European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 17

European Policy Analysis

of refugees were on their way—and little
in the behavior of Hungary, Poland,
Slovakia, and the Czech Republic suggests
that they would have softened their stand
toward refugees had they been afforded
additional time to think it over. Their
governments have succumbed to and
indeed fan an ugly nativism that opposes
refugees because they are foreigners and
above all Muslim foreigners. Their stance
is a rejection of European solidarity and
a repudiation of their international legal
obligations. It is also willfully blind to
three rather obvious facts: their own
citizens were welcomed into the West as
refugees; their obstinacy is staggeringly
ungrateful to old EU members states
who admitted them over the concerns of
Western European electorates and who
transfer large amounts of money to them;
and if Germany behaved as they did, then
hundreds of thousands of refugees would
be stranded in Eastern Europe and would
be their problem.

Across Europe, immigration
certainly is feeding populism, as all
far right parties in Europe—the Front
National in France, the United Kingdom
Independence Party, Jobbik in Hungary,
Golden Dawn in Greece, True Finns
in Finland, and the Alternative for
Germany, among many others—make
lower levels of migration, economic and/
or refugee, a basic part of their platform.
Indeed, it was one of the few points on
which the far-right agrees across Europe.
By contrast, the alliance between the left
and nativist elements suggested by von
Beyme is a limited one—most opposition
to immigration emerges from the right—
and is found in the countries with the
most generous welfare states, reflecting
both chauvinism and a reasonable
concern that migrants are attracted by

Scandinavian or Dutch welfare systems
rather than labor markets (Favell 2014).

The obvious question is whether
one can do anything about all of this. Von
Beyme is also correct that the securing
of the EU’s outer borders is essential to
preserving the Schengen system and,
more broadly, free movement within
the EU. The United Kingdom’s exit, if
it occurs, will make little difference as
the one area on which it is an active
participant in European cooperation is
in restrictive immigration policy, and
the country has always been outside
the Schengen zone. The real obstacle to
secure borders is weak border capacity
in Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, and, above
all, Greece; overcoming it will depend on
whether E uropean border policy can be
truly communitarized by concentrating
member resources, equipment, and
personnel on the southern border. The
sending and transit countries themselves
will play an important role, as they always
do, which is what makes the EU deal with
Turkey so essential to restoring order to
European migration policy. Indeed, for
all the understandable opposition on
human rights grounds, there was really
no other way to manage flows after
Austria, Serbia, Croatia, and Macedonia
closed their borders, leading directly to
a refugee bottleneck in Greece. Now that
the Balkan and Aegean routes are closed,
smugglers and traffickers may well shift
their focus back to the Mediterranean
and even the Black Sea, making Italy,
Romania, and Bulgaria the new focuses
of migrant and refugee pressure.

On immigration policy, von
Beyme rightly focusses on the two
issues that matter more than culture:
language and work. The aside regarding
praise bestowed on Germans in Brazil
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