Europe’s ‘unending’ migrant crisis isn’t anywhere near over

Two years ago, Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy photographed lying face down on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum, stirred the conscience of many Europeans. That moment of guilt and shame already seems past. We’ve barely noticed that since Kurdi’s death at least 8,500 people, many of them unescorted children, have died or disappeared while attempting to cross the Mediterranean, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.
The Italian government has started to work with the Libyan coast guard as well as tribes in southern Libya to block the flow of migrants and refugees. Italy’s neighbors — France, Switzerland and Austria — in turn have beefed up border security, with police sending migrants back to Italy. The number of refugees arriving in Europe has dramatically decreased this summer.
Still, more than 120,000 people have come to Europe by sea this year, a great majority of them making the perilous journey from Libya to Italy. And the desperation that drives the denizens of failing or failed states, as well as victims of banditry and interminable civil wars, into inflatable vessels and ramshackle fishing boats is unlikely to abate anytime soon.
The other reality also stares us in the face: Too much migration has already taken place for ultra-nationalist fantasy of ethnically and culturally homogenous populations to be realized. Yet many demagogic tendencies across Europe threaten to make the continent relive its awful past of sectarian hatred.
An admirer of Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico, Orban claims that “every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.” Never mind that, as anti-Orban activist group Two-Tailed Dog points out in a poster, “the average Hungarian is more likely to see a UFO than a refugee in his lifetime.” Or that Hungary, like most European countries with declining populations, needs migrants.
Even the most prosperous parts of Europe are now vulnerable to such pathologies. Last week Norway’s immigration minister from populist Progress Party, travelled to one of Stockholm’s most violent suburbs to highlight Sweden’s problems with immigration. Echoing Trump’s contention about London, she alleged that there are 60 “no-go zones” in Sweden.
The claim, an extraordinary breach of diplomatic protocol, was dismissed as “complete nonsense” by Sweden’s immigration minister. But the audience for Listhaug’s fake news was back home, where elections are due in less than two weeks. In Italy, too, far-right opposition parties are stoking public sentiments against migrants. In elections due next year in the euro zone’s third-largest economy, they could enfeeble the pro-EU ruling Democratic Party.
Certainly, politicians can squeeze much political mileage from vulnerable refugees. This is due to a psycho-social dynamic generated by the strangers in our midst — both real and imagined. Migrants, embodying the vast and opaque forces of globalization, remind many in Europe today of their own fragile socio-economic position. They come to be feared irrationally for further suppressing long stagnant wages and salaries, and lengthening the queues at employment
centers, schools and hospitals.
Few politicians, it seems, can resist the temptation to exploit the profound anxieties many people have about their precarious status in the world. It is so much easier to divert public anger over political dysfunction, corruption and incompetence against migrants than to enact positive change.
But there are also more hopeful trends, and nowhere more so than in Europe’s leading country. Contrary to all expectations, refugees have not featured much in Germany’s election campaign. This is largely because Germany is far less open to immigration than it was in 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the country’s borders to nearly one million refugees. Importantly, it is also true that German authorities have moved to integrate the newcomers, acknowledging that they are fated to co-exist with German citizens.
Most are enrolled in language classes. Some have found jobs. More importantly, neither Merkel nor her main opposition, the Social Democrats, has sought to exploit stray acts of criminality by refugees. Rather, Merkel has pragmatically claimed that there are bound to be some criminals among a large population of refugees.
Facing down her bitter far-right opponents in Germany, Merkel is now set to become a fourth-term chancellor. This is evidence that even mass immigration can be managed if there is sufficient political will. There should be no doubt about the alternative: a relentless mainstreaming of hateful rhetoric, with the kind of toxic consequences we have already witnessed in Europe’s savage 20th century history.

—Bloomberg

Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg View columnist. His books include “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia,” “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond” and “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.”