Migration Flows Coming to the EU and the Financial Crisis

Immigration is a traditionally sensitive issue in European politics, especially since mid-Eighties/early Nineties. Between late Sixties and early Seventies, southern European countries such as Italy and Spain (which had fuelled large intra- and extra-European flows in the previous years) started to become immigration countries, thus joining France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherland, UK and Switzerland, which had a far longer tradition in the field. In the following decades, new dimensions added to (and often replaced) the old intra-(Western) European flows: (1) a growing inflow coming from the Mediterranean southern shores; (2) new flows coming from south-eastern Europe, especially since 1989. According to official figures (Eurostat, OECD, Council of Europe), in the EU-27, immigrants were – at the beginning of 2006 – about 28 millions, i.e. 5.6% on a total population of about 500 million people. Their geographic distribution significantly varies, ranging from 0.1-0.3% on total population respectively in Rumania and Bulgaria to 3.9-9.8% in the core countries of EU-15. About two thirds of the immigrants are non-EU citizens: about one third of them (32%) are non-EU Europeans (including Russian, Turks, and citizens of the Balkan states), 22% of them come from Africa (two third from the northern states), 16% from Asia (half from China and the Far East, half from the Indian region), and 15% from America (mostly South America). According to the same figures, between 1.5 and 2.0 million immigrants per year reached the EU countries, while the European Commission assess some 350,000-500,000 of them as irregulars. The same source ranges between 3.0 and 8.0 million the total number of irregular immigrants living in the EU-25 in 2007. Such state of things has raised wide concern both at communitarian and country level, fostering a heated debate on the best way to cope with it. Through a long and sometimes harshly criticized path, in July 2008 the EU adopted the Immigration and Asylum Pact ‘to consolidate its efforts towards a common immigration policy’. In the following October endorsed the idea of an EU Blue Card (somehow mirroring the US Green Card) to “help fill posts that require highly-qualified personnel” and “make it easier for SMEs and other businesses to recruit specialist and highly-skilled staff”. Individual member states still play, nonetheless, the major role in coping with both legal and illegal immigration. Generally speaking, national legislations have grown increasingly restrictive since 1970s. Problems in absorbing the new workforce into a slowing labour market, anxieties about the impact of a great mass of low skilled/low cost workers on national wage and employment levels (the so-called “Polish plumber” effect), widespread fears for the impact of illegal immigration on law and order, and growing identitarian sensitiveness among different sectors of the public opinion, all have conjured in setting the trend. In most recent years, these elements have been further strengthened by the political consolidation of right wing (although not necessarily xenophobic) forces in many European countries. The present economic and financial crisis has had three main effects on this picture. (1) At macroeconomic level, it as triggered a broad-based GDP decline. According to EU forecasts, in 2009, EU GDP should fall by about 4.0%, compared with -1.5% in the world as a whole and -3.0% in the United States. This has put EU labour market under heavy stress, increasing competition and apparently reducing short-term incentives to immigration; at the same time it has not fully jeopardize EU relative well-off status, thus sustaining long term inflows coming from low-income areas. (2) At institutional level, the integration dynamic coupled with the pressing need to react to the crisis has fostered a new sense of urgency in the development of a common immigration policy. On the other hand, the same elements have also deepened the cleavages existing among different countries about the “burden sharing” issue and led some of them to try to define their “national way” to cope with the problem. (3) At social and political level, fears about the crisis’ length, depth, and long-term effects have fuelled growing anti-immigration sentiments and the spread – into the public opinion – of strongly emotional overtones. These have been frequently enhanced by media and their representation of the issue; during the last months, in many EU countries, new emphasis has been given to illegal immigration and its impact on law and order, but legal immigration too has often been styled as a problem due to its (supposedly negative) consequences on nationals’ welfare and status. In this perspective, short-term considerations seem to have enhanced the vision of a “fortress Europe” besieged by immigrant masses threatening its economic, social and cultural security. Presently, evidence is too much fragmentary to asses the crisis’ final impact on EU immigration flows, although some general trends can be forecasted. The widespread and frequently remarked lack of homogenous and reliable data makes things worse. According to the experience drawn from previous great economic shocks (from the Wall Street crash in 1929 to the Asian crisis in 1997-99), short and long-term effects of wide-scale financial turbulences on migrations can, nonetheless, be very different, with the latter being quite difficult to predict in the crisis’ early stages. But the undergoing economic and financial turmoil has already had deep political consequences, with the widening of the gaps existing: (1) at EU level, among the security perceptions of the different member states and (2) at international level, among the individual and collective needs of the different countries and among their perspective of human and social development. The emerging trade-off seems, thus, to be between a short-term, national and state-centred vision of security and a long-term, international and collective one. On one hand, the creeping re-nationalization of the immigration policies and the adoption of more stringent measures to deal with the problem portray an increasingly fragmented Europe, fighting hard to defend its “privileged” status. On the other, the effort to develop a common course of action can be seen as the first steps towards a more comprehensive approach, integrating immigration into a broader frame of measures aimed at rebuilding EU’s economy on sounder bases.