EU Immigration Policy: Look Who's Coming to Dinner

Asylum seekers are crowding Europe's borders in escalating and unprecedented numbers. Conflict in Syria and turbulence in  North Africa are the main immediate driving forces, but as we shall see, there are broader forces at work. Vast numbers of people require help. Can Europe provide for them all? Are those arriving also those most in need of help? What should Europeans sacrifice to accommodate the arrivals? Sweden's pensioners have now seen one of their two hot meals per day taken away from them as part of the effort to handle the cost of the influx of immigrants. A banal example, perhaps, but also a stark illustration. 

World poverty is supposedly declining. I find it hard to believe, given the increasing waves of atrocious events that take place in the world around us every day. Though I am not a religious person, I see endless self-gratification - in high places and low, endless greed, and endless grasping for power. So what's new? Check Gregoire de Tours or the decline of the Roman Republic. The most obvious news is that I am getting old, and the world is changing very fast.

The world changes in myriad ways, of course, but the changes need to be recognized above all in their grand - global - patterns. The adage used to be “think globally, act locally” - and maybe it still is. But my first point is that the message from the local level these days is getting garbled – locally. Global thinking is messed up by cultural barriers, increasingly impenetrable. Local action can only have global effects if it can be repeated all around the globe. Now we have to recognize that the “globally thinking” Egyptians who started the Egyptian revolution were only a small minority. The rest of their compatriots are not looking for global values, but for their own parochial ones to be installed. The same is true of the “creationists” of the United States, to take another example, showing how widespread the regression of basic knowledge actually is by now.

Moreover, the West is slowly realizing that its values, enshrined in great declarations of the United Nations (in particular, Human Rights, the Rights of Children, the Rights of Women), are not only being ignored, but actively opposed. Local action has a better foundation if locally anchored. Parochialism wins out. And the parochial is all over the news.

Current affairs used to be about understanding the general through the particular, the news. Of course, we can still make sense of our own local world and what is happening there. But the larger condition the human race is in can less than before be grasped by our paying attention to events of the day, or what happens in particular places. If we want to gain some deeper level of understanding we must therefore try to grasp things on a grander scale, the way we do when we link the ravages of the weather to climate change (with the disaster of the Philippines, November 2013 fresh in our minds as the most compelling current example). Curiously, we are quick to see the connection when it comes to nature, but less so when it has to do with people.

This is my second point. Runaway self-gratification – acts which have become legion and to most of us utterly abhorrent (mass rapes, violent mass demonstrations with killings, religious massacres), needs to be recognized as linked to broader underlying causes: rapid population growth, poverty, illiteracy, information flooding stripped of context. Some of these violent events are said to be justified as a form of retribution for acts of oppression, but the determined vanguard action of masked individuals in many of them shows how easy it is for vandals with a different agenda to take over and redirect a protest. Organized crime infiltrates and profits from these events wherever possible.

Since the 1980s, there has not been much talk about world population growth as a problem. Nevertheless, it is predominantly the effects of this overarching problem we are living with today. It may be too close to us to recognize, but the chief underlying causes that I can see of our present chaotic world is the combined population growth and economic stagnation in parts of the developing world.* Notable also, as a motivating force, is the wide dissemination of electronic images globally, beyond any context understandable to the majority of people exposed to them. Images are captivating and disturbing beyond anything that texts alone can do. Here I believe globalization is a curse as much as it is a blessing.

No wonder a better life in the West – conveyed in electronic images - is seen as THE dream for them to realize. No wonder kind individuals in the West want to help them share that better life; it is "their right". No wonder thousands and thousands of migrants are knocking on Europe's doors, thousands more every year. Unrealistic politicians from all over the EU push well-intentioned immigration policies that are bound to crash against hard realities, just as overloaded migrants' boats founder at the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The available resources are way short.

The profiteering of “helpers” along the way keeps the migrants business at a healthy rate of growth. Organizers of rickety truck transports across the Sahara get richer by the day. Middlemen on the southern Mediterranean shores, peddling rides in boats that should long since have been condemned, see their little fortunes grow. At the end of the line, in Sweden, smart private “consultants” are on hand to help the new arrivals find their way in the jungle of welfare benefits and rules. And believe it or not: the consultants' fees are paid by the generous Swedish government (source: Swedish TV, November 15, 2013).

The migrant clients of this long line of scavengers are not the poorest; they are people who have been able to save up or otherwise mobilize the sizable funds needed to make that long transit to the promised EU-land. Their poorer sisters and brothers have no chance of making the trip.

And the EU and its member states keep pushing their policy of increased immigration. Critics, like myself, are accused of racism and xenophobia.

The solution to the developing world's woes is not to bring all their inhabitants into the Western world. It is certainly not to help their middle class before helping the poorest. The solution is not either to continue the flow of development aid that in Africa has kept corrupt regimes in power – or competing violently for power – since the 1960s.

The solution must be something akin to what Robert Cooper hinted at about a decade ago (http://www.demos.co.uk/files/postmodernstate.pdf?1240939425) when he described the world as divided between a pre-modern, a modern and a postmodern part. The pre-modern world is a collection of failed states. To save them, and us all, one approach he could see was a “new imperialism”, whereby the postmodern Western world conquers the world of warlords and misery. However, he regarded it as unlikely to come about, since bringing order where there is chaos is not very profitable these days.


Robert Cooper is by many regarded as too controversial to touch. Check his analysis. I find it even more convincing today than when I first saw it, since the trends I have described are much more compelling now, and the dangers to the EU of staying on course with immigration without integration are steadily increasing.


Improvement of life in the countries of the migrants' origin is the only way those who need help the most can receive it, and the scavenging industry can be brought to a halt. Those efforts can only be successful if they are handled and fully controlled by the EU member states who bear the cost. The recipient states are unlikely to accept this unless their payoff is considerable (more corruption?). The EU and its member states are unlikely to be so venturesome. We need a recognized EU “immigration crisis” on a much greater scale than the current moderate unpleasantness before even a debate of the requirements for change can get started.

I have little illusion that we shall ever get there.

*Text changed from previous reference to "population explosion", see comments below.