Thread: Europe Makes Mistake Taking in Low Skilled Labor

Europe gets choosier about its newcomers
Talented workers welcomed, low-skill laborers shunned

Elizabeth Bryant, Chronicle Foreign Service

Monday, May 8, 2006



Paris -- Bakari Coulibali held up a half-eaten slice of baguette in his hand, his mouth full of crusty bread and butter.

"I thank these Christians," said Coulibali, a Muslim from Mali, as he sat at a church breakfast for the homeless. "Everyone here has a piece of bread. Every morning, they give us coffee. What else do we have besides this? Zero."

A onetime farmer who came to France illegally in 1990, Coulibali has joined the ranks of the opposition to tough new immigration legislation.

Demonstrations last week brought hundreds of thousands of foreign and citizen activists to the streets of cities across the Bay Area and the nation in support of immigrant rights. On the other side of the Atlantic, the debate also is heating up, pitting legalization advocates against backers of stronger anti-immigration measures.

Across broad swathes of Western Europe, the welcome mat is vanishing -- at least for low-skilled illegal immigrants such as Coulibali. Increasingly, European governments are introducing new immigration tests and other screening devices to attract only talented foreigners whose values mirror their own.

Xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiments are on the rise, experts say. The twin trends appear paradoxical in graying Europe, where foreign workers are needed to bankroll welfare states. France, Germany and other parts of Europe may be battling high unemployment rates, but jobs go begging in certain sectors like construction and information technology. Immigration restrictions have been eased to meet such labor gaps, but the borders are closing to unskilled immigrants from Africa and elsewhere, including asylum seekers suspected of fleeing their homes for economic reasons and not because of political persecution.

"There is a general trend toward regulation and restricting immigration -- and asylum seekers in particular," said Daniele Joly, an expert on immigration issues at the University of Warwick in England. "In appearance at least, the door is closed to immigration. And the discourse of politicians is very hostile to immigration."

France is no exception. On Tuesday, the National Assembly began debating immigration legislation that would make it harder for illegally entering foreigners to gain residency and for immigrants' families to settle here. The bill also would encourage newcomers to take language and citizenship tests and would cherry-pick skilled immigrants -- an initiative its sponsor, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, calls "chosen immigration."

Sarkozy also proposes cutting the red tape that hampers another effort -- cash payments for illegal immigrants who return home. By establishing firm rules, he argues, his legislation will quell rising xenophobia, while also responding to skilled-labor shortages in France.

"I'm convinced this text is firm and balanced," Sarkozy told French lawmakers last week. "It's tough against those who don't respect the rules of the game. And it's fair in favor of people who request to come to France and respect our admission rules."

But critics, including leftist politicians and a number of Christian churches, denounced the bill as unjust and mean-spirited.

"It will break up families," said the Rev. Francis Barjot, parish priest of the St. Hippolyte Roman Catholic Church in southern Paris. Welcoming only high-skilled immigrants, he said, "amounts to pillaging poor countries of their doctors, their professors -- when we should be helping them develop."

Barjot has done more than just complain -- he has welcomed 150 illegal immigrants who turned up at his church after being evicted from a state agency they had occupied to protest the immigration bill. "When someone knocks, you open the door," Barjot said.

Which is how 45-year-old Coulibali ended up at the church breakfast on Friday, slurping coffee and sketching a grim, 16-year existence down-and-out in Paris.

Sitting at an outdoor table with half a dozen other Africans, Coulibali described his life as a small farmer raising animals and crops in Mali, a former French colony. "I left because there was no rain," he said of his decision to come by boat to Europe in 1990. "I needed to find food for myself and my family."

In Paris, he has scrounged for work -- construction, cleaning houses, emptying trash. "It's better than stealing," he said. "I'm not lazy." He has found shelter here and there, with friends and family.

Today, Coulibali is homeless, and without legal working papers his options are limited. "I want papers to work like everyone else," Coulibali said. "That's all I want, legal papers."

But in Paris and in many other European capitals, the appeal for legal papers is increasingly being turned down. Britain, the Netherlands and Germany have approved new screening tests intended, they say, to draw in skilled workers and those who share their social and political values. The European Union is also considering an immigration "integration contract," to ensure that newcomers share similar social and political values. Even Denmark, with a history of tolerance toward immigrants -- despite the recent uproar over cartoons perceived as anti-Muslim -- is reversing course.

The trend is not universal. Spain and Greece recently granted amnesty to several million illegal immigrants, mostly from north and sub-Saharan Africa and Albania -- yet they, too, continue shipping many others home. Italy also has shifted between expelling and legalizing immigrants, as southern Europe transforms from a region of emigration to one of immigration.

In contrast to the United States, tighter European legislation has not sparked huge demonstrations. A rally against the immigration bill in Paris last weekend drew only 5,000 protesters -- a drop in the bucket compared with hundreds of thousands of people who demonstrated against an unpopular youth-jobs law last month. Even Europe's illegal immigrants have remained relatively silent about measures that affect their future.

"Illegal immigrants are very poorly organized, almost by definition," said Han Entzinger, an immigration professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. "And no one takes an interest in them -- it has to do with general anti-immigration feelings."

In France, high unemployment and last fall's riots by ethnic immigrant youths have only sharpened those sentiments. A rash of recent surveys show strong support for tighter immigration measures -- the bread-and-butter rhetoric of far-right politicians.

Indeed, a poll published Friday in Le Figaro magazine found Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the extremist National Front party, coasting on an 18 percent approval rating -- slightly higher than in 2002, when he placed second in French presidential elections. Le Pen, 77, is now stumping for next year's presidential race with a new slogan: "France, love it or leave it."

Anti-immigration sentiments are similarly feeding far-right parties in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria and Britain -- where the British National Party doubled its number of local councilors in elections Thursday.

Still, tough talk in Europe is not always matched by action, experts say. Britain, for example, granted 400,000 work permits to immigrants last year alone, Joly said.

"They don't have the courage to come clean and say: 'Now the situation has changed. We do need immigrants today,' " she said. "So they bring them in by stealth."

Originally Posted by sawdust

Europe gets choosier about its newcomers


"France, love it or leave it."

I'll give the French credit for that. Why should they bother themselves with low-skilled illegals when the USA welcomes them with open arms?
Just send them all to the USA. They will be much happier and healthier here. And they will be given automatic civil rights, free health care, social security benefits, subsidized housing, free education and many other things that Americans are denied.
A little bit of creativity in identy theft, and they can have almost anything that they want.
And the best part is that, as they are riding this free train, they don't even have to show any appreciation to the American people or the USA. And if enough of them show up, they can even take a state or two and claim them as their own.
Our Federal Government will support them all the way.

Looks like France is way ahead of us on this one, doesn't it?

Ireland too has instituted stricter immigration laws. Apparently every country but us is able to see the writing on the wall.

Originally Posted by nntrixie

Looks like France is way ahead of us on this one, doesn't it?

""It will break up families," said the Rev. Francis Barjot, parish priest of the St. Hippolyte Roman Catholic Church in southern Paris. Welcoming only high-skilled immigrants, he said, "amounts to pillaging poor countries of their doctors, their professors -- when we should be helping them develop."

Bravo!!!! Ole!!!!!

An excellent argument for closing our borders!!!!

It is in our and the potential invader's best interests to prevent them from entering and ousting those here to ensure families are not broken up!!!!

Even if an entire nuclear family of illegals is here, even if the kid(s) are anchor babies, there are aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, nephews, nieces and others in their homeland unable to interact with that family.

Family values, as touted by our putrid politicians, requires us to reunite those families!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Europe is dealing with the failure of letting all those low-skilled immigrants into their countries and now their is no work and they have to support them. It failed in europe and it will fail here as well. That is why we have to stop is now and not repeat the mistake that europe made.

What I want to know is: When all the developed bleeding heart countries have been done in by having to support the world's problems, where will all the wealthy go? They won't stay here (or "there") and try to cope with or fix what they caused...so where will they go? And I wonder...is provoking a race war just a way to avoid the class war that was already brewing? Just a thought.

I honestly think they have a plan. Whether they will stay in their own countries and live in their castles, protected by private armies or do they have some country in mind?

I do think they have a plan. I can't believe all those people are stupid enough to destroy their own world as they destroy ours.

Maybe we should be thinking of something similar??

They are all so rich that they will be living in luxury in switzerland by the time this all explodes and we will be stuck here trying to stay alive in this mess. They were protesting in the streets of Dublin this morning demanding asylum, they say they would rather starve to death than to go back to afghanistan.

nntrixie & Sawdust

Hey....maybe all of us here should pool some funds in an ALIPAC evacuation fund and buy some island somewhere for all of us to go to when the (___) hits the fan in the US?