Chapter 3

Whom Is Immigration For?

Good immigrants and bad—Is immigration for natives or immigrants?—Welfare and white flight—Polish plumbers—Barcelona or death—The duty of hospitality—Asylum and human rights—Asylum and democracy

Several months before the French presidential elections of 2007, the conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy found himself the butt of a catchy satirical song by the West African reggae group Zêdess. Sarkozy had given voice to a worry, increasingly common in France after the national wave of riots in the autumn of 2005, that the quality of France’s immigrants was going downhill. Welfare dependency and criminality were rising. Immigration was no longer represented in the public mind by a diligent fellow manning a lathe for ten hours a day. It was represented by the man Oriana Fallaci called “Mister I-Know-My-Rights,” and by the rioters, even if many were French born.

Proud of his own immigrant background (his father had fled Hungary after World War II), Sarkozy didn’t oppose immigration. But he thought France ought to be pickier. He called for an immigration choisie, a selective immigration that would allow France to set standards for those with a claim on its social safety net. He distinguished it from immigration subie, an immigration that is passively endured, or undergone. “France,” he said on a trip to Bamako, Mali, in May 2006, “cannot be the only country in the world forbidden to decide who is welcome on its territory and who is not.” One result of that speech was the Zêdess song, which Sarkozy’s political opponents forwarded gleefully around the Internet:

His name is Nicolas Sarkozy

He invented immigration choisie

He is a son of Hungarian immigration,

Who wants to win himself a Gallic coronation.

The muscular negro with his good set of teeth
    Is gone forever!

Today, blacks have to have college degrees
    And be clever.

These are the standards of the new slave ship.

He had the nerve to say it on an African trip.

Nicolas Sarkozy!

Why did your father leave Hungary?

Good immigrants and bad

But really, the joke was on Zêdess. Not only did Sarkozy not “invent” immigration choisie (which became law in 2006 and 2007). By the time the video came out, France was, just as Sarkozy had claimed, one of the last places in the developed world where getting a better caliber of immigrant had not yet become a national priority. In every other European country, there were calls for a more “Canadian” immigration policy. In recent years, Canada has admitted more immigrants per capita than any country in the world, if one excludes tiny tax shelters like Liechtenstein and the business hub of Switzerland. Almost a fifth (18.9 percent) of Canada’s population is foreign born. But Canada lets immigrants in on a highly selective basis. Applicants for permanent residence get ranked on a 100-point scale that measures education (25 points), language skills (24 points), job experience (21 points), age (10 points), employment contacts (10 points), and “social adaptability” (10 points). There are additional financial, medical, security, and criminal background checks. It was Canada’s selectivity, not the size of its immigrant flow, that was held up for emulation.

When European countries began looking carefully at their immigrants’ qualifications, certain countries had a head start. By 2000, a third of the doctors in Britain (33.7 percent) were foreign born. Ireland (35.3 percent) and Switzerland (28.1 percent) get a lot of foreign doctors, too. These percentages are rising as populations age. Britain passed a Highly Skilled Migrant Program in 2002, and added further inducements to educated immigrants three years later. The debate was also far along in Germany. Interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble noted that unlike Spain, for instance, Germany didn’t need low-skilled workers, since it had few national resources and was abandoning its extractive industries, such as coal. The sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, confronted by the claim that Germany would need 700,000 immigrants in coming years, replied: “We need 700,000 highly qualified immigrants. We are getting people we don’t need, while those we do need go to the US or Canada.”

He was right. Seven of the new additions to Forbes’s list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans in 2000 came from India alone, and all had made their money as high-tech entrepreneurs. The Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration, an EU-financed think tank in Florence, found that the United States and Canada got 54 percent of the world’s academically qualified immigrants.

With a few exceptions, such as those British doctors, Europe has been unable to attract the kind of highly skilled immigrant workers who can juice up an economy. Germany tried its own version of immigration choisie early in the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder. It launched a “green card” program for information technology workers from India and elsewhere, granting them up to five years’ residence. It was a flop. Of the 20,000 green cards offered, more than half went unclaimed. Some people, including the immigrants themselves, blamed the narrowness of the program. Germany did not permit newcomers to bring families and didn’t promise them a track to citizenship. Others blamed the messages of hostility that were rolled out along with the welcome mat. At the time, the Christian Democrat governor of North Rhine–Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers, made the memorable quip that what Germany needed was “Kinder statt Inder”—more children, not more Indians.

Immigration choisie contradicted the economic rationale for immigration that anxious Europeans had heard for decades—that there are certain jobs natives of rich countries “won’t do.” The protagonist of European immigration was no longer the illiterate Bengali janitress rolling her cleaning bucket through the hallways of a high-tech corporation after hours. The new protagonist was her compatriot, the physicist with a doctorate, working in an office down the hall. The immigration market had spoken, and what it had seemed to say was: “Janitors and busboys.” Now governments were intervening to make it say: “Doctors and software engineers.” Why was everyone so sure that an immigration managed according to government plans would be more efficient than an immigration managed according to the rough market that existed beforehand? Immigration choisie reflected a distrust of the efficiency of the global labor market—and the efficiency of the global labor market was the main economic justification for having immigration in the first place.

Is immigration for natives or immigrants?

The larger discomfort caused by immigration choisie was that it reopened the question of what and whom immigration was supposed to be for. Was it for natives or for immigrants? The more politicians said the former, the more they were suspected of thinking the latter. “They [the immigrants] are here because we were there” runs a familiar formula when Britons discuss Pakistanis or Dutch people Surinamese. Of course, the presence of, say, Sudanese in Norway or Bosnians in Ireland renders this well-meaning bon mot demonstrably false. But many Europeans and foreigners have tended to treat immigration to Europe as something immigrants are simply entitled to, part of an outstanding debt that Europe owes the rest of the world for centuries of economic exploitation.

So when the French government began discussing European cooperation to limit migration in 2006, prime minister Dominique de Villepin vowed to raise development aid by more than 50 percent over the coming three years. When EU leaders agreed on the outlines of a common immigration policy, to be implemented starting in 2010, seven heads of state from Mercosur, the South American economic treaty organization, assailed it as an expropriation of what was rightfully theirs. Bolivian premier Evo Morales warned Europeans: “Eating is a human right.” This is a bizarre statement, coming from an elected head of state. If his citizens aren’t eating, whose fault is that? Morales talks as if his representation of a constituency in the global economy is more important than his role as head of state.

Maybe it is. At any rate, politicians in emigrant countries have grown better and better at exploiting the confusion. In 2006, when Spanish authorities were trying to slow the arrival of African migrants to Europe by boat, the Gambian president, Yahya Jammeh, insisted that nothing could stop his citizens from making the passage. “This country only got its independence from Great Britain forty-one years ago,” he said. “To compensate for the exploitation to which our populations were subjected, our young people have the right to stay in Great Britain for the next 359 years.”

If we leave aside the demagoguery and focus on the economic aspirations, Jammeh had a point. Economically speaking, no model of development aid yet dreamed up has worked better than simply allowing migrants to set up a beachhead in an advanced economy and ship money home in the form of so-called “remittances.” According to a World Bank internal document, a quarter of a trillion dollars in remittances were wired around the world in 2006; if you add unrecorded flows, they account for more funds than all the foreign direct investment in the world, and are more than double the level of international aid. Transfers to El Salvador, mostly from the United States but also from Spain, now make up a sixth of that country’s economy, and Moroccans, mostly in Europe, sent €3.6 billion home in 2003. In the spring of 2007, Western Union, once a telegraph company but now primarily a place where migrants wire money, opened its 300,000th agency—in India, where it has 36,000 already. Although remittances are likely to drop along with the world economic downturn, they remain significant.

The economic effect of remittances is controversial. Do they mean that immigrant earnings are “lost” to the Western economies where they are earned? Or do they actually permit Third World countries to take control of their own capital development in a way that will benefit all countries in the global economy? Immigration choisie further complicates these questions. It takes something that many immigrant advocates consider a problem—the brain drain from poor countries—and subsidizes it. Economists differ on whether the migration of smart people from poor countries ultimately helps those countries (by relaying expertise) or hurts them (by sapping their brainpower). But in the short term, it hurts them. The migration of doctors to Britain mentioned above has caused desperate shortages in medical personnel in the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Liberia, Malawi, and elsewhere. Is it generous of Europe to take so many foreign doctors or selfish?

When Zêdess implied there was something effectively racist about Nicolas Sarkozy’s immigration choisie, they were, in the narrowest sense of the word, wrong. While the Sarkozy government set its standards high, it would not turn away any African who met them. Yet the song captured a certain reality: Sarkozy and others were declaring a return to the old understanding that there’s immigration and then there’s immigration. Sarkozy was replacing France’s unconditional welcome of all the world’s wanderers with a specific contract between France and certain qualified individuals. France would remain “open to immigrants,” but only in the way it was when Émile Zola’s father arrived from Venice: It would be open to immigrants who came pre-fitted to the economic needs and cultural preferences of the country. Economic needs and cultural preferences are sometimes hard to tell apart, and cultural preferences are often hard to distinguish from ethnic preferences. Zêdess was right to see that talking about immigration in terms of “training” and “social adaptability” did not make ethnic problems disappear. We will now turn to a few of them.

Welfare and white flight

One problem concerns welfare. Complex welfare economies such as those around which European economies have been organized for the past sixty years tend not to arise in multiethnic societies. The present wave of immigration will test whether multiethnic societies can even maintain them. Indications are that they cannot. The Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have shown that roughly half of Americans’ antipathy toward European-style socialism can be accounted for by the ethnic diversity of the United States. (The other half is a matter of political institutions.) This view is given strong support by the recent work of Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who has found that people living under conditions of ethnic diversity “hunker down.” They trust their neighbors less and are less inclined to devote their money to common or social causes. The list of recent social science studies that arrive at the same conclusion is as long as your arm.

That welfare states tend to arise only in conditions of ethnic homogeneity is a new version of a very old problem. “A State cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in any chance period of time,” wrote Aristotle. “Most of the states which have admitted persons of another stock, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by sedition.” What Aristotle calls sedition we, in a more relativistic age, would call dissent. Immigrants don’t have the same prejudices as natives. They have what we would call “fresh ways of doing things.” That can make them valuable in a competitive modern society. But welfare is supposed to be a refuge from competitive modern society. It is a realm of society in which dissent, eccentricity, and doing one’s own thing are not prized—as any American who remembers the uproar in the 1980s over “welfare queens” buying vodka with their food stamps will grant.

Once immigrants learn their way around the European welfare bureaucracy, they may have a different idea of the purpose of social security. Instead of using their benefits to pay for, say, food, they may use them to pay for, say, Islam. Two-thirds of French imams are on welfare. So are many British ones: Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the head of Britain’s “Muslim Parliament,” told a conference in Birmingham in 2005, “Our mosques are largely tribal and controlled by old men on the dole with no understanding of the changing world around them.” Most French and British citizens do not think of welfare checks as a do-it-yourself state subsidy for religion, nor would they support them through taxes if they did. If welfare recipients do not share the broader society’s values, then the broader society will turn against welfare.

Another problem concerns mobility. It is assumed that immigration pits mobile newcomers against entrenched natives. It does, but only briefly. Natives are more mobile than they look. Migrations spark secondary migrations. The sociologist Rogers Brubaker, in a 1998 essay, called them “migrations of ethnic unmixing.” For all the lip service paid to diversity, people tend to flee it. In the context of desegregation in the United States in the 1960s, such migrations were condemned as “white flight,” and the secondary migrants were tarred as racists. But whites are not the only race that undertakes such migrations and race is only one possible cause for them. As mentioned earlier, the arrival of the Irish in Boston destroyed the Protestant culture of one of the most important cities in the history of Protestantism. The destruction occurred not only because the Irish arrived but also because New England Yankees chose not to live in an Irish-run city that was increasingly violent and corrupt. As Oscar Handlin noted, only half the descendants of the Bostonians of 1820 still lived in the city thirty years later. Immigration in general, and immigrant Islam in particular, has the potential to spark such flights in Europe.

Judging the impact and sustainability of immigration by looking at the “numerator” of new immigrants, people may neglect to look at the “denominator” of the native population. A falling denominator intensifies immigration’s effect. Europe’s native populations, as noted, are shrinking naturally, and this shrinkage is accelerated by emigration. Whereas 109,500 Germans left their country in 2001, 144,800 left in 2005, for Canada, Australia, the United States, Spain, and elsewhere, providing the occasion for a new television series called Goodbye, Deutschland!

These departures may be linked to immigration. Certainly the departure of Jews from France has been. In 2002, a year that saw hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks, most of them committed by North African immigrants and their offspring, more than 3,000 French Jews—about 0.5 percent of the Jewish population—moved to Israel, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel, which measures such relocations, and departures for Canada and the United States were high as well. Violence also unsettled the Dutch. In 2004, the radical filmmaker Theo van Gogh was brutally assassinated in broad daylight by a Dutch Islamist, after making a film that condemned Koranic passages on women. That year, the Netherlands recorded more emigrants than immigrants. A company that specializes in emigration paperwork got 13,000 hits on its website in the week after the Van Gogh killing, and the Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand embassies described themselves as swamped with inquiries about emigrating. In 2006, the former Tory cabinet minister George Walden wrote Time to Emigrate?, a semifictional letter to a son planning on leaving Britain for good; virtually all of the reasons he cited for emigrating involved consequences of immigration.

Judging by population statistics, there can be no doubt that white flight is happening. Birmingham’s population, 77 percent white in the early 1990s, had fallen to 65.3 percent white by 2006, and whites were projected to constitute a minority there by 2026. Leicester was 70.1 percent white in 1991, but only 59.5 percent white in 2006. Whites will be a minority there in little more than a decade. The issue is not the race of a given city’s residents but the cultural meaning of the ethnic shift. In the United States of the 1960s and ’70s, white flight was an expression of danger, blight, and decay. Certain historic industrial cities, like Camden or Detroit, never recovered from it. The United States, a vast country with dozens of industrial cities, could easily absorb such losses. The stakes are somewhat higher in Europe, where a single city, such as Amsterdam, can be the repository of a great deal of a nation’s heritage, culture, and literature. “The Netherlands is an art country,” says Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “If the citizens of Amsterdam, 60 percent of whom will soon be of non-Western origin, are not made part of that, all of this will decay and be destroyed. When the municipality has to vote on whether funds go to preserve art or build a mosque, they may ask, ’Why should I pay for this stupid painting?’”

So the stakes of cultural compatibility are high. Canada, as we have seen, explicitly rewards immigrants for “adaptability” European countries are less forthright, but they are just as concerned. Consider Spain. Although it practically abuts North Africa, it gets only 20 percent of its immigrants from there; 38 percent come from Latin America. According to Bernabé López García, a professor of Mediterranean studies at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and a leading expert on Moroccan culture, this is not an accident. Spain has well-developed consular programs to recruit immigrants from Latin American countries (and the Philippines) that are not replicated in other poor countries. This, López believes, is a kind of “ethnic filtering,” an effort to close the country’s doors to Muslims.

Ethnic filtering is less sinister than it looks. It is a Canadian-style selectivity by a different means. Making a special effort to recruit Latin Americans is, by definition, discriminatory, but it is not racist. Spain is less concerned that its immigrants be white than that they have similarities of worldview with the people already established there, starting with knowing what the inside of a church looks like.

Polish plumbers

But that will not suffice to make an immigration problem-free. On Sundays in Paris, throngs of Polish immigrants overflow the seventeenth-century Jesuit-built church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, with its newly erected statue of John Paul II in front of the steps—a church that has not been full in decades. Yet the Polish immigration has been controversial. Cultural and economic factors interact in confusing ways, even when the immigrants come from a closely related culture.

When the European Union expanded from fifteen countries to twenty-five in 2004, eight of the ten new member states came from the old Soviet bloc. While some countries worried about being swamped by Slavs after EU enlargement, Europe’s three most market-oriented countries—Britain, Ireland, and Sweden—left their borders open. Britain braced itself for an estimated 5,000 to 13,000 new arrivals. It got 627,000. The Republic of Ireland got so many immigrants after Polish accession in 2004 that, by the end of 2005, its 164,000 newcomers from the East bloc accounted for more than 4 percent of the country’s population.

The economist Hans-Werner Sinn had long predicted such an influx, since the new accession countries were much poorer, relative to the EU, than predecessors such as Spain and Portugal. At the time of accession, laborers in such skills-rich places as Slovakia and Hungary were working at one-seventh the cost of the senescent and gripe-prone German workforce. So EU expansion was mixed news for Western Europe. It meant downward pressure on wages; in 2005, the “Polish plumber” would become the great symbolic grievance of the successful French referendum campaign against a proposed European constitutional treaty. But it also raised hopes that Western European labor needs could be filled by people who more or less thought like Europeans (say, maids from Hungary and machinists from Bulgaria) rather than people who did not (say, maids and machinists from Pakistan and Algeria). There seemed to be no limit to the pool of fellow Europeans ready to man service jobs.

But there was a limit. Except for Poland and Slovakia, every one of the new countries in the EU entered with a birthrate below the Western European average. The Baltic states in particular were due to lose 37.7 percent of their population by the middle of the twenty-first century. The eastward growth of the EU did not alleviate the EU’s worker shortfall—it exacerbated it. Latvia is a case in point. In the eighteen months after Britain, Ireland, and Sweden opened their borders to migrants from the new EU countries, Latvia, a land with scarcely a million people, lost 100,000 of its youngest and most ambitious to emigration, a quarter of them to Ireland. The labor gap was severe enough for Latvian businessmen to consider filling it with workers from Ghana. Was Europe’s eastern border moving eastward, following the pretensions of the continent’s leaders? Or was the border moving westward, following the migration of Europe’s actual population? “During the Cold War,” one Latvian said, “we all dreamed of leaving, but the risk is that if everyone leaves, then the country will disappear.” It is indeed a risk. Not every country, not every culture, not every language is going to survive this big latter-day Völkerwanderung.

In his poem “Going, Going” (1972), Philip Larkin wrote of overdevelopment and environmental destruction in England, and of the way people knuckled under to its inevitability. Instead of challenging things they were uneasy about, people sought to “invent / Excuses that make them all needs.” The economic need for mass immigration is that way. The justifications keep shifting: now growth, now welfare, now the benefit to the host society, now the benefit to the immigrants themselves. Immigration is a fait accompli for which people are scrambling to find a rationale.

Barcelona or death

Officially, Britain, France, and Germany had shut their gates to mass labor immigration by the late 1970s. They had reached a point of economic saturation. The advantages immigration brought (in theory) to a capitalist system were less apparent (in practice) to real voters, who understood more laborers to mean more unemployment. But the end to labor programs and the establishment of generously financed repatriation programs did nothing to stem immigration. Whether by design or by negligence the flow of immigrants continued untrammeled. New excuses emerged to explain why immigration was a need. The main one was the duty to offer asylum to those threatened by violence, poverty, or political persecution. Labor immigration gave way to refugee immigration and to immigration aimed at reunifying (and forming) families. As natives began to doubt that mass immigration was to their own economic advantage, they were informed that sometimes economic advantage had nothing to do with it. Admitting immigrants changed from an economic program to a moral duty. As such, it became less and less amenable to democratic decision-making. This change in emphasis actually increased the flow of immigrants at the very moment when politicians claimed to be shutting it down. Political differences deepened, with, on one side, a smoldering rage among working-class voters and, on the other, an elite conventional wisdom that there was something “inevitable” about mass immigration.

How unmanageable immigration becomes when humanitarian considerations get mixed up with economic ones can be seen in Spain, which vies with Italy as the new century’s top European destination for immigrants. Spain has two North African enclave cities, Ceuta and Melilla. These have been European since the fifteenth century, but never until the end of the twentieth were they magnets for immigration. Barbed wire was put up around Ceuta only in 1971, and then only to stem a cholera epidemic. Since 1999, there have been reception centers for immigrants and high-security fences in both places. The reception centers have been full ever since. The fences have been insufficient. For years, migrants from Central and West Africa and elsewhere gathered near the perimeter, burrowing or vaulting through vulnerable spots onto European Union territory.

In September 2005, this migration underwent a quantum escalation. Moroccan police dispersed a group of four hundred migrants, largely Malians and Gambians, who had been living in the brush outside the perimeter of Melilla. Most were penniless and many had crossed the Sahara to get this far. Perhaps fearful that they would be sent far from the European border, the migrants, who numbered in the thousands altogether, gathered the following day to storm the barbed-wire fence en masse. Five hundred charged in the morning, some carrying ladders, others throwing stones and swinging clubs; 130 made it into Melilla, many with the skin ripped off their hands by the barbed wire. Hundreds more attacked the fence that night, and two hundred got over. To authorities’ surprise, the Melilla-based migrants seemed to be in contact with those outside Ceuta, two hundred miles away, because similar attempts to storm the perimeter began there, too. All told, there were ten assaults in eleven days. Spain rushed three companies of its army to the two cities. The Moroccan border guard got involved. On September 29, they shot dead four people trying to rush the fence in Ceuta. A week later in Melilla, Moroccan forces killed six more people taking part in a four-hundred-man assault.

Many accounts describe the migrants’ assaults as “desperate,” and indeed they were. But there was more to it than desperation. Immigration is about ambitions as much as grievances. Just as impressive as the migrants’ desperation was their confident resourcefulness, the levelheaded tactical seriousness with which they sought to confound, outwit, and overwhelm the Spanish and Moroccan militaries. These were, albeit at a low level of technological sophistication, coordinated military operations.

The successful gate crashers, the survivors, applied for asylum status (for which the state of war that prevails in much of Africa provides a prima facie case) and were lodged in hospices set up by the Red Cross and other charities. Many were sent to peninsular Spain and released into the general public with “expulsion orders” that no one—either in Spain or among the immigrants—expected to be enforced. From there, thanks to the relaxation of border controls, they could travel unimpeded to most Western European countries. Today Ceuta and Melilla are secured with ditches and two rows of high-security fencing six meters high.

A few months later, motorized flotillas of long, banana-shaped West African fishing boats—called lothios in the Senegalese language of Wolof—began appearing off the resort beaches of Spain’s Canary Islands. They carried thousands of Senegalese and other West African men and boys. These migrants, too, were recklessly brave. The Wolof motto that they recited to journalists back home in Dakar and emblazoned on their boats was Barga mba barsakh—“Barcelona or Death.” Of course, Barça is the football club Barcelona, not the city, which may say something about the realism of these would-be immigrants’ aspirations. Realistic or not, they were in earnest. Since the West African coast is where the Gulf Stream turns south and then rushes west, back across the Atlantic, routine engine failure could be fatal. Boats that drifted off course had been found months later, loaded with cadavers, as far away as Barbados. By the late summer of 2006, nearly 30,000 of these new “boat people” had landed in the Canaries. European commissioner Franco Frattini of Italy estimated that 3,000 people had died en route.

The Canaries had been a favored immigrant destination for decades—particularly for those making the sixty-mile hop from the Moroccan coastal villages of Tarfaya and Laayoune to the island of Fuerteventura. But this traffic had been a matter of a half-dozen or so North Africans arriving on skiffs and looking for short-term labor. The use of lothios, some of which could hold 150 men, signaled a leap in scale, an industrialization of the phenomenon. These and other big boats opened Europe up to populations that were ten days away by sea—and farther, because the attraction of the West African route into Europe, once it was shown to be reliable, was not limited to West Africans. A rusty freighter overloaded with Pakistanis was intercepted, and hundreds of Asians were picked up wandering in the desert between Morocco and Mauritania, thousands of miles from home.

Nor was the crisis confined to the Canaries. Boats launched from Libya, filled with Middle Eastern and Asian migrants, had been landing on the Italian islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria. The scale was considerably smaller (10,000 boat people in the summer of 2006), the languages were different, but the scenes were otherwise similar. Some of the new immigrants were using speedboats and Jet Skis to break the chain of coastguard boats that ring the Italian and Greek islands; some were hiking into the EU through the hills surrounding the tiny Slovakian town of Ubla, where the EU borders Ukraine. Of course, these spectacular entries onto European territory were the exception rather than the rule. Most of Europe’s illegal migrants enter legally, in airplanes, ferries, and automobiles, either as family members visiting with European citizens or as simple tourists. They become illegal by either overstaying their tourist visas or disappearing into the general population after rejection of an application for residence or asylum.

If the lothio invasion was a cause for worry, it was also a cause for pity. There was something shameful about turning away people who owned so little, who had risked so much, and who had shown such bravery. Smarter migrants had always known how to play off this bad conscience, and pretty soon the boat people did, too. That is why the actual landings in the Canaries were almost always peaceful and why few of the voyagers carried any scrap of identification of any kind. Under Spanish law, people of unknown nationality could not be deported, nor could they be detained longer than forty days. Those who remained silent under interrogation were almost automatically admitted into Spain and, in most cases, flown to the Iberian mainland, again with toothless “expulsion orders.” The arrival of lothios in large groups swamped the Spanish authorities logistically and bureaucratically—as it was meant to. In cases where there was violence, the protocol differed surprisingly little. In April 2007, the Spanish patrol boat Río Duero approached a lothio carrying fifty-seven migrants off the coast of Mauritania and was met with a shower of Molotov cocktails. When the Río Duero sent crewmen to approach the lothio in an inflatable raft, the migrants tried to puncture it with pikes and sharp tools. The Río Duero escorted the boat to the Canary Island port of Arguineguín. The identifiable malefactors were sent back to Mauritania for trial. Many of the other passengers were released into Spain, and Europe.

At the height of the lothio crisis, Spain was pursuing a schizoid, two-track policy. On one hand, it was caring for the immigrants as brothers. It hastily refitted dozens of public buildings as temporary migrant housing: hotels and resorts, discotheques and prep schools, with circus tents thrown up, too, to handle the overflow. Military barracks, like the one at Las Raíces in the Canaries, made especially convenient refugee housing, since they had kitchens and recreational facilities. Since Spain, like other European countries, was shrinking its military, there were many such buildings lying idle. Arrangements were made to ensure that the newcomers could practice their religion—usually Islam—in the makeshift camps.

On the other hand, Spain was resisting the immigrants as invaders. Frontex, a transnational border guard that had been cobbled together out of the armed forces of European Union member states in 2005, got its first major deployment. The problem was that Frontex was something of a Potemkin agency, with a budget of only €15.8 million. Most of its work was done by the helicopters of Spain’s Guardia Civil. The Italian and Portuguese navies made fitful contributions, but both Senegal and Mauritania refused to permit anything that looked like a Frontex warship in their waters. So the government of Spanish prime minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero—probably the least militarily inclined in Europe—considered stronger measures. At the height of the crisis its cabinet drew up plans to send a naval expedition to the African coast to cut off the migration at its source. The idea was rejected because defense minister José Antonio Alonso worried that the big ships might swamp the rickety lothios, creating an international human rights incident.

One can sympathize with Spain’s ambivalence. What does “Barcelona or Death” mean? Does it mean “Help me in extremis” or “Cross me at your peril”? Obviously the Spanish government had no idea. Europeans in general could not figure out whether these immigrants were desperate wards, diligent workingmen, or ruthless invaders, and lacked the imagination to admit that they could be all of those things or none. What Europe needed under the circumstances was a moral code that would give answers about what it owed these people. It does not have one. A vague idea that Europe needs labor coexists with a lack of curiosity about whether migrants are indeed coming to work; a vague idea that migrants need to be cared for as refugees makes it seem impolite to count the cost of assuming responsibility for the world’s poor. To roll out the welcome mat for all these people would be nuts; to turn them away would be racist. Unable to muster the will for either a heartfelt welcome or for earnest self-defense, they hope the world will mistake their paralysis for hospitality.

The duty of hospitality

Hospitality exists as a tradition and as a moral imperative in every culture. Modern readers of the Odyssey are sometimes surprised that, for days after Odysseus is welcomed as a stranger and guest into his own house, no one asks his name. It would have been a rude way to treat a guest. The same kind of hospitality is law in the Old Testament. (Leviticus 19:33–34: “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”) The New Testament (Matthew 25:31–46) repeats this imperative (“For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in”) and lays out the consequences of disobeying it. The severity of those consequences—damnation, to be precise—shows that hospitality is as central to the European or Christian tradition as it is to any other. The cliché that it is backward-looking and traditionalist to hinder immigration, and modern and open-minded to welcome it, is a mistake. In historically Christian countries, “pro-immigrant” politicians always draw on deep cultural reflexes, not to mention the support of most official church groups, and “anti-immigrant” politicians must always smash a few taboos before they can get anywhere.

There is a paradox about hospitality. Hans Magnus Enzensberger describes the paradox this way:

In order to avoid constant bloodbaths and to make possible a bare minimum of exchange and commerce between various clans, families and tribes, ancient societies set up the taboos and rituals of hospitality. But these precautions do not eliminate the status of “outsider.” On the contrary, they set it in stone. The guest is sacred, but he may not tarry.

Hospitality is meant to protect travelers in hostile territory; it is not meant to give large groups of visitors—who may include militants, freeloaders, and opportunists—the run of the place. And yet, since hospitality is such an innate, deeply human inclination, canny people find it a particularly easy thing to exploit, much as advertisers exploit other deeply human drives, such as sex. That is why cultures establish all kinds of rules around hospitality. A guest who tarries becomes an interloper.

Hospitality is related to xenophobia. In fact, it is one of the faces of xenophobia. When Gothic tribes concluded a peace settlement with the troubled Roman Empire in 382, they were given hospitalitas (billeting on profitable lands) but not connubium (the right to marry Romans), and the accordance of the former privilege was linked to the denial of the latter. The most spectacular illustration history offers of the kinship of hospitality and mistrust is that of Captain Cook, who was feted, flattered, and worshipped for a month by the Hawaiian islanders in Kealakekua Bay in 1779. When he and his crew returned on an emergency visit to repair a broken mast, they were massacred.

The difference between hospitality and a full and permanent welcome has been widely remarked by Muslims who arrived in Denmark in the 1970s. Whether well disposed or ill disposed toward Danish culture, they tend to describe their reception back then as almost dreamlike in its generosity, at both the governmental and interpersonal level. But sometime in the 1990s, the climate changed with incredible suddenness to one of suspicion and even hostility. The temptation is to look for some precipitating event, some act of bad faith on someone’s part. Liberal Danes often cite the rise of the Danish People’s Party after 1995, as if it were possible in a democracy to manufacture society-wide anti-immigrant discontent out of thin air. The late imam Ahmed Abu Laban, a Palestinian firebrand who spent the last years of his life in Denmark, tried to explain the shift as a matter of religious intolerance. Danes, he said, “did not react to [immigrants] as Muslims. After a short period, Danes recognized that Muslims are committed, that Muslims are not going to give up Islam.”

What happened in Denmark was more inevitable than that. The welcome immigrants received in their first months or years was not the permanent natural order of things. It was the reflexive courtesy accorded guests. Immigrants stayed long enough to lose their ritualized role as “guests,” and, with it, their claim on Danes’ hospitality. (This does not mean they lost their claim on decent treatment, only their claim on the specific form of decent treatment that is hospitality.) Once immigrants lost that role, what were they? Danes like any others, with well-defined constitutional responsibilities and unspoken cultural ones? Danes with special privileges relieving them of those responsibilities? Workers, requiring a new contractual relationship? Or interlopers, requiring resistance?

The problem in Denmark, as in Spain and the rest of Europe, is that no consensus answer to those questions has arisen. It is often noted with shock how long it took for European natives to realize that immigrants had settled in Europe to stay. Europeans went on thinking that immigrants would simply “go home” until at least the 1970s, when France first established programs to pay immigrants to repatriate themselves, and in some cases well into the 1980s. Today, however, Europeans often make the opposite mistake. They exaggerate how well established immigrants are in Europe. In high-immigration countries like Spain and Italy, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are first generation, and even in the oldest immigration countries, the immigrant population is much less rooted than it appears. In 2000, 60 percent of Germany’s vast foreign population had arrived after 1985. Plenty of immigrants are full members of the society of their new homeland, with full claims on it. Just as many are not.

Asylum and human rights

Political asylum is the modern, bureaucratized version of the ancient duty of hospitality. As Enzensberger notes, the “‘noble’ asylum-seeker” was a staple of nineteenth-century literature. But the experience of the twentieth century caused an erosion of the distinction between people who come for refuge and people who come to stay. The willingness of a state to vouch for the migrants living in it often meant the difference between life and death—as it did for Jews in Nazi-occupied France and those Poles who were “repatriated” from Western Europe to the Communist-occupied east after World War II, to name just two of many instances. The West, anxious not to repeat these mistakes, became understandably absolutist in its reluctance to abandon refugees. Those who fled Communist and other tyrannies that arose after the war often had an automatic claim on the hospitality of the free world. The American welcome to refugees from Cuba was duplicated in Europe when it came to refugees from former colonies. Influential voices, from across the political spectrum, rose in anger if that welcome was withheld. When Britain passed its 1968 Immigration Act, which aimed to close the country’s gates to ethnic Indians driven out of Kenya by “Africanization,” the conservative journalist Auberon Waugh called it “one of the most immoral pieces of legislation ever to have emerged from any British parliament.” The Times wrote: “The Labour Party has a new ideology. It does not any longer profess to believe in the equality of man. It does not even believe in the equality of British citizens. It believes in the equality of white British citizens.”

Despite occasional legislation (such as the 1968 act) aimed at limiting the claims of foreigners to refugee status, an understanding spread that the welcome due to refugees was practically unconditional. Europe’s refugee population began to grow, forming, as the Swedish economist Torsten Persson put it, “a ringlike pattern of political crises.” To consider just the flow into Scandinavia, Polish Jews fleeing state anti-Semitism and Greeks fleeing the dictatorship of the “colonels” began arriving in the late 1960s. There followed pro-Allende Chileans in the 1970s, Vietnamese boat people somewhat later, and, in the 1980s, Kurdish nationalists from Turkey and refugees from both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. It was enough to be from a war-torn area—Eastern Turkey, for instance, or Algeria—to get settled in Europe at government expense while authorities adjudicated one’s case. Some countries, the Netherlands most conspicuously, codified principles placing the burden of proof on those who would deny asylum to refugees. Even when the government decided against the petitioners and their families, it often maintained support for them if they chose not to return to their native countries. It seemed a violation of the higher law of hospitality to order them back.

By the early 1990s, when the warlord-induced famine in Somalia and ethnic warfare in the Balkans arose almost simultaneously, an easily game-able system was in place that made admission automatic to prospective immigrants who understood it. Various immigrant-advocacy NGOs in Europe made sure they understood it. Many evolved out of religious charitable organizations, such as the influential Vluchtelingen Werk in the Netherlands. Anti-racist groups often played this role in France, and the Red Cross served as informal immigration lawyer to the African boat people who arrived in Europe after 2006. The right to settle one’s relatives in the asylum country was an inevitable sequel to humanitarian immigration. In the quarter century after 1980, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, half of all residence permits granted in Sweden—almost 400,000—went to reunite families from various geopolitical disaster areas.

European countries wound up so overburdened by asylum applicants that it was almost a joke. In 2006, the British home secretary John Reid announced a goal—not necessarily an attainable one—of working through the “legacy backlog” of asylum applications within five years. Germany received almost half a million applications for asylum, largely from the former Yugoslavia, in 1992 alone. Enormous though these numbers were, Germany may not have been the country most heavily burdened. That same year in Sweden, a country of only 9 million, asylum applications were reaching a peak of 84,000 a year. This wave came at the wrong time. Between 1990 and 1994, squeezed between an expanding state sector and increasing global competition for its industries, Sweden was undergoing the worst economic slump that any Western European economy went through between the Second World War and the financial crisis of 2008. Its GNP shrank by 6 percent, and employment levels declined by 12 percent. Since the vast majority of asylum seekers were accepted, Sweden was adding almost 1 percent a year to its population. And that was before “family reunification” was factored in. An explicitly xenophobic party, New Democracy, founded on the eve of Sweden’s elections, stormed into parliament with 6 percent of the vote.

Refugees are not a random assortment of humanity. They are, by definition, products of societies marked by violence, corruption, or both—and no humanitarian principle permits one to choose only the most honorable among those taking flight. For Europe, the biggest nearby humanitarian catastrophes and the bloodiest nearby wars were either in the Muslim world (Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Eastern Turkey) or on its borders (the former Yugoslavia). One result, for Sweden, was a Muslim population of between 200,000 and 400,000 by the turn of the century, a figure that was topped up, after 2003, by tens of thousands of Iraqis fleeing the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

The refugee and asylum system has been tightened across Europe in recent years, in the face of popular opposition. A report in 2006 by the UN High Commission on Refugees showed only 9.2 million refugees and asylum seekers worldwide—the lowest level in a quarter century, and probably indicative of nothing more than tougher European screening procedures. Denmark, which approved a majority of asylum applicants in 2001, was approving only a tenth three years later. Even the once-liberal Netherlands changed its laws in 2001, limiting possibilities of appeal that could drag on for years and provide a pretext for de facto residency. By 2006, only a sixth of asylum applicants in the Netherlands were getting “A” status, that is, the right to an immediate transfer to subsidized municipal housing, along with integration activities and Dutch lessons. (Rejected applicants do, however, get the right to send their children to Dutch schools, and no one monitors whether they leave the country or not.)

“You have to have a hell of a good story,” said one Dutch immigration official in 2005. But the best stories were easily counterfeited. They became well-known through an incredibly efficient grapevine of immigrant information. The asylum system will always be somewhat manipulable. As of early 2006, women from countries that practice female circumcision could stay in the Netherlands on a five-year permit. People fleeing Iran usually had to prove they had been tortured or otherwise targeted by the regime—except for male homosexuals, who were admitted automatically. Pregnant women who had fallen afoul of China’s “one-child policy” were well viewed. Unsurprisingly, Chinese and East African women and Persian gays have made up a larger proportion of those seeking asylum in recent years.

There were very specific responsibilities under international law regarding migrant children. Very few teenage migrants give their age as eighteen or over, and many deny having living parents. European countries have differed on whether to permit forensic procedures (wrist-bone X-rays, dental tests) to determine age. Migrants knew the best countries to claim to come from—since Ivory Coast was at war in 2006, many of the boat people arriving in Spain claimed to be from there, despite speaking Senegalese languages and no Ivorian ones. They also knew the best countries to go to: At a visit to a Dutch immigrant hostel in 2005, one could hear the immigrants’ own rankings of the easiest countries for migrants to get into. At the time, these were: 1) Ireland, 2) Belgium, 3) “England” (meaning Britain), 4) Sweden (which had recently become easy again after a temporary crackdown), and 5) France. The list is certainly different today. It does not necessarily show that any country is a perennial “soft touch” (although some are), only the incredible sensitivity of prospective migrants to shifts in immigration law, and to countries’ “mood” toward immigrants.

Asylum and democracy

To those Europeans who believe their continent has an immigration problem, asylum policy is at the red-hot core of it. This marks a contrast with the United States, where the main distinction drawn is between legal immigrants and illegal ones, and asylum seekers provoke no particular outrage. In Europe, all candidates for asylum go through an orderly legal process, after extensive government vetting. Europeans’ big distinction is between “real” asylum seekers, who have the right to stay, and “bogus” ones (to use the British tabloid term), who do not. A majority of asylum seekers fall under the heading of bogus, in the sense that they are not under specific threat in their countries of origin, other than the threat of poverty. Weeks after the assaults on Ceuta and Melilla mentioned above, 3,000 Sudanese camped in front of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Cairo to seek refugee status. What was bizarre was that many of them already had refugee status in Egypt. So these were bogus petitioners in the sense that what they were really seeking was passage to some country more prosperous than Egypt. The sad ending to the story, though, shows that the line between “real” and “bogus” calls for help is not always easy to draw: In the last days of 2005, Egyptian riot police attacked the encampment, killing twenty-three.

In very few parts of Europe are active steps taken to send rejected asylum seekers home. The number of rejected applicants who stay may run as high as 80 percent. Asked by the BBC in 2003 how many foreigners were living illegally in Britain, home secretary David Blunkett replied, “I haven’t got a clue, is the answer. I suppose that’s a lovely headline that my advisers will be horrified with, but I haven’t and nor has any other person in government.” A common populist assumption is that elites favor liberal asylum policies not as an end but as a means—to more labor immigration. There may be something to this. One often hears that limiting asylum applications by sending back those who don’t make the cut would be too cruel or too costly. The “futility thesis” (to use Albert O. Hirschman’s term) is frequently invoked. The £4.7 billion it would cost to deport Britain’s illegal overstayers, according to the Institute of Public Policy Research, consigns the idea to what Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting calls “make-believe policy land.” This may be true, but not necessarily because voters think that spending £4.7 billion to make their immigration policy more ruthlessly efficient would be a waste of the treasury’s money.

The way asylum is discussed in Europe does not calm but rather radicalizes the political debate. Since rights to asylum are based on universal values, on civilized norms, they are insulated from the democratic processes that have curtailed other kinds of immigration in recent years. It ensures that those who still object to Europe’s level of immigration and wish to tighten asylum admissions further must now take aim at the civilized norms themselves. Populist anti-immigrant politicians—starting with Pia Kjaersgaard of the Danish People’s Party and continuing with the talk-show host Robert Kilroy-Silk, who led the eccentric UK Independence party to a surprising third-place finish in European elections in 2004—have called for their respective countries to withdraw from the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, which lays out what its signatories owe to refugees and asylum seekers. In the summer of 2006, British prime minister Tony Blair and home secretary John Reid hinted they might reexamine Britain’s participation in the Convention, too. While Gordon Brown has been more muted on the subject, he has not rallied the public to the cause of European rights legislation, either. Leading parliamentarians in Kjaersgaard’s party openly proclaim their distrust of “left-wing intellectuals” and of the “expert” values that govern the adjudication of asylum decisions. They use “expert” as a synonym for anti-democratic, and they have a point. The idea that democratic electorates are untrustworthy custodians of civilized norms is implicit in much political discussion of immigration, in Europe and elsewhere.

The administration of asylum policies and the question of whether asylum seekers are bogus or truly desperate have had less to do with the outrage than first meets the eye. Asylum upsets voters because it is a different bargain than they were promised when mass immigration began. Problems come, as the late sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad put it, “when immigration stops being exclusively work immigration —that is, an immigration of workers alone—and turns into family integration (or into an immigration of settlement).” These new immigrants who come as relatives and refugees aren’t coming to do, they’re coming to be.

It was often said in the aftermath of the Gastarbeiter program that Europe had sought factors of production and realized only later that it was importing human beings. Refugee applicants come unambiguously as human beings—they present themselves in suffering humanity’s name. They are seldom thought of as “factors of production.” So while offering fewer quantifiable benefits to the land of arrival, they lay a much larger claim on it than the old labor immigrants ever did. This transformation was inevitable once mass immigration got under way. To native Europeans it felt like part of a larger change—from a passive population of immigrants to a willful population of immigrants. This was something that European values, as they had evolved in the decades since the Second World War, were totally unprepared for.