"ZERO TOLERANCE" POLICY ON IMMIGRATION IS THE REAL SECURITY THREAT
Not surprisingly, the leak, in early September, of the Austrian Council Presidency's confidential "strategy paper" drew a storm of indignation from all groups and organisations forming what one could call Europe's "humanitarian lobby". Amnesty International (AI), the European Council of Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), national NGOs engaged in the defence of refugee and immigrant rights, civil liberties and human rights, as well as Green and Left parties were united in their rejection of the strategy paper. Their deep concern appears to be fully shared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The criticism of the "humanitarians" concentrates on the paper's proposal to consider a departure from valid international refugee law as set out by the 1951 Geneva Convention and the setting up of an entirely new system of "protection", based on political discretion of the governments of target states of flight instead of a "properly constituted legal procedure focussing on the individual case".
UNHCR is right, of course, when it recalls that "the 1951 Convention is still a perfectly valid and viable legal instrument to address the protection needs of persons fleeing, inter alia, civil war or persecution by non-state agents(...)" 1). ECRE is right, when it notes that, in examining a person's right to protection under the Convention, "what counts is the failure of national protection, not who persecutes", and that "individual determination is not and has never been the 'sole instrument' of refugee protection" 2). claudia Roth, the leader of the Green group in the European Parliament is right, when she states that the proposals of the strategy paper amount to abolishing the right of asylum.
Nonetheless, we should ask ourselves, whether this sort of criticism still makes much sense.
As a matter of fact, the "humanitarians" have been announcing the end of the right of asylum for years, whenever new restrictive and dissuasive measures in the field of asylum and immigration where introduced on the EU, Schengen or national level - and, actually, they were right. In practice, the shift of system called for in the strategy paper has already taken place. Anybody acquainted with the plight of asylum seekers in Europe knows that there is no longer such a thing as an individual right to asylum. By unilaterally introducing ever more restrictive interpretations of the 1951 Convention, Western European States have, in practice, already effectively amended the Convention along the outlines set out in the strategy paper.
The problem is that, apart from the dwindling species of European "humanitarians", nobody really seems to care. And since the national and EU decision-makers are aware of this, they in their turn do not find it necessary to take any account of moral, humanitarian, or rule-of-law scruples.
Thus, the constantly recurring lamentations of the "humanitarians" are threatening to become an ever more self-humiliating exercise, demonstrating nothing other than their political insignificance.
If we really are to face up to the policies outlined in the strategy paper, if we wish to defend human rights, freedom and democratic government, we will have to move away from a somewhat nostalgic, basically non-political, humanitarian and rule-of-law discourse. Instead, the policies proposed in the paper should be opposed on their own merits. In other words, we should challenge the alleged effectiveness of these policies as compared to their declared objectives, which are not humanitarian but genuinely egoistic. Accordingly, debate would no longer focus on whether we like asylum seekers and immigrants or not, i.e. on the fruitless and frustrating battle opposing the "good guys" to the "bad guys". Instead, debate would concentrate on the central contention underlying the strategy paper: that migrant and refugee fluxes must and can be prevented by more measures of control and deterrence, and that such a policy is an effective means of maintaining security and stability inside the "first circle" of rich Western countries.
By concentrating their criticism on the catch-eye proposals of the paper questioning the merits of the 1951 Geneva Convention, the "humanitarians" may unintentionally have diverted public attention from other proposals in the paper which might soon prove to be far more fatal.
What are the implications of, for example, the strategy paper's assertion that the prevention of migrant and refugee influxes is a vital interest of the EU, justifying the use of "political muscle" - comprising everything from diplomatic and economic blackmail to military intervention - in disciplining States generating "undesirable" refugee and migrant fluxes? Is the rising super-power EU planning to justify future military interventions outside Europe with the "humanitarian" objective of enabling would-be emigrants and refugees to stay in their countries of origin? Are States like Serbia, Algeria, Turkey and Iraq to be rewarded for more effectively preventing their nationals from leaving their country? Are they supposed to turn their States into detention centres?
A religious belief in policing
Be that as it may, the blunt proposal to complement the stringent control and deterrence measures already introduced within the Justice and Home Affairs framework by concerted action in the field of foreign policy and defence is a chilling illustration of the central assumption underlying the entire strategy paper: the almost religious belief in various forms of "policing away" the phenomenon of migration and flight. In the words of ECRE, the strategy paper "clings to the assumption that more and better deterrents are the only way forward - that the uncontrollable will ultimately be controlled". This basic assumption underlying the strategy paper is all the more astonishing in view of the quite explicit avowal, in the same paper, of the manifest failure of the repressive and dissuasive policies introduced since the beginning of the 90s for the purpose of preventing immigration.
The making of an army of "outlaws"
The main conclusion drawn in the analysis is that, while the number of asylum applications appears to have stabilized after 1994 (in fact, this is likely to be a very temporary halt, due to the end of the war in Bosnia, rather than to more restrictive asylum law), illegal immigration is on the increase. This indicates that all the dissuasive and repressive asylum and immigration policies have achieved is to push ever more people into illegality.
Is it astonishing that ever more would-be immigrants feel the only way to enter and stay in Western Europe is to do so illegally?
Quite obviously, it makes no sense for a would-be immigrant to apply for an entry visa, when he or she knows in advance that legal entry and stay will be denied. Nor does it make sense for a refugee to apply for asylum, when experience teaches that by making an application you reveal your identity and your whereabouts to authorities whose prime concern is to lock you up, turn down your application and remove you from the country as quickly as possible.
No wonder, then, that we are currently witnessing the emergence of what one could call "shadow societies" inside the Western European countries. They are formed by the steadily growing number of people excluded from the visible, official society ("undesirable" immigrants in the first place) who have learned that any contact with State authorities (including welfare, health and education) entails only trouble. Thus, their prime concern is to remain "invisible". For the authorities, these people do not exist, they are legally non-existent, they are literally "outlaws".
Yet, even outlaws must live. In the constant struggle for survival they are likely to become an easy prey for the illicit labour market and criminal networks in search of both victims and recruits. Thus, shadow societies constitute a growing ground for conflict and violence.
In view of the above, is it not legitimate to claim that the prevailing anti-immigration policies of the Western European countries have dramatically failed to achieve their declared goal of maintaining what governments like to call "public order and security"? Have they not virtually triggered a development that could soon prove a major threat to the security and stability of Western European countries?
The strategy paper strongly recommends a clamp-down on "facilitators" of illegal immigration. How long will it take the EU Council to understand that it is precisely their own policies of blocking the way for legal immigrants and genuine refugees that have decisively contributed to the rapid growth of the international business branch of trafficking in human beings? These criminal networks are now used as a welcome pretext for the rapid expansion of a European police apparatus that is steadily slipping out of democratic control and accountability.
The inconsistency of the strategy paper is startling indeed. It begins with noting the total failure of a remedy only to propose more of the same.
Distinguishing between migrants and refugees no way to cope with involuntary migration
Comments from various quarters also question a tendency in the strategy paper not to distinguish between migrants and (political) refugees. While this distinction may be appropriate in addressing the strictly legal aspects of asylum and immigration, one may wonder whether it makes much sense in addressing the root causes of forced migration (be it on economic or political grounds).
As a matter of fact, a legal distinction between immigrants and refugees on Convention, humanitarian, de facto, environmental or whatever other grounds changes not at all the undeniable fact that a steadily growing number of people see leaving their country of origin as the only way to escape degrading living conditions. People who leave their homes and their loved ones because they feel they have no other choice all have one thing in common: they are involuntary migrants. Thus, the mere fact of classifying them in different categories ranging from "economic migrant" to "Convention refugee", mainly for the purpose of denying 90 percent of them a legal status corresponding to their real life situation, is no way of tackling the problem of forced migration. It will merely result in the further growth of an international army of outlaws.
Global problems cannot be exported
Nor will the European Union succeed in tackling the security threat inherent in exclusion and the ensuing involuntary migration, by transforming itself into a fortress and the neighbouring buffer countries into Bantustan-like protectorates. Indeed, sending migrants back to third States merely displaces the potential of conflcit geographically and temporarily. This policy of "exporting" the problem, advocated by the strategy paper, is next to criminal in its shortsightedness. It is likely to prove suicidal in the longer term, since it is bound to contribute to the destabilisation of the young and vulnerable democracies surrounding "fortress Europe", burdened by Western diktat with a problem they are even less in a position to tackle than the wealthy European Union.
Today already, over a hundred thousand migrants and refugees on their way to Western Europe are said to be stranded in the city of Moscow alone. One more ticking time-bomb for the Russian government to cope with... Is anybody naive enough to believe that Western Europe will be spared from the consequences of a destabilisation of the CIS?
Involuntary migration is a global problem, and global problems cannot be shuffled off on neighbours. They can not be tackled with policing, unilateral action and arrogant super-power diplomacy. Just as South African apartheid policy fostered violence instead of promoting security and stability, a European apartheid policy will generate the conflicts it is meant to prevent.
A need for politics, not policing
The only way for the European Union to contribute to a persistent decrease of involuntary migration, is to address its underlying causes. Just recently, some of these causes were highlighted in the 1998 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Based on a comprehensive analysis of global development, the report held that "[today's] consumption is undermining the environmental resource base. It is exacerbating inequalities. And the dynamics of the consumption-poverty-inequality-environment nexus are accelerating. If the trends continue without change - not redistributing from high-income to low-income customers, not shifting from polluting to cleaner goods, not promoting goods that empower poor producers, not shifting priority from consumption for conspicuous display to meeting basic needs - today's problems of consumption and human development will worsen". And so will the problem of migration, one could add.
Getting rid of the UNHCR
Addressing these root causes would, undeniably, require enormous effort and some rethinking from the European Union and other wealthy countries - effort and rethinking the strategy paper appears to regard as too much of a challenge for the EU's muscle and brains. The possibilities of eliminating the "economic causes of migration from the Third World are undoubtedly very limited", the paper asserts, and goes on to claim that the same applies to "demographic and environmental factors and to durable change in the human rights situation". So, the EU is to rely on the prevailing instruments of policing which have already proven costly, ineffective and counterproductive. As for the genuinely strategic, and according to the paper, almost impossible task of finding and implementing solutions to the underlying causes of flight and migration, the paper proposes to shift responsibility to a UNHCR whose tasks have previously been "redefined" as a result of EU lobbying. One can barely imagine a more cynical proposal. The genuinely political, crucial job of acting on "States responsible for displacing people or the push factors in the countries of emigration" is to be generously conveyed upon the refugee agency of the United Nations, whose manifest lack of means and power no longer needs to be established. This proposal aims at killing many birds with one stone: to get rid of a still cumbersome international monitor of EU asylum policies by depriving the UNHCR of its prime role of protecting the rights of refugees in host countries, and to shuffle off responsibility for future lack of progress in preventing human rights violations and migration on the unpopular refugee agency and the UN as a whole.
Need for an alternative strategy
It is the merit of the strategy paper that it casts full light, at last, on extremely disquieting EU policy trends which could hitherto only be guessed at. We owe its remarkably blunt wording to two facts: that it was not intended for disclosure to the public, and that it was drafted by a senior official of the Austrian Interior Ministry, Dr Manfred Matzka, who has never shown a great sensitivity for nuance. Indeed, Dr Matzka started his political career as a Marxist hardliner before gradually mutating into a notorious hardliner on immigration and asylum. In bringing his "strategy" to paper, it simply did not occur to him that it might be advisable, be it for tactical reasons only, to exercise some "humanitarian" restraint.
The leaking of the strategy paper came as a major embarrassment to a majority of EU-member state governments, which hurried to stress what they called the "unofficial" and "draft" character of the document. Accordingly, the wording of the second version of the paper was somewhat watered down, and we may expect that the final version will be further edited. Yet, there is nothing to suggest that the Council in its majority disapproves the essence of the strategy outlined by their (civil) servant, Dr Matzka. At an informal meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council, Austrian Interior Minister Schlögl noted that all Member Sates accepted the "broad outlines" of the strategy paper 3). And commenting on the German government's cautious reaction to the paper, Heribert Prantl, the Home Affairs editor of the Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote: "What seems to annoy the government is not the anti-refugee tendency of the paper but its bluntness" 4).
No doubt, Dr Matzka's strategy proposals are likely to be implemented with the usual disregard for humanitarian and democratic scruples, if the European public fails to understand that the planned further expansion of "fortress Europe", far from stopping migration, poses a prime threat to security, stability, and peace not just outside the walls of the fortress, but in the very heart of Western European society. To appeal to the egoistic sentiments of Europeans by highlighting this threat to their security interests may prove more effective in countering repressive asylum and immigration policies than lamenting their lack of humanity.
N. B.
References:1. Preliminary observations on the Austrian Presidency Strategy Paper on Immigration and Asylum Policy, UNHCR Brussels, 9.9.98. 2. Observations on the Austrian Presidency of the European Union's Strategy Paper on Immigration and Asylum Policy, ECRE Secretariat, 4.9.98. 3. Agence Europe, report on informal meeting of the JHA Council in Vienna, 29.10.98. 4. 'Letzte Ölung für die Genfer Konvention?', by Heribert Prantl, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12/13.9.98.