Thread: Vitriolic pro-immigration propaganda (Economist)

Corporate leeches striking back. I strongly doubt that Europe needs more immigrants. Neither corporate vampires nor hard left extremists aren't "Europe". Recently I have read a report stating that children poverty is on record levels in Germany and getting worse and worse. The same concerns other countries. However I think this article is good because American people can see from Economist's whining and cursing that in Europe people are trying to defend themselves.



[quote] Europe and immigration
The trouble with migrants

Nov 22nd 2007 | BERLIN, BRUSSELS, PARIS AND ROME
From The Economist print edition

Europe is fretting about too much immigration when it needs even more

CAST your eye around Europe, and you find a funk about foreigners. Denmark's voters have given the anti-immigration Danish People's Party its fourth successive rise in voting share. The Swiss gave 29% of their votes to the xenophobic Swiss People's Party. An anti-foreigner party is the second-biggest in Norway. A fifth of Flemish voters in Belgium back the far-right Vlaams Belang.

In France, Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidency in May after aping the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen. He now talks of inculcating French values. Next year, when France has the European Union presidency, he will promote a similar idea at EU level. His new ministry of national identity and immigration has proposed quotas on immigrants from some regions that may be a ploy to keep out the dark-skinned. He has passed a law to limit immigration for family unification, which allows DNA testing to prove genetic ties.

French policy is measured by comparison with recent actions in Italy. After a Romanian migrant killed an Italian woman in Rome, Romano Prodi's government approved a decree to make it easier to expel EU citizens who are deemed a threat to public security. This pandered to the popular prejudice that Italy's half a million Romanian immigrants, often Roma (gypsies), are more criminal than other new arrivals. But it achieved little. Vigilantes attacked Romanians; police destroyed Roma camps. But as of mid-November, only 117 people had been served with expulsion orders; far fewer had actually gone.

Why are Europe's voters and politicians so stirred up? The short answer is that rates of immigration, from inside and outside the EU, are high, and have been rising for years. A report by Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, suggests that since 2001 migration has added 0.5% a year to Europe's workforce. It concludes that immigration in Europe has outstripped even inflows to America. In many European countries the stock of the foreign-born population has never been higher. As much as 24% of the Swiss population was born elsewhere, as was 12% of Belgium's.

The numbers alone do not explain why some countries are anxious and others less so. France and Denmark have foreign-born shares of the population of only 8% and 6.5% respectively. Some countries that are relatively more relaxed about immigration have much bigger shares: Sweden has 12% and Ireland 11%, for example. One explanation is that an inrush of immigrants may not provoke a backlash so long as the economy is strong.

Worries about immigration from poor countries have been around for years. The fresh element in many west European countries is a concern about immigration from new EU members in eastern Europe. Since the accession of eight countries from the region in 2004, followed by Romania and Bulgaria in January 2007, large numbers of migrant workers have moved (often legally and temporarily) from east to west. Britain, Sweden and Ireland opened up fully to workers from the east in May 2004 and have taken in many highly educated migrants, helping to sustain their long economic upswings. Countries that have seen housing booms have imported hundreds of thousands of lower-skilled workers, often from the east.

Spain alone is thought by the European Commission to be home to some 547,000 adults of working age from Romania and Bulgaria. Yet Spaniards, according to a poll this month for France 24, a television station, appear untroubled. They have the sunniest attitudes of all Europeans towards migration, with 43% of respondents saying that immigrants are a boon to Europe and 55% believing that they are good for the economy. The same poll suggested that 42% of Britons think immigrants are good for the economy, although fewer believe they benefit the country overall.

Yet even in Britain there is creeping anxiety about high immigration from within the EU. This is partly to do with foreign nationals (all those skilled Poles in London) who now take roughly half of all the new jobs being created in Britain. Other gripes are that schools, hospitals and roads are getting overcrowded. After its experience since 2004, Britain decided last January to keep its doors shut to migrant workers from Romania and Bulgaria. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, aware of Mr Sarkozy's electoral success, even talked at the Labour Party conference of “British jobs for British workersâ€

Originally Posted by Lugundum

He has passed a law to limit immigration for family unification, which allows DNA testing to prove genetic ties.

What a fantastic idea!!!

Just curious, as to why are we are not discussing this topic.
If anything is, this is a threat to American citizens and our way of life.
What is Alipac's position on this subject?