In the past year, anti-immigration parties in Sweden and Finland entered national parliaments, joining the ranks of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands and France’s National Front. But while political statements warn of a flood of foreigners, panelists at a workshop on Monday said the debate on immigrants is sometimes smoke and mirrors.
Is Europe a migrant magnet?
“We shouldn’t forget that the numbers are somewhere else,” said Professor Jochen Hippler, from the University of Duisberg-Essen during “Transnational Migration, Price and Prejudices: Ways out of the dilemma.”
He noted that Afghan refugees go in huge numbers to Pakistan, and Libran refugees go to Tunisia. They are fleeing to survive, he said, and they are not necessarily heading to Germany or Denmark first.
And even when they do come, their threat is a small, “symbolically charged” issue, he said. And when it comes to actual terrorist attacks, “[you] can’t even compare it to dangerous things like driving a car.”
Legal roots
Illegal immigrants often whip up images of border stations at night and fishing boats ferrying people over the Mediterranean Sea. But most illegal immigrants enter the country legally, said Francesco Ragazzi, an assistant professor at Leiden University. Most often, they simply don’t return home when their visa expires.
But the image of waves of immigration crashing over Europe persists, Hippler warned. A lack of information can create fertile ground for anti-immigration sentiment in Europe.
“If you combine confusion with the threat of losing something… you get the precursors to moral panic.”
By: Katherine Dunn
