Europe rethinks its 'safe haven' status

In the years following the World War II, a chagrined US and Europe vowed to follow the Geneva Conventions and create safe havens for refugees. Yet such lofty ideals were hard to uphold after massive influxes of workers in the 1960s and early 1970s were halted during an economic downturn.

Those immigrant populations - often Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East - swelled with family reunification, yet often remained economically and socially distinct from the societies that had adopted. The image of the immigrant began to change, and distinctions between those who came for work and those who came for safety began to blur.

Now "asylum seekers are viewed as potential cheaters," says Jean-Pierre Cassarino, scientific coordinator for the Return Migration to the Maghreb (MIRAM), hosted by the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies in Florence, Italy. [Editor's note: The original version misidentified Dr. Cassarino's affiliation.]

Today, in once-homogenous Europe, tensions between immigrants and native Europeans appear to be increasing. The perception that an ever increasing number of newcomers - who neither speak the language of their adopted country nor accept its cultural mores - are changing the culture has increased support for ideas once only advanced by far-right political parties.

"France, Austria, and the Netherlands all have had very significant electoral success of the far-right parties," says Michael Collyer, a research fellow in European migration policy at the University of Sussex.

Collier points to the success in France - also this past week - of a strict new immigration law proposed by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Mr. Sarkozy's proposal would institutionalize "selective" immigration, giving an advantage to privileged immigrants of better economic and education status who are more "integratable."

It would also change the rights of family reunification for workers already in the country; speed up the expulsion of undocumented immigrants who are discovered or whose applications for asylum are rejected; lengthen the amount of time it takes to apply for permanent residency status for married couples; and toughen visa requirements. Most controversial, Sarkozy announced deportations for undocumented immigrant school children.

"We speak of the need to fight immigration but we don't have a clear position on whether we need immigrants," says Mr. De Bruycker, noting the precipitous dip in population growth in European Union countries in the last half century. He adds that a series of recent incidents have affected the image of immigrants in the European mind. The murder of a Jewish man - Ilan Halimi - on the outskirts of Paris earlier this spring, for example, by a band of immigrant youths. Or the murder of a Malian woman and a Flemish child in Antwerp last week by the son of a founder of Belgium's most far-right party.

"In Europe, we are still unable to accept that we are a continent of immigration," says De Bruycker.

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