[-empyre-] Welcome to February 2016: Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Babak Fakhamzadeh]

Hi all,

We've got quite a big topic on our hands, making it harder to single
out a particular angle or narrative. Perhaps not an unreasonable
starting point is the current refugee crisis in Europe. As Renate in
the opening email hints at, Rome was at its peak when it actively
incorporated the peoples, barbarians perhaps, on their frontiers,
Caesar himself extending Roman citizenship to the Gauls and others.

Europe has been a continent of immigrants, virtually all 'native'
Europeans originally descending from immigrants coming in from the
Eurasian plains(, with perhaps only the Basques being the exception).
So, in many ways, the recent new arrivals coming in from the direction
of the Middle East are just the latest in a long line of immigrants.
Yet, the negative European backlash is strong. Perhaps driven by the
recent and, also strong, undercurrent of xenophobia in many European
countries, the 'otherness' of the Syrian arrivals is emphasised and
their presence actively resisted.

Now, I wonder, my question to us on the list, what are the
consequences of the arrival of this sizeable group of immigrants going
to be, for Europe, over the next 5 to, say, 10 years? Will the whole
issue simply fizzle out and the immigrants simply be integrated? Will
the EU fall apart? Will some countries secede from the Union? Will
some countries turn into virtual police states?
And, why?

And, related, how are those countries that do take in larger number of
immigrants going to deal with making sure their integration is not
going to be botched in the same way that Germany, Holland and France
botched the integration of specifically Turkish and Moroccan
immigrants in the 1960s and onwards?

Looking forward to the responses :)

Babak

--
Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com | http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com

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