Immigration-Integration Barometer
January 24th, 2010 | Conferences, Lectorat, News & Info, PresentationsWhy 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).