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?  Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL 
PROTECTED]
--------------------------
Brooks Isoldi, editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://www.intellnet.org

  Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com
  Subscribe:    [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Unsubscribe:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]


*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has 
not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of 
The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT 
YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the 
included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of 
intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, 
techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other 
intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes 
only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material 
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use 
this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' 
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
    mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    [EMAIL PROTECTED]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 

Reply via email to