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Is Immigration Fueling the Rise of Nativism in Europe? - New America Media
Is Immigration Fueling the Rise of Nativism in Europe? - New America Media
Far-right parties across Europe are gaining momentum, as witnessed by their recent successes at the ballot box in Greece and France. While immigration is thought to be a major factor fueling the parties’ rise, a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute finds that although there is clearly a relationship, the connection is not as straightforward as is often assumed.
During times of economic crisis immigrants are often scapegoated as the cause of all problems, from crime to unemployment. Far-right parties, in particular, make attacking immigrants the core of their program. None more so than the Greek Golden Dawn, an unabashed neo-Nazi party, which even goes so far as to enforce its election slogan “Let’s rid this country from the filth” by attacking immigrants in the streets. Yet, while this is an extreme case, and most far-right parties do not use violence, anti-immigrant sentiments are rampant throughout Europe and they are not only reserved for the far right.
In the recent French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front gained a record 17.9 percent of the vote. She had called for the reinstatement of border controls within the European Union and had promised to cut back immigration by 90 percent. Mainstream right-wing French president Nicolas Sarkozy tried to gain re-election by winning over her voters, saying that there were too many foreigners in France and that he would decrease immigration by 50 percent.
What explains this outburst of anti-immigrant politics? Is Europe hit by a new wave of mass immigration? No! In many European countries the number of immigrants has actually fallen since the economic crisis started in 2008. In general, levels of immigration do not really explain the electoral success of far-right parties. But in time of economic crisis and record levels of unemployment – youth unemployment is around 50 percent in Greece – arguments that immigrants take away the jobs of natives do find more support.
Still, despite the more favorable breeding ground, with majorities of the European public concerned about immigration, far-right parties have gained very different levels of success across the continent. Against success stories in Austria and Italy, where far-right parties have been part of the national government, stand as many examples of relatively or complete failure, such as in Germany and the United Kingdom. To be successful, far-right parties need a charismatic leader and well-organized party. But they also need to be able to exploit the immigration issue, which means that they should not have serious competition from other parties on the issue. In 2007 Sarkozy won the French presidency by promising to be tough on crime and immigration and was faced with a far-right party led by an old extremist leader (Jean-Marie Le Pen). This year people judged him on what he had – and had not -- done in the past years, and preferred a rejuvenated far-right with an attractive new leader (Marine Le Pen).
Many commentators have warned that the current economic crisis will lead to a rise of the radical right; just as it brought Hitler to power in the 1930s. They point to the recent successes in France and Greece and predict that these are only the beginning. But while far-right parties have done overall slightly better in elections since the crisis started in 2008, many remain irrelevant, and currently only one country, Switzerland, has a far-right party in government. The reason is that during an economic crisis the political focus shifts to socio-economic issues like the economy and unemployment, and far-right parties have few ideas or legitimacy on these issues. Hence, it is unlikely that the radical right will make huge gains in the near future.
That said, as soon as the crisis is considered over, a return to socio-cultural issues is likely, and immigration and Islam will undoubtedly become popular again. Whether this will lead to a massive gain of political influence of the radical right is largely dependent upon the question of whether the mainstream left-wing and right-wing parties are finally able to develop their own vision on these topics. Unfortunately, so far this doesn’t look to be the case.
Cas Mudde is Hampton and Esther Boswell Distinguished University Professor of Political Science at DePauw University in Indiana and is the author of The Relationship Between Immigration and Nativism in Europe and North America, which can be downloaded for free at:www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/Immigration-Nativism.pdf.
Is Immigration Fueling the Rise of Nativism in Europe?
Far-right parties across Europe are gaining momentum, as witnessed by their recent successes at the ballot box in Greece and France. While immigration is thought to be a major factor fueling the parties’ rise, a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute finds that although there is clearly a relationship, the connection is not as straightforward as is often assumed.
During times of economic crisis immigrants are often scapegoated as the cause of all problems, from crime to unemployment. Far-right parties, in particular, make attacking immigrants the core of their program. None more so than the Greek Golden Dawn, an unabashed neo-Nazi party, which even goes so far as to enforce its election slogan “Let’s rid this country from the filth” by attacking immigrants in the streets. Yet, while this is an extreme case, and most far-right parties do not use violence, anti-immigrant sentiments are rampant throughout Europe and they are not only reserved for the far right.
In the recent French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front gained a record 17.9 percent of the vote. She had called for the reinstatement of border controls within the European Union and had promised to cut back immigration by 90 percent. Mainstream right-wing French president Nicolas Sarkozy tried to gain re-election by winning over her voters, saying that there were too many foreigners in France and that he would decrease immigration by 50 percent.
What explains this outburst of anti-immigrant politics? Is Europe hit by a new wave of mass immigration? No! In many European countries the number of immigrants has actually fallen since the economic crisis started in 2008. In general, levels of immigration do not really explain the electoral success of far-right parties. But in time of economic crisis and record levels of unemployment – youth unemployment is around 50 percent in Greece – arguments that immigrants take away the jobs of natives do find more support.
Still, despite the more favorable breeding ground, with majorities of the European public concerned about immigration, far-right parties have gained very different levels of success across the continent. Against success stories in Austria and Italy, where far-right parties have been part of the national government, stand as many examples of relatively or complete failure, such as in Germany and the United Kingdom. To be successful, far-right parties need a charismatic leader and well-organized party. But they also need to be able to exploit the immigration issue, which means that they should not have serious competition from other parties on the issue. In 2007 Sarkozy won the French presidency by promising to be tough on crime and immigration and was faced with a far-right party led by an old extremist leader (Jean-Marie Le Pen). This year people judged him on what he had – and had not -- done in the past years, and preferred a rejuvenated far-right with an attractive new leader (Marine Le Pen).
Many commentators have warned that the current economic crisis will lead to a rise of the radical right; just as it brought Hitler to power in the 1930s. They point to the recent successes in France and Greece and predict that these are only the beginning. But while far-right parties have done overall slightly better in elections since the crisis started in 2008, many remain irrelevant, and currently only one country, Switzerland, has a far-right party in government. The reason is that during an economic crisis the political focus shifts to socio-economic issues like the economy and unemployment, and far-right parties have few ideas or legitimacy on these issues. Hence, it is unlikely that the radical right will make huge gains in the near future.
That said, as soon as the crisis is considered over, a return to socio-cultural issues is likely, and immigration and Islam will undoubtedly become popular again. Whether this will lead to a massive gain of political influence of the radical right is largely dependent upon the question of whether the mainstream left-wing and right-wing parties are finally able to develop their own vision on these topics. Unfortunately, so far this doesn’t look to be the case.
Cas Mudde is Hampton and Esther Boswell Distinguished University Professor of Political Science at DePauw University in Indiana and is the author of The Relationship Between Immigration and Nativism in Europe and North America, which can be downloaded for free at:www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/Immigration-Nativism.pdf.
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U.N. Official Recommends U.S. Return Mt. Rushmore to the Sioux - COLORLINES
U.N. Official Recommends U.S. Return Mt. Rushmore to the Sioux - COLORLINES
(Photo: NPS/Ed Menard Ranger)
U.N. Official Recommends U.S. Return Mt. Rushmore to the Sioux
A United Nations human rights official has recommended the U.S. turn over control of lands considered to be sacred to Native Americans, including the site of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.
James Anaya, a UN fact-finder on the rights of indigenous peoples, presented his recommendations in Geneva last Friday after completing a 12-day visit to the U.S. where he met with representatives of indigenous peoples in six states.
‘I have heard stories that make evident the profound hurt that indigenous peoples continue to feel because of the history of oppression they have faced,’ Mr Anaya said in a statement. For over a century, he said, the government had seized lands and resources from Native Americans, removed children from their families and communities, caused the loss of languages, broke treaties with tribes and oppressed the indigenous peoples on the grounds of racial discrimination. ‘The sense of loss, alienation and indignity is pervasive throughout Indian Country,’ Anaya said.
Anaya’s findings will be included in a final report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council.
Monday, April 2, 2012
A Native Caste Society - NYTimes.com
A Native Caste Society - NYTimes.com
In Florida, a Death Foretold
Bettmann Corbis
A car burned during a riot in Miami in January 1989.
By ISABEL WILKERSON
Published: March 31, 2012
Tampa, Fla.
Multimedia
Related
Times Topic: Trayvon Martin
Related in Opinion
Op-Ed Contributor: The Gated Community Mentality (March 30, 2012)
Op-Ed Contributor: Florida’s Disastrous Self-Defense Law(March 24, 2012)
IN the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived — white, earnest and fresh from the North — white Southerners told him that a Northerner would soon enough “feel about Negroes as Southerners do.” In making that prediction, the anthropologist John Dollard wrote in his seminal study “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” they are saying “that he joins the white caste. The solicitation is extremely active, though informal, and one must stand by one’s caste to survive.”
Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described. Assumptions about one’s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother.
We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers — like previous waves of immigrants in the past — may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive.
A study released in 2006 by Duke University on attitudes on race in Durham, N.C., a city with one of the fastest-growing Latino populations in the country, found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos — 78 percent — felt they had the most in common with whites, while 53 percent of them felt they had the least in common with blacks. So it would make sense for those respondents to act with the same assumptions about blacks that they perceive are held by native whites. In fact the Latino respondents, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America, actually reported higher negative feelings toward blacks than most native-born whites. Nearly 60 percent reported feeling that few or almost no blacks were hard-working or could be trusted, while only 10 percent of whites held that view.
On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. “Blacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,” said Paula D. McClain, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, “because they know what laws have done to them.”
But shared hardships don’t necessarily make allies. “As linked fate rises, so does competition,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. “It’s like a sibling rivalry,” he said. “This is not a painless relationship.” And, of course, Latino immigrants don’t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. “When we come to the U.S.,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, “we immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, ‘My job is to be anything but black.’ ”
This uneasy coexistence has had tragic consequences in the past. A series of riots broke out in Miami in the 1980s after several black men were shot dead by Latino police officers who claimed self-defense and were later acquitted. In 1982 in Miami, a 20-year-old black man named Nevell Johnson Jr. was killed at a video arcade by a white, Cuban-born police officer. Seven years later, after a routine traffic stop in that same Miami neighborhood, a black man riding a motorcycle, Clement Anthony Lloyd, was shot dead by a Colombian-born police officer. The motorcycle then crashed; another black man who was riding on the back died the next day.
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