LONDON – Can it go on? Why should it go on? And, anyway, what real long run benefits does it bring? These are the still unanswered questions that fifty years of massive immigration into Europe pose. The last ten years the questioning has been relatively muted. The European economies under-performed and European governments finally, if belatedly, put into place common immigration policies that weakened a flow that was diminished anyway by the slackening of demand.
But the big questions from the 1960s and 70s are back with a vengeance. Economic activity is picking up fast and some governments, such as the Spanish, are letting it be known they are more in favour of renewed immigration. The whole 60’s belief system is being dusted off: that immigration oils the cogs and wheels of the economy, especially the bit down below decks where the heavy lifting is done. Moreover, it was said, as immigration reduces labour bottlenecks, it counters inflationary pressures.
Thirty years ago Spain was a country of emigration. France, in particular, was flooded with Spanish workers and, from these Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, the Spanish emigrated by the shipload to Venezuela.
Today Spain is one of the fastest growing economies of Europe. Particularly in the south, in the agricultural areas growing hothouse winter vegetables and fruits, there is a great demand for cheap labour. Africa is near. For decades Moroccans especially have dared death or captivity to make the sixteen kilometre crossing of the Mediterranean at its neck. Now black Africans from as far away as war-torn Sierre Leone and economically unstable Nigeria are making the perilous journey through wild Atlantic seas to the Canary Islands. The papers in Spain are full of the interception at the beginning of the week of a small boat off the coast of Fuerteventura, the Spanish island lying closest to the African coast. It was full of Nigerians, including two children and two pregnant women. The coastguard also discovered in the sea close by the dead body of an African.
For now the numbers remain manageable, but “for how long?” asks Senora Natividad Cano, Feurteventura’s director for social affairs.”Fuerteventura has been converted into the port of entry for Europe.”
Many are returned from whence they came. But more slip through the thin net and those who employ them seem to have influential political connections. Spain recently legalized 70,000 immigrants. Yet their economic and political sponsors are slow to move when it comes to making a decent life for those the government allows to stay. Many of these immigrants on the mainland live in hovels, surrounded by a hostile populace. In February, crowds attacked these rudimentary lodgings and burnt them down, a rampage brought on by the Moroccan murder of a local.
In every country in Europe, as the economy swings into a healthy upturn, the immigration debate is becoming re-engaged. Jobs, especially in the bottom rungs of the ladder, are becoming scarce. Should Europe open up again, or be prepared to slow down the economy?
Even to those like myself who are both pro the free market and pro the intermingling of people there is a sense, albiet expressed reluctantly, that enough is now enough. We are still digesting the influx of the 60s and 70s, some countries better than others. This earlier massive migration, whatever good it did to a few sectors of the economy, to many of the first generation immigrants themselves and to our ignorance of the music, the cuisine and the culture of far away peoples, created a series of hard-to-deal-with problems for which society is still paying the bills.
It also enabled society to put on hold older problems it should have been forced to confront earlier. In particular, it postponed the reorganization of economic life in the most humdrum parts of the economy, putting off the day when menial jobs should have been re-shaped to have more appeal to unemployed locals. It also postponed the day when a lot of businesses, in particular those in textile manufacturing and agriculture, should have packed up and re-located in the lands from which the immigrants came.
For society at large, a new wave of immigration greases the wheels and keeps the inflationary demons at bay but, over time, the costs outweigh the benefits. Once the immigrants are settled, their families re-united or reproduced, their own demands can become inflationary. Their need for housing, schools and social services can make the net effect of their presence a fiscal burden. Even in America, which for now accepts it is a country of immigration, and the process of social adapting and adopting is more smooth, economists find it hard to prove that latter day immigration has been a significant economic plus over the long run.
Europe, a continent not used to immigration despite various waves throughout history, is not instinctively welcoming. Quite the reverse, its raw impulses are hostile. It is the working class who have to bear the social brunt of immigration, not the intellectuals or economists who explain its supposed benefits, even allure. It is this hostility that has helped ensure that a large number of the second generation of the earlier immigrants find themselves ill-educated, alienated, unemployed and, in too many cases, attracted to crime. (And it must never be overlooked that first generation immigrants had a crime rate well below the local average.)
A new large wave of immigration is the last thing Europe is ready for; it will take at least another generation’s hard work to get on top of the problems of the last.
It will not be easy even in a time of economic growth to find the answers. Immigration as a quick fix, as in modern Spain, is a tempting, if ill-considered, way to go. But why, with its increasingly open internal borders, should the rest of Europe accept Spain’s ill-thought out response? Surely the European Union must pressure Spain to think again.
There are indications that the penny is beginning to drop about alternatives. As the scientific reports start to land on ministers’ desks telling them before too long people may start to expect to live until they are 180, the realization is belatedly dawning how nonsensical are the policies and attitudes of the last decade that encouraged firms and institutions to encourage retirement at age 60 or even earlier. Here, in fact, in premature retirement is an enormous pool of potential labour. Holland, in particular, has shown what a flexible and useful resource it is, as long as employers themselves become less rigid and more imaginative in the way they hire and deploy their workforce.
Perhaps the great immigration debate should now become the great re-organization debate.
– – – – –
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
