized by Moscow in 1940. Civil war in Yugoslavia (box) has displaced 500,000 people, many of whom have been relocated within the country. But 38,000 people have registered for asylum in Hungary and an estimated 50,000 are in Germany.
The issue of asylum is now one of Europe’s most acute problems. Following a continentwide crackdown on conventional immigration, the number of people seeking refuge from economic hardship in Europe fell from 1.2 million in 1973 to an average of between 700,000 and 900,000 a year by 1990. During the same period, the number who said they were seeking asylum from political persecution climbed from 14,000 to 500,000. But instead of developing fair procedures to distinguish the two kinds of refugees, many Western European nations are beginning to treat asylum requests as covers for illegal immigration.
Consider the response of Britain, which more or less ended immigration three decades ago. Because the government is now looking at 1,000 applications for asylum each week, the House of Commons is debating a bill that would restrict the rights of would-be refugees by giving them only 48 hours to appeal an unfavorable decision and requiring them to be fingerprinted to prevent multiple claims. Germany, feeling overelmed, is looking to the EC to help solve its refugee problems. And they are the most severe in Europe: already home to nearly 1 million asylum seekers to date and 200,000 to 400,000 ethnic Germans arriving from Eastern Europe each year, the country has become the Continent’s warehouse for refugees. Some of Bonn’s problems are of its own making. Its 1949 Constitution provides the right of political asylum to virtually anyone who is persecuted, as well as to all ethnic Germans. Even those who are rejected can appeal the finding and remain in the country for months, even years, without being deported. Says Johannes Fietz, an official at the Interior Ministry, “If someone doesn’t want to leave Germany, we can hardly force them to go.”
But the German extremists can make the lives of many refugees miserable in the meantime. Applicants live in dormitories, where they have been victimized by an astonishing 1,700 separate attacks by skinheads this year alone. The government has been slow to condemn the violence-and too willing, at times, to blame the victims. A week after the Hoyerswerda attack unleashed a spree of neo-Nazi assaults across the country, Chancellor Helmut Kohl finally expressed his “regret.” The incidents, he said, could “damage Germany’s reputation in the world”-as if the violence were more a public-relations gaffe than cause for national outrage and revulsion. Still, a newly appointed Kohl aide called last week for immigration quotas.
Immigrant expulsion is now a campaign issue. In Austria, an EC hopeful, the rightwing Freedom Party recently took 23 percent of the vote in Vienna’s city elections with its call for a ban on asylum seekers and a restriction on guest workers. While campaigning, Jorg Haider, the party’s charismatic 41-year-old leader, praised the “orderly employment policies” of the Third Reich. “We’re not hostile toward foreigners,” he said with David Duke-like charm. “We’re friendly toward our own citizens.” Last week Belgium’s far-right Flemish bloc showed surprising strength in Flanders by calling for the mass deportation of the country’s 260,000 immigrants–mostly from the Maghrib, Ghana, Zaire and Turkey–as “the law of nature.” Belgium’s French-speaking Liberal Party had its own anti-foreigner platform and distributed pamphlets bearing racist cartoons.
By making immigration a virulent inyour-face issue in French politics, JeanMarie Le Pen’s National Front has secured the support of up to 15 percent of the electorate. His plan is to grab enough votes from a right-wing candidate in the first round of the 1995 presidential elections to force a final runoff with the Socialist candidate. More mainstrean are now parroting his extremism. Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac complained about “the noise” and “the smell” of immigrant families, Prime Minister Edith Cresson suggested using chartered planes for mass expulsions of refugees and former president Valery Giscard d’Estaing recommended restricting citizenship as a “blood right” to those with French parents.
No matter that the anti-immigrant tide lashes the very people whose labor over the past three decades has helped create the industrial miracle in Europe-and the impetus for 1992. The asylum issue will outlive any decisions the EC reaches next week in Maastricht. With its aging population and stagnant birthrate, Europe needs the low-wage work force from the Third World. Whatever barriers the EC throws up, refugees will keep climbing over them-as long as such marked disparities continue between north and south, rich and poor.
