The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 / Edition 1 available in Paperback
The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0252072944
- ISBN-13:
- 9780252072949
- Pub. Date:
- 10/05/2005
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0252072944
- ISBN-13:
- 9780252072949
- Pub. Date:
- 10/05/2005
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 / Edition 1
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Overview
Leo Lucassen tackles the question of whether the integration process of these recent immigrants will fundamentally differ in the long run (over multiple generations) from the experiences of similar immigrant groups in the past. For comparison, Lucassen focuses on "large and problematic groups" from Western Europe's past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) and demonstrates a number of structural similarities in the way migrants and their descendants integrated into these nation states. Lucassen emphasizes that the geographic sources of the "threat" have changed and that contemporaries tend to overemphasize the threat of each successive wave of immigrants, in part because the successfully incorporated immigrants of the past have become invisible in national histories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252072949 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2005 |
| Series: | Studies of World Migrations |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Immigrant Threat
The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850By LEO LUCASSEN
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Leo LucassenAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-252-03046-X
Introduction
American SituationsSince the arrival of non-Western immigrants in the late 1940s, public discussion in western Europe has been dominated by the fear that the immigrants will turn into unassimilable segments of the population. Initially, scholars and politicians pointed their fingers at the United States, where African Americans especially, but also more recently immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, were concentrated in inner-city ghettos characterized by intergenerational poverty, criminality and widespread rioting. From the 1950s through the beginning of the 1980s in particular, the prospect of being confronted with "American situations," as they were called, worried many native western Europeans and inspired various anti-immigrant movements, such as the National Front in Great Britain and the Front National in France.
In the later decades of the twentieth century, fear of social disorder and underclass formation was eclipsed by a more fundamental cultural and philosophical discomfort with the conflicting values of non-Western migrants. Populist leaders, ranging from Jean Marie Le Pen in France to Jorg Haider in Austria, Flip Dewinter in Belgium, and Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, may differ in many respects, but they all agree that immigration must be stopped and that non-Western newcomers, especially when they are Muslim, threaten the core values of Western liberal democracies. Moreover, they argue that through their sheer numbers, these immigrants destabilize Western societies and in the near future will become so numerous that the demographic outlook of countries such as France, Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands will change dramatically.
National statistics, or rather extrapolations based on them, often provide powerful ammunition in this public debate. Thus, for France it has been argued that Islam will soon become the nation's dominant religious faith, assuming that all Muslim immigrants and their offspring-some three million around the year 2000-are indeed devout believers. Other statistics employ a broader definition of immigrant strictu senso to include that of immigrants' descendants. A good example is the use of the term allochtones in the Netherlands, which defines immigrants as everybody born abroad as well as people who have at least one parent not born in the Netherlands. On the basis of this definition, which easily leads to static and hereditary interpretations, it is forecast that in the near future a large segment of the population in the Netherlands will consist of allochtones, thus turning the indigenous population into a minority. In countries like France, where the Republican ius soli tradition precludes such statistics, the perception that the numbers of "Arabs" and other Muslims are on the rise is widespread; but whether people are French citizens or not is irrelevant. Children born in France with French citizenship but with parents born in North Africa may not show up in statistics as such, but they are nevertheless very much considered part of the problematic immigrant population. And the same is true for the offspring of West Indian immigrants, who were British citizens from the start.
The fear of the new immigrants has many different roots, ranging from racist and eugenicist traditions on the extreme Right to principal defenders of the Republican tradition of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution on the Left. Thus, opposition to the rise of Islam, and thereby to the continuing immigration from Muslim countries, can be heard in both neo-Nazi and leftist-inspired intellectual circles. A good example of the latter is the leading French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, who as far back as the 1980s voiced his concerns about cultural relativism and more recently has criticized the radicalization of Muslims in western Europe, as well as the celebration of cultural differences.
"Negroes" and "Arabs"
Although there has been migration from Asia and Africa to Europe from the early modern period onward, it was not until after the Second World War that considerable numbers of immigrants settled more or less permanently in western Europe, starting with colonial migrants who, for either political (decolonization) or economic reasons, found their way to the "mother" country. The earliest examples are the West Indians in Great Britain and the Dutch East Indians who left Indonesia between 1946 and 1968. Both were seen as problematic because of their skin color and the social and cultural characteristics associated with it. This is especially true of the West Indians, who caused great unrest and became the brunt of permanent hostility. People from all layers of British society were afraid that these newcomers would never really fit in but would remain isolated aliens for generations in the cities where they were concentrated. From the 1980s onward the principal target of anti-immigrant discourse gradually shifted toward newcomers from Muslim countries. Beginning in the 1970s, natives of Pakistan and Bangladesh in Great Britain had already run a much higher risk of being harassed, attacked, and beaten up than second-generation Caribbean youths, and in the course of the 1980s they would finally move center stage. The emergence of religion and culture as principal markers over color and race was stimulated by the Islamic revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1979 and culminated in the Rushdie affair in 1989 and the First Gulf War against Iraq a few years later. From that time on, culture, not race, has become the buzzword, often framed in global terms, as Samuel P. Huntington points out in his influential book on the clash of civilizations.
This shift in attention, which occurred throughout western Europe, coincided with a substantial inflow into western Europe of migrants from Muslim countries such as Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, most of whom were family members who joined the initially much smaller group of predominantly male guest workers from these regions. Thus the Turkish population in the Netherlands has increased from some thirty thousand around 1970 to more than three hundred thousand at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This confluence of changes in the international political climate and the actual settlement of newcomers from Muslim countries, who became highly visible through the establishment of mosques and Islamic dress codes (such as headscarves for women), led to the widespread view that Islamic migrants are problematic. Many people, including scholars, politicians, and considerable segments of the population, believe that the values of these migrants are fundamentally opposed to the "Judeo-Christian" tradition or the heritage of the Enlightenment, rooted in the equality of men and women and the separation of church and state. (This notion, by the way, displays a curious amnesia about the deeply rooted anti-Semitism in western Europe-and not only in Germany!-at least until the Second World War). The terrorist attacks on the Pentagon in Washington and the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001, as well as the ensuing "war on terrorism," have provided even more fuel to the conviction that the culture of Islam and that of the West are irreconcilable.
This Manichean dichotomy has had a profound influence on the way Muslim migrants and their descendants are looked upon in western Europe, and it explains the emotionally loaded discussions about Muslims' alleged failure to integrate, which have dominated the public debate in western Europe since the 1990s. Islam is seen as an obstacle to integration from both a political and a cultural point of view. Migrants coming from Muslim countries are not only assumed to be more open to the political and terrorist-backed form of Islam, but they are also viewed as people coming from tribal societies whose values are diametrically opposed to the individualistic, secular western European society.
The idea that the new, non-Western immigrants are different from immigrants in western Europe in the past (the Irish in England or the Poles in Germany)-who, after all, originated from within-is not limited to the political Right or to opponents of immigration at large. At the other end of the spectrum are supporters of a society structured around the principle of multiculturalism who, inspired by policies in Canada and Australia, are convinced that the cultural background of the new migrants differs fundamentally from those in the past. Well-known advocates of normative multiculturalism, such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, have started a worldwide discussion about the political and philosophical justification of multiculturalism. In their view, Western societies have to acknowledge the right of immigrants (and non-immigrants, for that matter) to be different, not only in the private but also in the public domain. Moreover, they argue that the migrants, rather than threaten, enrich western European societies, and that by acknowledging their cultures, Western societies would become more tolerant, more open-minded, and less nationalistic.
Although scholars working in the multiculturalist tradition vehemently resent the anti-immigration discourse, their work can inadvertently strengthen populist ideas that the new immigrants will not fully integrate and will always remain outsiders, at least to some extent. Multiculturalists may argue that transnational identities and ethnic-group consciousness are, in principle, good things because they empower immigrants, but such factors nevertheless make assimilation less likely and undercut the exclusionary power of the nation-state; for those who oppose the new immigration, it confirms their worst fears.
Lessons from the United States
The principal aim of this book is not to analyze the battle between multiculturalists and those who see non-Western (Islamic) cultures as a threat to Western civilization. Instead, it focuses on the question of whether, from a historical perspective, it is reasonable to believe that the integration process of these new immigrants will indeed be fundamentally different in the long run (over several generations) from that of similar immigrant groups in the past. Or, to put it in the form of a question, to what extent are past immigrant experiences relevant for understanding the present as well as the near future?
Recent scholarly debate in the United States has stressed the relevance of such a historical comparison. Its central question is: To what extent is the post-1965 immigration and integration process similar to that experienced by the immigrants who set foot on American soil between 1880 and 1920? This debate has mobilized social scientists and historians, yielding a wealth of arguments from both sides. On the one hand we find that it is mostly historians who stress similarities and who predict some sort of assimilation of the current migrants in the foreseeable future. Political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists, on the other hand, are convinced that structural changes in both the nature of the immigration and the receiving society have made obsolete the old assimilation model, developed by the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s and 1930s. In her book From Ellis Island to JFK, Nancy Foner produced an exploration and summary of the debate; more recently, Richard Alba and Victor Nee provide an outstanding analysis in Remaking the American Mainstream.
Because such a discussion has not yet taken hold in Europe, it is interesting to take a brief look at the core arguments in the American debate. Proponents of the "uniqueness school," who dominate the debate, argue that not only has the composition of immigrant groups changed dramatically (from Europeans to Asians, Africans, and Hispanics), but also that the structure of the present-day receiving society differs significantly from that which existed around 1900. Their conviction is buttressed by at least four major arguments. The first is that migrants, coming from all over the world, are much more visible by their skin color and other phenotypical characteristics. Given the significance of racial categorization in the United States, which places significant value on color and tends to categorize people as either white or non-white, it is expected that this makes assimilation far more difficult than it was for southern European migrants, who were not so very different from the contemporary native population at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the argument continues, a considerable number of these new migrants share values which conflict with those of the Western world.
The second argument points to the unprecedented effect of the transportation and communication revolutions. Inexpensive and fast travel, satellite television, telephone, fax, and e-mail have dramatically enhanced the possibilities of remaining in contact with the home country or one's own ethnic group, greatly facilitating the emergence of transnational communities: people from the same region who stay in contact wherever they settle. This enables them to keep some distance from the country in which they settle and retain a transnational or diasporic identity that supersedes or at least competes with identification with the new country and thus blocks full-scale assimilation.
Third, many argue that the economic structure of the United States has changed fundamentally since the 1960s, a shift which is summed up by the use of the term "hourglass economy." Through the restructuring of the global economy from the 1960s onward, many stable and well-paid jobs in industry and manufacturing (textile, cars, shoes, etc.) have disappeared or been transferred to low-wage countries. This has reduced the size of this segment of the labor market considerably-and with it the chances of upward social mobility. With the disappearance of many blue-collar jobs and the shrinking of the lower-middle class, the possibility of advancement within one's own company has diminished greatly. Instead, formal education and college degrees have emerged as the gateway to social mobility. At the same time, low-wage jobs in the service sector are blossoming. Whereas many unskilled migrants in the past could slowly rise to a position in the middle class, this road has largely been closed to present-day low-skilled immigrants from developing countries who instead experience a form of downward mobility.
Finally, the idea has been put forward that old migrants in the United States encountered a more open society that was willing to turn immigrants into citizens and thus win their votes. The frequent elections and fierce battles between various factions made the stream of immigrants an attractive reservoir of potential new votes, often mobilized through ethnic networks and communities. These four factors-skin color, access to technology, an hourglass economic model, and a less open society- are presently deemed to be so fundamental that the classic assimilation process is not likely to repeat itself. Instead, many migrants will either experience a form of segmented assimilation into the African American lower classes or hold on much longer to their ethnic communities. As such, this interpretation of the current settlement process is a continuation of earlier criticism on the assimilation model voiced in the 1970s by scholars like Glazer, Moynihan, and many others who preferred the culinary imagery of the "salad bowl" over that of the "melting pot."
This view, which treats the experience of the new migrants as basically different and unique, is criticized by what we could label the "continuity school," represented predominantly by historians but which also finds support among social scientists. They argue that the interpretation of the past is too rose colored, whereas the present is painted too much in shades of gray. Joel Perlmann and Roger Waldinger, for example, show that the adaptation of Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, and others in the first half of the twentieth century went less smoothly than is often assumed. The majority of both the first and the second generation experienced no, or only limited, social mobility, were confronted with considerable racial discrimination, and only gradually became "white," meaning they were accepted as equals by the native population. Moreover, they argue, present-day migrants (with the exception of Mexicans) are generally better schooled than the average American, and many of them enter the labor market in the upper segment rather than at the bottom. Recent research shows that even Mexican immigrants, whose children are generally thought to experience a "second-generation decline," are doing better than expected. As well, the segmented assimilation hypothesis is not confirmed, with women doing even better then men.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Immigrant Threat by LEO LUCASSEN Copyright © 2005 by Leo Lucassen.
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