SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 24, 2007, 04:16 PM URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,461120,00.html THE ONSLAUGHT OF THE POOR The New Mass Migration
By Klaus Brinkbäumer Today, there are more than 190 million migrants in the world. Many set out in search of adventure, but Africa's poor are fleeing desparation for a life of hope in Europe. Though rarely welcome, neither laws nor walls can stop them from making the dangerous journey. And thousands die each year. On the one side of this story of migrants, Africans squat in the dust in the Mauritanian port city of Nouadhibou, waiting for a boat to take them to the Canary Islands. They live in "Bidonvilles," slums of concrete, corrugated metal and plastic tarps. They buy their bread at the Boulangerie Mondiale, or World Bakery, which is nothing but a wooden shack with a window through which bread is passed. Nouadhibou's sandy streets lead to a harbor packed with 400 wooden boats. Sixty to 80 people can be jammed into each boat. The sea is a greenish color, conditions are windy, and the police complain that without radios, without speedboats and without helicopters, catching refugees is virtually impossible. It's 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) from here to the Canary Islands, 1,200 kilometers in these wooden boats called "Cayucos" 1,200 kilometers of treacherous waves and changing currents -- a rough, three to four day journey at sea. More than 11,000 people have reached the other side since Jan. 1, 2006. The other side is a promised land, a paradise and both the goal and purpose of many desperate lives. For those waiting in Nouadhibou, the other side might be the town of Los Cristianos on the island of Tenerife. It's a place where white people lie roasting themselves pink on the beach, where they drink beer in Irish pubs, play golf, flirt and go out to eat, and where they stroll along the harbor promenade, watching as the boats come in almost daily. On calm days, 700 Africans people reach the Canary Islands in the span of 24 hours. On stormy days, hundreds drown. This is the migration Europe fears and has taken measures to prevent. The flight of the African masses began in the 1990s -- and some even travel for years on trucks and buses, on foot and in inflatable boats because they believed that they were entitled to make this journey. It is the same belief that has driven refugees from Asia's crisis regions to find a new home in Australia and that gives Mexican migrants the confidence to brave the prospect of being hunted down by border guards to cross into the United States. It encourages Eastern Europeans to head westward into the European Union and people to leave any of the world's 24 current crisis regions, often with no idea of where they are going. And it is the same belief that has always driven mankind to migrate from one place to another. The history of an eternal search Human beings naturally seek a place to call home, and yet the lure of adventure draws them into the faraway and the unknown. Man is settled and yet a traveler. He wants peace but wages war, he wants others to refrain from attacking his territory, and yet he drives others out. The history of migration is the history of an eternal search, man's unending search for a place where he can live. It some cases, it is nothing but a place where he can survive, and in others it is one where he can find a better life. Man seeks gold, oil and diamonds, but sometimes he seeks nothing more than clean water and rice. He seeks the sea and the sun, but sometimes nothing more than electricity, a school and a strip of land safe from natural disaster. He always seeks peace and security. In 2005 there were 191 million migrants on Earth, or three percent of the global population. This represents a huge increase over earlier figures of 82 million migrants in 1970 and 175 million only six years ago. Of those migrants, 48.6 percent are women. And 64.1 percent live in Europe and Russia, where they make up 8.8 percent of the population. According to United Nations statistics, the United States has accepted 20 percent of all migrants (38.4 million people) and Germany 5.2 percent (10.1 million). The history of migration is the history of mankind. If one were to believe what is written in the bible, this history began when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, making them mankind's first homeless people. From the standpoint of evolution, modern man came into being about 200,000 years ago in Africa and, from there, migrated into the rest of the world -- to Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia. It may have taken a while, but migrating man eventually reached the more remote regions of the earth, places like the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean, Hawaii and the North Sea island of Sylt. It is documented that the Philistines came to Canaan in about 1190 B.C., where they introduced the name "Palestine." It is also documented that many Jews were carried off by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. and later released by Kyros, the King of the Persians, in 538 B.C., and returned to Palestine. What is now modern-day Europe has always been the site of the constant migration of tribes and ethnic groups. Legend has it that Rome was founded because people were seeking a home. Aeneas, the father of the Eternal City, fled there to escape the flames of Troy. The Celts migrated to northern Italy, the Balkans, northern Spain and Portugal. And the Goths, the Gepids and the Vandals went to southern Russia and the Carpathians. Migratio gentium Nowadays the term "migration of peoples" -- or "Völkerwanderung" in German -- touches on sensitive issues for Germans. It comes from the Latin expression "migratio gentium," although the Latin "gens" was more commonly used in connection with the armed members of a tribe, or its army. German nationalists used the German term "Völkerwanderung" to support their claims of the superiority of Germanic tribes. As a result, Germans apply the term to the migrations of Germanic tribes beginning in the 4th century A.D.. The Huns invaded Russia, the Ostrogoths marched into Hungary and Italy, the Visigoths into Italy, France and Spain and the Franks into what later became France. The Langobards, or Lombards, entered northern Italy in 568 A.D. and settled in the region now known as Lombardy. The Vikings' initial impetus for sailing across the seas was trade. But once they had discovered how affluent the cities of Western Europe were and how easily they could be reached through Europe's many navigable rivers, the Vikings returned to rob their former trading partners. After the death of the Prophet Mohammed, the Arabs on the other side of the Mediterranean set forth and occupied Palestine and North Africa. The Moors, a Berber people, crossed the Mediterranean to Spain in 711 A.D. It wasn't until 1492, after the fall of Grenada, that the Spaniards drove them out of Europe, together with 160,000 Jews. In the same year, Christopher Columbus, his expedition financed by a baptized Spanish Jew, set sail to search for an ocean passage to India and the New World. Disease, guns and attack dogs eventually killed off most of the original inhabitants of that New World. And when all the Spaniards, Portuguese and English who had emigrated to America needed laborers, they imported slaves from Africa, setting a powerful vortex of resettlement into motion. It was the first forced migration of millions of people. Sixty-million Europeans emigrated, too. Only they did so voluntarily. Then came the 20th century, which was to become the century of refugees. There had always been political refugees. In fact, the aristocrats who fled abroad during the French Revolution coined the word "emigrant." But a new quality of hatred and exclusion developed with the emergence of the nation states of the 19th century. Anyone with the wrong religious beliefs, the wrong heritage, the wrong ideology -- in short, anyone who didn't belong -- was either forcibly expelled or fell victim to what had also become a century of ethnic cleansing. The Ottomans drove a million Armenians to their deaths, after World War I Greeks were forced out of Anatolia and Turks out of Greece and at least a million Russians fled from the Bolsheviks. Historian Alexander Demandt writes: "The goal, in both acquiring land and expelling others, is to establish a living space for one's own group, a process which has parallels in biology and is associated with victims and violence." A little more than two years ago Kofi Annan, the then secretary general of the United Nations, established the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), with Rita Süssmuth, the former German Minister for Families and erstwhile president of parliament, as one of its inaugural members. After traveling around the world and analyzing the relevant data, the commission concluded that migration could become the most important issue of the 21st century. The data available largely bears out this conclusion. Why do migrants emigrate? Unemployment is one reason, and low pay is another. In sub-Saharan Africa, 45.7 percent of the population earns less than $1 a day. Substandard education at home and low life expectancy in poor countries are two other reasons. Add to that the reasons that have applied for thousands of years: wars, natural disaster and starvation. This at least partly explains why migrants are constantly traversing the globe, from East to West and South to North. Man is settled -- but only as long as his home is truly a home. And if it isn't he sets out to find another home. An exodus from Europe People were leaving Europe only 150 years ago, leaving countries like Ireland, Italy and Germany -- most of them bound for America. Nowadays, migrants are trekking from Mexico to the United States, from Ukraine to Germany, from China halfway around the globe to the South American country of Surinam (at 20,000 kilometers, or about 12,400 miles, the longest route confirmed by aid organizations), and from West African countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon to Spain, Italy and Germany. Migrants are rarely welcome. Australia, a country settled by immigrants, now pays large sums of money to tiny island states in the South Pacific so that they can create camps for unwanted refugees. Often they get stuck in these camps for years -- children, too, who are often denied even the most basic care. The situation in Africa is even more dramatic. Some refugee camps in Guinea and other African countries turned into cities in their own right long ago, cities where upwards of 30,000 to 40,000 people live in tents and huts far away from home. Life in these makeshift cities revolves around spending hours standing in line for food, and many residents sink into apathy and destructive behavior. Of course, drugs, prostitution and violence are all part of the mix. In 1921 the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, named Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen as its first High Commissioner for Refugees. Nansen's first job was to help bring home half a million prisoners of war and find homes throughout Europe for refugees from Russia, Armenia and Bulgaria. Borders became less porous during the global economic crisis of the 1930s. In 1938, representatives of 32 nations met in Evian, France on Lake Geneva to decide what to do about the Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany. Their conclusion was to do nothing. For the diplomats meeting in Evian, the Jews were nothing but "a burden on the economic situation." Swiss Federal Councillor Eduard von Steiger summed up the general tone of the meeting when he said, infamously: "the lifeboat is full." The German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that refugees are homeless, nationless and devoid of rights. About 40 million refugees were traveling through Europe in 1945, and 14 million Germans were driven out of Eastern Europe. A vague definition Under the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees adopted in 1950, a refugee is defined as any person who, "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality." Noble-minded as these words may seem, they also provided a common framework for negotiators to uphold the interests of their respective states. The UN definition, in its vagueness, complicates the definition of refugee status when it comes to the modern-day phenomena of the victims of terrorism, religious fanaticism, paramilitary forces and marauding bands burning down villages. It sometimes boils down to a matter of interpretation, especially when so-called nongovernmental persecution is interpreted in various ways to reflect political alliances and economic interests. Finally, the UN definition does not cover those fleeing from poverty, epidemics and drought. This complexity produces two classes of foreigners. According to the official definition, a "refugee" is someone who is unable to return to his country, whereas a "migrant" is someone who, at least in theory, could return. Under this definition, only 9.2 million of the 191 million migrants counted by Kofi Annan's commission qualify as refugees. This reflects the reality of the standard war of words in the world of diplomacy. International law requires states to address the needs of refugees, whereas migrants are people who migrate voluntarily and can thus be left to their own devices. A drastic shift in German asylum policy In Germany, the country's asylum law was once conceived as a form of atonement for past injustices, and as a symbol of the country's new liberalism. Under Article 16a, Section 1 of the German constitution, "the politically persecuted are entitled to the right of asylum." This sentence was long considered a bedrock principle of German asylum practice. According to Stefan Telöken of the Berlin office of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), "a tacit laissez-faire policy was in effect for years, based on the principle: Anyone who can make it to Europe has made it." But, Telöken continues, "this understanding has since been eliminated." In 1985, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Germany signed the first Schengen Agreement, the basic result of which was twofold. First, border controls were gradually eliminated at borders within large parts of the European Union, and these borders soon disappeared for EU citizens living in Schengen countries. Second, and more important for refugees, the EU's external borders became less porous and were turned into the modern equivalent of castle walls. Almost all EU member states gradually joined the Schengen Agreement. Telöken, who has been working for the UNHCR for 19 years, wears oval glasses and displays the fan paraphernalia of Cologne's football team in his Berlin office. According to Telöken, the signatory states to the Schengen Agreement quickly modified and concentrated their laws relating to refugees and asylum, "and in doing so, the corrections were generally made in a downward direction." In European Union jargon it's called "harmonization." Sounds pleasant enough. For the 21st-century migrants headed for Germany, harmonization has produced three significant rules. The so-called country of origin rule means that asylum applicants who come from a country considered safe by German standards, such as Ghana or Senegal, must provide specific proof of political persecution for their individual cases. For migrants far away from home, this is usually impossible, and so most are deported. The "airport rule" means that asylum applicants lacking a passport or those coming from safe countries of origin are kept in the transit areas of German airports until a final decision has been reached on their application. By law, the process must be completed within 19 days. Applicants who are rejected are sent back to the city from which their initial flight to Germany departed. The third and most important regulation is the "third country rule," which means that foreigners coming to Germany from a safe third country, such as Spain or Italy, are no longer allowed to apply for asylum here and can be sent back to that third country immediately. This rule is especially useful for Germany, surrounded as it is by safe third countries. Africans trying to reach Germany by sea would have to pass through Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium or the Netherlands -- all considered "safe third countries" -- before reaching German soil at the port of Cuxhaven, where they could apply for German asylum. At that point, German authorities can easily apply the third country rule. A fast-closing society The new rules are increasingly turning Germany into a closed society. While the German government claims that it supports controlled immigration, African governments accuse Europe of siphoning off their best and brightest citizens. According to Telöken, "for Africans there are practically no legal options for entering Germany anymore." The numbers bear out Telöken's statement. In 1995, there were 127,937 applications for asylum in Germany. That number has steadily declined over the years, to 98,644 in 1998, 50,564 in 2003 and, by 2005, to only 28,914 asylum applications. Thirty years ago, half of all applications were approved. Today only one in a hundred applicants makes it -- one in a thousand when it comes to Africans. The industrialized nations should ask themselves "whether the introduction of more and more restrictive measures against asylum seekers doesn't result in the door being closed for many women, men and children," says António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The numbers, says Guterres, reveal that the debate "over a growing asylum problem does not correspond to reality." Of course, debate or not, migrants keep trying. When politicians create barriers to legal migration, migrants find illegal routes. It's an all-too human solution for people who dream of a better life. Another factor is the growing gap between rich and poor. Fifty years ago, people in the world's richest countries earned 50 times as much as those in its poorest; today they earn 130 times as much. The result is envy and temptation. One of the consequences of globalization is that the world's poor are increasingly familiar with the lifestyles of the world's rich. Of course, the poor are not about to accept as a God-given fact that Europe is rich and unattainable while Africa is poor and must remain their home until their untimely death. After all, who says that a person's place of birth should always remain his home? Do migrants harm our societies? No one benefits from migration if migrants are not integrated and not tolerated, and if they are treated with a hefty dose of hypocrisy. Migrants are expensive and, as non-taxpayers, contribute little to the social costs they incur. But does this have to be a foregone conclusion? A silent and shameful crisis Why must they live in the shadows, and why are Africans, in particular, treated with such animosity and aggression in Europe? Historian Wolfgang Benz, 66, is the director of Berlin's Center for Anti-Semitism Research. Sitting in his cluttered office on Ernst-Reuter-Platz, Benz says: "One needs education and affluence to have the capacity for tolerance. In a population that seeks explanations for its problems but is unable to find any rational explanations, the conviction sets in that the foreigners, those who have no rights, are being given something that belongs to us." In this "us versus them" mentality, the "us" are the whites and the "them" are those against whom the whites must defend themselves: the black Africans. It's an atmosphere in which the objects of our prejudices turn into the enemy, in which gypsies become rapists, Jews become rip-off merchants, Poles become thieves and Africans become "second-class human beings who must first be taught values like hard work," says Benz. Language, of course, has a lot to do with the treatment of migrants. Defining them as "illegal" makes them criminal, even when, as in the case of Africans, they have no legal options for reaching Europe. Those who call them "economic refugees" are trivializing their motives for leaving home, their hardships and the dangers they face along the way -- almost painting them as people for whom abandoning their homes is a painless and lighthearted undertaking. Jean Améry, who fled from the Nazis, proves just how wrong that assumption is when he describes the moment of flight in which "the past was suddenly and utterly destroyed, when you suddenly no longer knew who you were." According to the Global Commission on International Migration, 50 percent of migrants work, contributing billions of euros to the economic outputs of their host countries. Migrants were responsible for 89 percent of population growth in Europe between 1990 and 2000. Without migration the continent's population would have shrunk by 4.4 million within a five-year period. Migrants also help bear the financial burdens of their native countries. In 2004 they sent $150 billion back home through banks (three times the amount of development aid paid worldwide) and about another $300 billion through other channels. Before ending his term as UN secretary general last year, Kofi Annan, who himself moved from Ghana to New York to take the job, said he wanted to see the EU pursue a "policy of controlled immigration." When asked about the many dead in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the former UN official said: "This silent crisis of human rights brings shame on our world." On Thursday, SPIEGEL INTERNATIONAL will start posting Klaus Brinkbäumer's 10-part series, "The African Odyssey," which documents the four-year journey made by African immigrant John Ekow Ampan from Ghana to Europe. © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2007 All Rights Reserved Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH +++ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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