LONDON – It is all too easy both to understate and to overstate the results of the first round of the French general election. To overstate is to forget that Jean-Marie Le Pen achieved back in 1995 14% of the vote as against his present 16.86%, hardly a mammoth increase. He is still far behind the electoral pull of his Austrian counterpart Jorg Haider and the peripheral position of his National Front party gives it no chance of being a critical element in supporting a government, as does its Danish counterpart the Peoples Party.
Yet again is all too easy to understate the significance of his victory over Lionel Jospin. Le Pen is part of a marked trend in European politics. Admittedly Haider seems to be losing support but in many countries rightist candidates with an anti-immigrant tone and policies that underline tough law and order themes are still gaining ground.
Their significance is two fold. First, this is the first time anti-immigrant movements spewing racist rhetoric and tough cop solutions have been important political forces in so many European countries at the same time. Second, they do have something real to say unlike their predecessors Enoch Powell in Britain and James Schwartzenbach in Switzerland who in the 1960s and 70s earned a following by predicting awful things that were going to happen if immigration was allowed to continue at its then high levels.
The truth is awful things are now happening. Last year it was race riots in Oldham in the old industrial revolution heartland of England. This year it is the burning of Jewish synagogues in Marseilles by Muslim youths angry at the Israeli response to the Intifada. All over Europe it is the undoubted rise of crime among immigrant youth.
For its part, the “welcome” by the host community has been at best unthought out and at worst simply vicious. Right back in the 1950s and early 1960s when Third World immigration first achieved significant proportions there were too many reports of racist attacks by angry whites, police brutality, job discrimination at every level combined with an appalling general ignorance even by the intelligensia of what was actually going on at the bottom of the heap.
For example, there was a widespread assumption in the 1960s and 70s that immigrant crime rates were already higher than average when in fact right across Europe they were signicantly lower. There was also a too widespread assumption that that these first generation immigrants were attracted to Europe because of the access to welfare payments when in fact they were under using such facilities relative to the general population and they only migrated when jobs were available. In Britain, immigrants had a much higher rate of home ownership than the indigenous working class.
Tragically over time many of these misconceptions actually did become true. As the age profile changed and as the first generation’s children found their way forward blocked by prejudice, poor education and alienation from their own parents’ humble but purposeful lifestyles unemployment, welfare dependency and crime began to climb. Despite these impediments, for a majority of immigrants there has been a way through, material life has become better and there has been significant individual achievement. (Although not as much as comparable immigrant groups in America. As General Colin Powell, born of Jamaican immigrant parents, has observed, in England he’d have risen to sergeant; in the U.S. he became Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs.) Yet a too large minority have missed the boat and stayed back, estranged, seething, and in some cases prone to crime and even violence.
We cannot close our eyes to what is happening today. It is too socially simplistic to point to economics and say we need immigrants to grease the wheels of the raw underbelly of modern society, working in the low wage economy, doing the difficult jobs at unsocial hours.
It is even more simplistic, as economists have often done, to point to the anti-inflationary contribution of the flow of new immigrants or to highlight the hypocrisy of advanced capitalist societies who don’t appear to accept that free trade and free flows of capital be balanced by the free flow of labour. Some are even arguing that the immigrant gates should be opened wide now that Europe has an ageing population and not enough young tax payers to support the pensions of older people with their dramatically extended longevity.
The trouble is economists don’t usually live in tower blocks next to dysfunctional immigrant families. Neither do most politicians, academics nor journalists have their children playing in glass-strewn streets with tough, delinquent-inclined immigrant youth. Nor do they work on the assembly line cheek by jowl with young immigrant men who don’t speak their language very well, who don’t laugh at their jokes and who eat and socialize in a manner that is totally alien to their own traditions and life-style.
Most people in most countries are not prepared to change their cultural make up at the speed many Europeans have been asked to the last three decades. Yes, the world is becoming more cosmopolitan, but most of us still more easily identify with our own kind. Finding that balance is not easy.
Europe probably has to say no to further immigration until it has digested properly what it has already swallowed and make more effort to sort out its present racial malaise. If it doesn’t this 17 or 20% of the vote will climb to 30% bringing right into centre stage the ugliness of parties like Le Pen’s, which at the moment, for all the headlines, are still extremists out on the political edge.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By JONATHAN POWERFollow this link to read about – and order – Jonathan Power’s book written for the
40th Anniversary of Amnesty International
“Like Water on Stone – The Story of Amnesty International”
