The following think-piece by an active participant in the European public discussion on immigration policy, written well before the European parliamentary elections of May 29, 2019, is understood as a contribution to the European and international political debate and not (so much) as a “pure” scholarly article. It begins with a stark prognosis: the earthquake-like outcome of these elections will strengthen the far-right political parties all over Europe, dramatically weakening the European center and left, and breaking down the “welcome culture” initiated by German chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous statement of late summer 2015—”We can do this” (“Wir schaffen das”)[1]—which signaled a temporary and short-lived “air superiority” for multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and the welcoming of masses of refugees from the Middle East and North. One of the main reasons for the predictable decline of the Left on the European continent is, in my opinion, its inability to find credible solutions to the problems of immigration and integration.
The debate was further compounded by heated European discussions about the United Nations Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration on December 10–11, 2018, in Marrakesh, Morocco,[2] from which the United States and several other countries, including Australia, withdrew because the pact would impinge on their sovereign decisions about migration policy.[3]
The present contribution will only summarize arguments that were recently presented at length in the German-language press[4] and in scholarly journals.[5] Readers can follow these arguments, article by article, and also the statistical evidence adduced in them.
Today there are more than 265 million global migrants, as documented in the World Bank’s Bilateral Migration Matrix data (BMM),[6] which allows researchers to analyze migration from every country of the world to every other country. Now that the UN Migration Pact is signed, the stakes are truly high: a recent global Gallup survey[7] concluded that nearly 700 million adults around the world say that they would like to migrate to another country permanently if they could—almost three times the total number of adults and children that have already migrated to another country, according to World Bank estimates. The Gallup data suggest that millions of migrants would like to come to the leading Western military powers—at the end of the day, 166 million to the United States, 46 million to the United Kingdom, and 39 million to France. Even if the actual number of migrants who are immediately prepared to come amounted to only three percent of these estimates, the consequences would be considerable.
For the West and its security, the risks now involved in this process are enormous. A decisive change in the demographic patterns of long-term strategic Western allies in favor of large-scale Muslim immigration, where anti-Semitism is endemic, will have its consequences. The situation of Jewish communities around the world, already worsened by rising anti-Semitism, will deteriorate further. In a recent comment in the Jerusalem Post, Manfred Gerstenfeld described Malmö, a typical European city with high Muslim immigration, as the capital of European anti-Semitism.[8]
Much of European academia and media still seem to be in a state of shock-induced paralysis, unable to come to terms with the challenges posed by Islamism and Muslim anti-Semitism almost two decades after 9/11 and almost half a decade after the Paris 2015 terror attacks. But these aspects are well-known to any serious analyst of developments in the region, and they are often glossed over in the call for “radical diversity.”[9]
I am inclined to agree with a realistic and pessimistic long-term scenario regarding migration to Europe, which would estimate that the problems Muslim mass migration now poses are almost unsolvable. Consolidated population-weighted figures compiled from international surveys suggest that 17.38% of the entire Muslim population in the world, on average, now support terrorist organizations and acts of terrorism (average rates of favoring Hamas, Hizbullah, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, suicide bombing) and that in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, 74% of the population are anti-Semitic.[10]
This scenario would also emphasize the long-term strategic implications of mass migration from the Muslim world to the leading Western countries, and for the Jewish communities in the West. Given the growing dependence of European political decision-making on “Turkish goodwill” in order to manage the “refugee crisis,”[11] such a scenario would also cautiously take into account the role that Turkey’s current government now plays in global Islamism.
Debates in Europe hardly ever consider the complex and often contradictory developments in the value systems and societies of the Arab world, and of the Muslim world in general, from which the hundreds of thousands of new migrants to Europe have come.[12] If only five percent of these refugees have sympathies with Islamist terrorist groups, the destabilization potential would be enormous, considering the numbers of persons involved. Blindness to history can exact a heavy price, and blindness to the dangers of Islamist radicalism in key Western allies can have very negative and long-lasting consequences for the entire free world.
The work of Israeli scholar Arnon Groiss on stereotypes in Arab and Iranian schoolbooks is rarely mentioned in the European public debate, and yet this debate talks about fast-track recognition of diplomas without ever having analyzed the content of the curricula and the textbooks of secondary or higher education in the countries concerned.[13]
It is no coincidence that the chief ideologist of the global Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Rahmadan, today talks in the framework of migration about the Dar al-Shahada (the space where Muslims bear testimony) as the third space of how Muslims should divide the world (Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the House of War).[14]
In the European “welcome culture” environment, no critical questions are being asked about such phenomena as the brain drain,[15] or migration in the context of rising global inequality, correctly foreseen by social scientists from the world-system tradition.[16] No critical questions are being asked about the relationship between increased migration and the environment, which has been on the minds of “critical” migration researchers for decades now.[17] An analysis like the following by Robin Simcox at the Heritage Foundation certainly would not be welcome among the adherents of the European left:
Almost 1,000 people have been injured or killed in terrorist attacks featuring asylum seekers or refugees since 2014. Over the past four years, 16 percent of Islamist plots in Europe featured asylum seekers or refugees. ISIS has direct connections to the majority of plots, with Germany targeted most often, and Syrians more frequently involved than any other nationality. Nearly three-quarters of plotters carry out, or have their plans thwarted, within two years of arrival in Europe. Radicalization of plotters generally occurred abroad although in the most recent plots, more commonly within Europe itself. Europe’s response to migration flows has been inadequate and inadvertently increased the terrorist threat dramatically. European leaders must acknowledge the mistakes of the past and control the refugee flow strictly in the future.[18]
The second part of Arno Tausch’s essay will appear later this week.
Notes
1. Florian Trauner and Jocelyn Turton, “‘Welcome Culture’: The Emergence and Transformation of a Public Debate on Migration,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 46, no. 1 (2017).
2. “Global Compact for Migration,” United Nations website.
3. Rick Gladstone, “U.S. Quits Migration Pact, Saying It Infringes on Sovereignty,” New York Times, December 3, 2017; Amy Remeikis and Ben Doherty, “Dutton Says Australia Won’t ‘Surrender Our Sovereignty’ by Signing UN Migration Deal,” Guardian, July 24, 2018; Shehab Khan, “Austria to Follow US and Hungary by Withdrawing from UN Migration Pact,” Independent, October 31, 2018.
4. See especially my articles “Enorme Defizite der Toleranz in der muslimischen Welt,” Neue Illustrierte Welt 1 (2016): 7; “Zur Flüchtlingskrise in Europa,” David: Jüdische Kulturzeitschrift 111 (December 2016, Chanukka 5777): 28–30; “Was rezente arabische Umfragen über den Terror verraten,” Der Standard, March 23, 2017; “Die Dämonen des Antisemitismus,” Die Presse, August 28, 2017; “9/11: Wie viele Muslime unterstützen den Terror?,” Die Presse, September 11, 2017; “Einfach wegschauen: Was die grüne Wahlniederlage mit der EU-Politik zu tun hat,” Wiener Zeitung, October 16, 2017; “Das globale Gefälle bei der religiösen Toleranz,” Wiener Zeitung, November 13, 2017; “Kein guter Pakt: Warum Skepsis gegenüber dem Globalen Migrationspakt der UNO angebracht ist,” Wiener Zeitung, November 2, 2018; “Adieu, Willkommenskultur? Die Bastionen der globalen Intoleranz gegen Migranten liegen sicher nicht in Europa,” Wiener Zeitung, January 3, 2019.
5. Arno Tausch and Almas Heshmati, ” Islamism and Gender Relations in the Muslim World as Reflected in Recent World Values Survey Data,” Society and Economy 38, no. 4 (2016): 427–53; Russell Berman and Arno Tausch, “Measuring Support for Terrorism in Muslim Majority Countries and Implications for Immigration Policies in the West,” Strategic Assessment 20, no. 1 (2017): 7–21; Arno Tausch and Almas Heshmati, “Testing Turkey’s Place Within the Maps of Global Economic, Political and Social Values,” Polish Political Science Review/Polski Przeglad Politologiczny 5, no. 1 (2018): 73–110.
6. World Bank, “Migration and Remittances Data”.
7. Neli Esipova, Julie Ray, and Rajesh Srinivasan, “The World’s Potential Migrants: Who They Are, Where They Want to Go, and Why It Matters,” Gallup white paper, 2010–11.
8. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Europe’s Rule of Law and the Jews,” Jerusalem Post, November 3, 2018.
9. Bassam Tibi, “The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism and Its Challenge to Europe and to Islam,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 1 (2007): 35–54; Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: From Jihadist to Institutional Islamism (London: Routledge, 2014).
10. Leonid Grinin, Andrey Korotayev, and Arno Tausch, Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy (New York: Springer, 2018).
11. See Günter Seufert, Turkey as Partner of the EU in the Refugee Crisis: Ankara’s Problems and Interests, SWP Comment 2016/C 01, January 2016. Seufert aptly described this dependency: “Meanwhile, in Germany and other EU member states, a public critical of Turkey sneered at what was deemed ‘kowtowing’ by European politics to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. All this illustrates that eyes remain firmly closed to the unpleasant realization that the familiar power balance between the EU and accession candidate Turkey has now turned on its head, for, in the refugee crisis, the EU is more reliant on Turkey than vice versa.” For the official EU policies, see “EU Response to the Syrian Crisis,” European Union External Action website, March 8, 2019. See also Annegret Bendiek, A Paradigm Shift in the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy: From Transformation to Resilience, SWP Research Paper, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, October 2017.
12. See Arno Tausch, Almas Heshmati, and Hishām Qarawī, The Political Algebra of Global Value Change: General Models and Implications for the Muslim World (New York: Nova Publishers, 2015), and also the series of articles by the present author for the Rubin Center at the IDC Herzliya, summarized here.
13. Arnon Groiss, “The West, Christians, and Jews in Saudi Arabian Schoolbooks” (Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, American Jewish Committee, 2003); Arnon Groiss, ed., “Jews, Christians, War and Peace in Egyptian School Textbooks” (Centre for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, 2004); Arnon Groiss and Nethanel Toobian, “The Attitude to ‘the Other’ and to Peace in Iranian Schoolbooks and Teacher’s Guides” (Centre for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, 2006); Arnon Groiss and Yohanan Manor, “Jews, Zionism and Israel in Syrian School Textbooks” (Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, 2001); Arnon Groiss, “Palestinian Textbooks: From Arafat to Abbas and Hamas” (Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace and the American Jewish Committee, 2008).
14. Jonathan Laurence, “The Prophet of Moderation: Tariq Ramadan’s Quest to Reclaim Islam,” New York Times, June 18, 2007. For a general survey on these issues, see Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2012), and Ralph Ghadban, “Ein Dozent des unfreien Denkens,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 9, 2009.
15. Alejandro Portes, “Determinants of the Brain Drain,” International Migration Review 10, no. 4 (1976): 489–508.
16. Douglas S. Massey et al., “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal,” Population and Development Review 19, no. 3 (1993): 431–66.
17. Arno Tausch and Almas Heshmati, Globalization, the Human Condition, and Sustainable Development in the Twenty-first Century: Cross-national Perspectives and European Implications (London: Anthem Press, 2013).
18. Robin Simcox, “The Asylum–Terror Nexus: How Europe Should Respond,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, 3314, June 18, 2018; and Arno Tausch, “Occidentalism, Terrorism, and the Shari’a State: New Multivariate Perspectives on Islamism Based on International Survey Data,” SSRN, January 12, 2017.
