Even those who welcome the arrival of refugees to Europe are starting to worry. While news media flood their channels with near-apocalyptic images of the refugee onslaught in Europe, emergency asylum centers in many countries seem hardly able to cope. Do their governments have a plan to integrate the newcomers into their societies? The resident populations deserve answers.
As Hungary sends armored vehicles and armed soldiers to meet war refugees spilling over its borders, hundreds of thousands of refugees are arriving in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Great Britain, and several other nations which have agreed to accept those in need.
While this phase of the refugee crisis -- the arrival -- plays out, polls in the accepting nations are starting to show unease among resident populations. Although many agree that people should be allowed into their countries as they escape war and destruction, increasing numbers are asking what's next for the refugees, and for their own societies.
At the core is anxiety about the difficulty of integrating those refugees who choose to stay. As this poll from the Netherlands shows, 72 percent of respondents expect the newcomers to somehow affect their societies. Fifty-eight percent fear that the refugees will have a negative impact.
The countries now welcoming refugees have already experienced their share of recent socio-cultural upheaval. In most of these countries a perceived failure to fully integrate new minorities into society has led to resentment against established political parties.
As the refugees settle in, the next phase is integration. The past decades have seen severe mistakes made on this front, leading to resentment that has fed widespread anti-immigrant sentiment. The fact that quite a few people firmly believe that every Muslim wants to decapitate unbelievers and hold their wives and daughters as rape slaves doesn't help.
In the past, when countries such as Germany took in large numbers of Turkish refugees, most newcomers were left to their own devices. In many countries this led to the creation of ghettos -- the banlieues of Paris spring to mind. The same thing happened in the Netherlands, where large contingents of Turkish and Moroccan guest workers from the late 1960s onwards weren't bothered with language courses or education programs. As a result, integration for many never happened, and cultural differences remained, much to the ire of many Dutch voters -- some of whom subsequently revolted, adhering to politician Pim Fortuyn when he took a tough stance against newcomers and the country's soft integration policies.
All this raises difficult questions for those in power. Do they have plans for the next phase -- the integration phase? Will there be enough jobs for locals and for newcomers? The German economy needs labor force expansion; the country is greying fast. As this excellent overview by The Washington Post shows, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-borders policy is rooted not just in Samaritanism, but also in cold calculus. Germany is heading for major problems down the road because of a quickly shrinking labor force. And right now unemployment in Germany is at record lows. But what happens when the economy goes south again, as economies always do at some point, and unemployment rises?
In the Netherlands and France, unemployment is significantly higher (at 6.3 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively). The Dutch government set aside €900 million ($1.01 billion) to pay for refugees' shelter, and promised still more. Unfortunately, the same government has in recent years made severe cutbacks on benefits for the long-term unemployed and for those on welfare, leading to logical (and tough to answer) questions, such as: Are refugees somehow more important than we, your own resident poor?
The resident populations deserve answers. So the leaders of Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, France -- all those countries that are accepting refugees -- had better devise policies that work, based on decades of experience. That will be the real test of this refugee crisis. Unfortunately, so far governments haven't shown even the beginnings of a plan.
(AP photo)