Europe’s Center Is Losing On Immigration
If mainstream parties don't adapt, the far-right will keep winning.
Conversations about immigration in European politics almost invariably center around questions of racism and xenophobia. This is missing critical context. It may surprise readers to learn, for instance, that racism in European countries has not been shown to correlate with the success of anti-immigrant, populist parties. The success of these parties has to be understood somewhat differently: While there are certainly racists and xenophobes who support them, other voters have valid concerns, which have been left unaddressed by mainstream parties, enabling the right-wing to exploit and inflame them. It is much to the detriment of mainstream parties that they have been so slow to recognize the challenges of immigration, or to come up with meaningful reforms to address them. Their own failures are part of the reason for the success of the far-right—which seems to be on the march everywhere.
Immigration was a top concern of voters in this summer’s European Union elections, which brought major gains for right-wing populist parties. Immigration was also front and center in the Austrian elections in September, won by the far-right Freedom Party, which ran on the campaign slogan “Fortress Austria” and promised to end immigration and the crime, violence, and welfare-abuse purportedly caused by it. In the Netherlands, the party of right-wing populist Geert Wilders also came out on top in the country’s most recent elections. The Dutch government formed after the elections announced the “strictest asylum policy ever.” That included using emergency powers to change asylum and immigration policies and seeking an opt-out of the EU’s migration rules. In Sweden, the country that has probably been more generous to immigrants than any other in Europe, the right-populist Sweden Democrats also notched major gains in the country’s last elections, and the government supported by them promptly promised to clamp down on immigration, going so far as to offer migrants $34,000 to return home.
But due to its import and history the place where the rise of an anti-immigration party has raised the most concern is Germany. Since September the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won elections in the German state of Thuringia and come in a close second in the state elections held in Saxony and Brandenburg. Nationally, the AfD is polling second. Given the AfD’s radicalism—members have ties to neo-Nazi organizations, have downplayed the importance of the Holocaust, called for pride in Germany’s “World War II accomplishments,” and more—the consequences of its growing support are potentially dire. On the heels of the AfD’s election victories, the ruling coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals announced important policy changes, including re-instituting passport checks at its borders in order to reduce illegal immigration. If policies like these spread and became permanent, it would mean the end of one of the European Union’s greatest achievements—the Schengen agreement’s elimination of internal borders—and pose a threat to European unity. What lies behind these developments?
The most common explanation is that they are the consequence of a racist, xenophobic backlash to immigration in Germany and elsewhere. Right-wing populists do, after all, want to limit immigration and often make racist and xenophobic appeals. Despite the intuitive nature of this explanation, the empirical evidence for it is surprisingly weak. A survey by the Pew Research Center has found little correlation between levels of racism and xenophobia in a country and the support given to right-wing populists. Such parties perform very well in some countries where racism and xenophobia are not prevalent, such as Sweden, and perform poorly in others where such attitudes are prevalent, such as Ireland and Portugal. Similarly, there is no correlation over time between racism and xenophobia and support for right-wing populism: Such sentiments have generally waned in Western Europe, while support for right-wing populism has risen. As one group of scholars writes, between 1990 and 2018 “views about cultural issues across all occupational groups became consistently more cosmopolitan” in Western democracies. What, then, has been going on?
First, it is important to recognize that existing immigration policies in Europe have failed to deal with real problems. Rates of illegal immigration have been extremely high, particularly in Germany, straining systems already overwhelmed by the record number of asylum seekers that have arrived over the past decade. Last year, for example, 1.14 million people filed asylum claims in Europe, the highest number since the height of the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. Moreover, of the 7 million asylum seekers that have arrived since 2015, 3.6 million have had their claims rejected and been ordered to leave, yet only 1 million have actually done so. In addition, after arriving in Europe, a very large number of asylum seekers purposefully move on to countries historically viewed as generous, like Germany and Sweden. In order to disincentive such behavior, EU rules allow countries to transfer asylum-seekers back to their country of entry, but such transfer requests are often rejected.
Second, rising immigration has coincided with difficult economic times, making citizens particularly wary of immigration’s costs. Scholars consistently find that voters experiencing de-industrialization and trade shocks or those who are in direct competition with immigrants for scarce public resources, such as welfare benefits and access to housing, easily become resentful about immigration. While there is every reason to believe that the long-term economic impact of immigration is generally positive, the impact of the low-skilled and low-educated migrants that represent a very large share of the asylum seekers reaching Europe is less clear. Jan van de Beek, an independent Dutch researcher, notes, for example, that between half and two-thirds of all asylum seekers who arrived in the Netherlands since 1999 and have left school are unemployed and on benefits, even though the country suffers from extreme labor shortages. A recent U.K. study similarly found that a low-wage migrant worker’s contribution to the budget was a net negative of hundreds of thousands of pounds while a recent Danish study concluded that immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey and their descendants have drained a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn) from public resources in 2018, about 1.4% of GDP.
There is also evidence that low-skilled, low-educated and illegal migrants have been disproportionately involved in crime, another major concern of voters. This became a major issue in Germany, which has experienced a significant rise in violent crime, including two well-publicized stabbing incidents that occurred shortly before the recent state elections in which the AfD performed so well. The first involved a 25-year-old refugee from Afghanistan (whose asylum application had been denied but who could not be repatriated to Afghanistan) killing a policeman, and the second involved a 26-year-old Syrian (whose asylum application had also been rejected but who nonetheless remained in Germany) killing three people and injuring eight others. These events and crime more generally are consistently mentioned by AfD voters as a source of concern. Similar concerns were part of the backstory to the right-wing FPÖ’s recent victory in Austria. Asylum applications remain extraordinarily high; the proportion of immigrants who do not speak German is a noticeable problem in public education; stabbings and gang wars have become prevalent in immigrant neighborhoods; and a few weeks before the election a thwarted terrorist attack forced the cancellation of a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.
Until fairly recently, however, such concerns—about illegal immigration, the repatriation of failed asylum applicants, assimilation, budgetary strains, crime and so on—were not responded to; indeed, in many cases they were not even acknowledged. In fact, over the past decade or so, as concerns like these were growing among the general population, elites in both center-left and center-right parties were becoming more liberal or “cosmopolitan” regarding immigration. As Laurenz Guenther of Bocconi University has shown, during this period “parliamentarians [became] much more liberal than the electoral center, and even most conservative or Christian democratic parties [became] more liberal than the mean voter” on cultural matters, especially immigration. This dynamic can certainly be seen in Germany. Marie Kübler and Armin Schäfer, for example, found that while just under 40% of the German population strongly agrees that immigrants are obliged to assimilate to German culture, up until recently not a single Left, SPD or Green MP did. About 33 percent of Christian democratic MPs in Germany now claim to be strong advocates of assimilation, but, in 2013, only 15.8 percent of them held this position. In contrast, this position is supported by almost all AfD MPs. As for AfD voters, they are not uniformly socio-culturally conservative; rather they are uniformly concerned about immigration and what they see as its negative consequences.
In short, if we want to understand the growing support given to right-wing parties promising to rein in immigration, a focus on racism and xenophobia will only get us so far. Instead, we have to understand the success of these parties in the context of failures of the center and left. In particular, the inability or unwillingness of mainstream parties to address voters’ concerns about illegal immigration, crime, lack of integration, strained government resources and so on created opportunities for “anti-establishment” or populist parties to appeal to such voters by promising to do so. This opportunity grew as the salience or importance of immigration increased due to high-profile violent events, media attention, and the efforts of politicians to keep immigration-related concerns at the forefront of political debate. For center and left parties to fight right-wing populism, they must of course point out and condemn racism and xenophobia, but they must also acknowledge and address voters’ legitimate concerns over immigration. Too often critics conflate doing the latter with copying, appeasing, or selling-out to the far-right. This is a tragic mistake. Evincing concern with illegal immigration, growing crime, terrorism, the reality of economic tradeoffs, budgetary constraints and so on are not prima facie evidence of racism or xenophobia. These are legitimate voter concerns. And to ignore them is a strategic blunder. If mainstream parties are unable or unwilling to come up with ways to address real and pressing problems related to immigration that concern many voters, populists will continue to have a source of grievances and resentments to draw on and democracy will suffer.
Sheri Berman, a member of the Persuasion board of advisors, is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her most recent book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day.
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The idea of globalism ignores human tribal nature and the related negative impacts to the health of nations derived from common cultural and ethnicity. It is just a lie that nations are made better by diversity lacking significant investment in assimilation services for immigrants.
The only reason that countries like the US have demonstrated such profound success with its diverse population is the abundance of working class upward mobility. Immigrants assimilated because of the economic benefits derived. Today we have loaded up with government benefits that don’t require assimilation, and because of the same globalism agenda that has opened borders and allowed floods of immigrants, we have exported working class economic opportunity to other countries.
This same scenario is playing out in all western countries. The problem is that there are trillions at stake for the globalists maintaining their globalist agenda, and their political home… the globalist Regime home… is the liberal, left Democrat parties.
The far right will keep winning because the globalists will never stop attempting to retain the system that flows money and power to them.
What strikes me as odd here is the framing: The goal is to combat the "far right". To do so, it's acceptable to deal with the electorate's complaints about immigration because those are largely reasonable.
Why in the world do we not simply say "We should deal with the electorate's complaints about immigration because those are largely reasonable," and dealing with the reasonable complaints of the electorate is what we're 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵? The hope is that if we do a good job we'll be reelected so that we can 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦 to server the electorate.