ICPTR

France backs partial veil ban
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“France has backed a partial ban on the wearing of Muslim veils in public. A parliamentary inquiry recommended they be made illegal in all places of public services, including public transport. It also said residence cards and citizenship should be refused to anyone with visible signs of a “radical religious practice.” To read the whole article visit: http://news.uk.msn.com/world/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=151891504.
(AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

What politicians do not seem to acknowledge, or perhaps even fail to understand, is that the majority of women wearing the burqa in France are already French citizens. Most of them were born in France. The question then is: why is this phenomenon fast growing in France and other European countries and not in some Arab or Muslim countries, especially immigration sending countries including Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia? What makes people convert to this way of life and lifestyle in European societies? The burqa phenomenon as a product of failed integration policies is not a religious demarcation per se, but a form of new civil protest of les Beurres or the so called hyphenated-French.
Putting the thorny issue of “freedom of expression” aside, in lay terms, pragmatically, would the ban effectively reduce ongoing immigration-integration related tensions or fuel them? The ban does not seem to reach the heart of the problem. Rather, it may seem like a childish game of power, which instead of alleviating misunderstandings, would but relocate reactive tensions to other modern venues of protest or expression. The burqa (and by the way also the growing Talibanisation wear culture of men in France) should be looked at as a national identity crisis of those who use them. Curiously, when will beards be also banned in selected public places?

Why Europe needs an immigration strategy (Kofi A. Annan, 2004)
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One of the biggest tests for the enlarged European Union, in the years and decades to come, will be how it manages the challenge of immigration. If European societies rise to this challenge, immigration will enrich and strengthen them. If they fail to do so, the result may be declining living standards and social division.

The face of immigration and hospitality has changed, and so have its challenges and opportunities. There is no need for argumentation; a quick scan in the media shows the actual immigration-integration climate in major Western European countries, be it in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweeden, Switzerland, Norway, Greece, the UK, Austria or Belgium. Although there is much ado in some countries than others, the overwhelming climate and discourse is rather negative. This is what we hear, what we have become conditioned to hearing, and what we most often expected to hear:

Madam President, we are losing our country. We are losing our Netherlands. We are losing it to mass immigration. We are losing it to the inflow which is no longer in control. We are losing it to a culture of backwardness and violence. We are losing it to the Moroccan thugs who go through life scoffing and spitting and beating up innocent people. They make the schoolyards and streets unsafe. They stick up their middle finger to funeral processions, threaten and abuse ambulance staff and beat up gay people and hiss ‘whore’ to women. They happily accept our benefits, our homes, our doctors. But not our standards and values (Excerpt from a speech Geert Wilders gave in Dutch parliament, September 2008).

This is what we seldom hear and know:
All who are committed to Europe’s future, and to human dignity, should therefore take a stand against the tendency to make immigrants the scapegoats for social problems. The vast majority of immigrants are industrious, courageous, and determined. They don’t want a free ride. They want a fair opportunity for themselves and their families. They are not criminals or terrorists. They are law-abiding. They don’t want to live apart. They want to integrate, while retaining their identity (Kofi Annan, January 2004).

Clearly, the media plays a big role in affecting our judgements about immigrants and integration, and the discrepency between negative and positive news is outrageously and harfully too big.

Managing migration is not only a matter of opening doors and joining hands internationally. It also requires each country to do more to integrate [old and] new arrivals. Immigrants must adjust to their new societies – and societies need to adjust too. Only with an imaginative strategy for integrating immigrants can countries ensure that they enrich the host society more than they unsettle it (Kofi Anna, 2004).

The task undertaken by the research center and participating European reserarch groups is to develop a integration barometer with the objective to measure the traditonal as well as modern indicators of integration. Certainly, integration barometers exist, however, the proposed barometer is comprehensive in nature, in that, among others, unlike other barometers, it also includes perspectives about integration from the immigration sending country -a somewhat forgotten perspective, yet very important. Simply put, while it might be that a sending country would like and does encourage their people to keep their national identity for cultural and economic reasons, the receiving country, however, might be encouraging and seeking the assimilation of its new and old immigrants in the mainstream culture. Thus, the challenges of immigration and integration are big, and only through comprehensive research can we comprehend the big picture of diversity, and act accordingly (click on link below for pp presentation)
Immigration-integration-barometer

(For more information about the Comprehensive Integration-Immigration Barometer, contact us by e-mail or phone at:
omar.moufakkir@stenden.com
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