Maahanmuuttokriittisyys - onko tulevaisuus valoisa ?

Maahanmuuttokriittisten kannatus ja puolueiden vaikutusvalta Euroopassa on kasvanut viime aikoina. Mm. Ranskassa ja Tanskassa hallitus on tiukentamassa maahanmuuttopolitiikkaansa.

Tilanne on kuitenkin hyvin epävakaa.

1. Ellei syntyvyys Euroopassa nouse, alhainen syntyvyys yhdistettynä tiukkaan maahanmuuttopolitiikkaan johtanee talouden näivettymiseen ja ennemmin tai myöhemmin kasvaa riski, että rajat avataan uudelleen.

Tanskassa riski voi hyvin realisoitua jo tänä vuonna pidettävissä vaaleissa. Tanskan kasvu on nollaluokkaa, paine eläkeiän nostamiseen on kova ja samoin työajan pidentämiseen. Oikeistohallituksen päivät voivat olla luetut. Se seuraako tästä välttämättä maahanmuuttopolitiikan oleellinen muutos ei ole minulle selvää.

2. Toinen epävakauden lähde on maahanmuuttajien syntyvyys. Syntyvyys laskee maahanmuuttajien keskuudessa mutta vain joillain maahanmuuuttajaryhmillä:

Looking at Britain, the sociologist Eric Kaufmann found that Caribbean and Eastern European immigrants rapidly picked up the ambient secularism (and low birthrates) of British society, but that there was virtually no change at all in the religiosity (and fecundity) of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslims between the first and second generations. (Lähde: Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, Christopher Caldwell.)

Nähdäkseni nimenomaan kunniankulttuurit, missä suvut kilpailevat verisestikin keskenään, ovat kaikkein kärkkäimpiä säilyttämään korkean syntyvyytensä:

...fathering as many children as possible increased the number of lineage members. ... the tendency seen elsewhere for decreased fertility as a result of urbanization is not evident here. (Lähde: Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Philip Carl Salzman)

3. Kolmas ongelma on se, että monet maahanmuuttajaryhmät (nimenomaan muslimit) eivät integroidu Eurooppaan lähes ollenkaan. Muslimit eri maista (Punjabista, Bengalista, Irakista, Marokosta, Egyptistä jne.) integroituvat kyllä toisiinsa mutta eivät Eurooppaan. Ne muodostavat hiljalleen yhtenäisen muslimi-identiteetin:

Many French and even second-generation French students of North African origin, who make up the majority in certain schools, live as if they are foreign to the national community. They reply to anything you say to them with two categories: “the French” and “us.” Where once they claimed an Arab identity (which is not, by the way, always self-evident for North Africans), today they increasingly claim a “Muslim”.(Lähde: Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, Christopher Caldwell.)

Saksan turkkilainen hakee vaimonsa Anatoliasta, eikä hyväksy vaimokseen edes toista Saksan turkkilaista.

The situation is similar in every country in Europe. In France, the number of foreign spouses rose from 23,000 in 1990 to more than 60,000 in 2004 and family-related immigration now accounts for 78 percent of permanent legal immigration. In Denmark, the vast majority of first-, second-, and third-generation Turks and Pakistanis take their spouses from the home country; some studies have shown the rate for Turks to be over 90 percent. In the Bradford District Race Review, published after Britain was hit by a wave of race riots in the summer of 2001, Sir Herman (later Lord) Ouseley warned that “50% of the marriages that take place in the Asian community result in an intake of new residents who are unable to communicate in the English language, which limits their participation in mainstream social and educational activities.” Fully 60 percent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi marriages are to spouses born abroad, a major factor in the roughly 50 percent growth of the Pakistani population of Manchester, Birmingham, and Bradford over the 1990s. Six decades into the mass immigration from the Indian subcontinent, three-quarters of Bengali children aged 0–4 have mothers born in Bangladesh. (Lähde: sama.)

Integroituminen osaksi saksalaista yhteiskuntaa on epäonnistuunut myös työmarkkinoiden osalta:

The Turks, who throughout the 1960s and 1970s had a higher labor force participation than native Germans, are now, if not exactly an underclass, at least an economic problem, with unemployment reaching 40 percent in some cities (including Berlin), three times the national rate of welfare dependency, and an average retirement age of fifty. (Lähde: sama.)

Eurooppa toistamassa Ottomaanien virheitä ?

Moni eurooppalainen on tehnyt johtopäätöksen, että jo riittää: "Maahanmuuttoa on rajoitettava radikaalisti. Emme tarvitse maamme sisään muslimien viidettä kolonnaa."

Tämä viidennen kolonnan välttämisen ajatus oli se logiikka jota Kemal Atatürk seurasi Turkissa 1920-luvun alussa. Vasta kaatunut Ottomaanien valtakunta oli Atatürkin näkökulmasta heikko nimenomaan siksi että Ottomaanien valtakunta oli monikulttuurinen.

Ottoman cities of the time, like Sarajevo, Thessalonica, and Istanbul, may have been the most cosmopolitan places in the world. They included large minority populations of Greek Christians, Armenian Christians, Jews, and others, who were organized into ethnic communities, or millets, that enjoyed a certain amount of self-rule. But at the start of the nineteenth century, Turkey’s European neighbors used the oppression of their “brethren” in Greece and other spots inside Ottoman borders as their pretext to tear the empire to pieces.

Atatürk käsitti asian niin että Turkki on uudelleen homogenisoitava:

decades the dominant strain of Turkish nationalist thinking has been that Ottoman tolerance was the most important weapon the empire’s enemies used against it, and even that the empire died of its tolerance... his background should be understood by anyone wishing to comprehend the massacres of millions of Armenians during the First World War, or the idolatry of Kemal Atatürk, or what made Turkish nationalism so virulent and uncompromising that the Kurdishness of Kurdish-speaking Kurds has been officially denied by the central government for much of the last century. ...

What the Turks did, in reaction to the carving up of their multinational empire, was to reconceive the rump of it as the birthright of one “people.” They drew the lesson that to have any officially recognized minorities at all can, under certain circumstances, be a dangerous thing. It is striking that the European champions of Turkish admission to the EU, who are tireless in adducing commonalities between Turkish and European history, have paid not the slightest attention to the history of Turkish minority policy, except to deplore the country’s modern-day persecution of the Kurds and pass retrospective condemnations of the slaughter of the Armenians.

Eurooppa on tänään ehkä toistamassa saman virheen, minkä Atatürk ymmärsi ottomaanien virheeksi:

The Danish cartoon crisis shows that Europeans and Ottomans have at least certain points in common. The worldwide violence and boycotts that followed on Jyllands-Posten’s publication of satirical cartoons about Muhammad did not require that the Danish Muslim community be badly integrated, or disgruntled—as indeed, they were not, particularly. All that was required was immigration, global media, radicalization of the Muslim world, extravagant claims for human rights, and a generalized fading of the sense that what goes on in someone else’s country is none of your business. Under the circumstances, one traveling delegation of a few angry Danish imams was sufficient to rally violent people around the globe in defense of their allegedly beleaguered “brethren.”

Muslimimaat tulevat suurella todennäköisyydellä käyttämään Euroopan muslimiväestöä viidentenä kolonnanaan.

(Kun monikultturismista puhutaan usein kuullostaa siltä, että moni keskustelija kuvittelee että kyseessä on jonkinlainen uusi ilmiö. Ei ole. Mm. Puolan tasavalta 1500-1700-luvuilla ja Ottomaanien valtakunta 1400-1900-luvuilla perustuivat malliin, joissa vähemmistöjen oikeudet turvattiin laajalla kulttuuriautonomialla. Tämäntyyppinen monikultturismi päättyi molempien maiden tapauksessa uudelleenhomogenisointiin - Puolan tapauksessa tosin suurelta osin ulkovaltojen toimesta.

Malli on siis hyvin erilainen kuin Amerikassa tapahtunut maahanmuuttajien assimilaatio:

The European experience of Muslim immigration has less in common with the American experience of immigration (largely a success) than with the American experience of race (an enduring problem, with all successes attained only at very steep costs).)

Massachusetts

Toinen historian mielenkintoinen kokemus voisi olla irlantilaisten saapuminen Massachusettsiin 1800-luvulla. Aluksi tuo sen ajan yksi liberaaleimpia yhteiskuntia otti irlantilaiset suht avoimesti vastaan:

There was a period of calm after the Irish first arrived in Boston. They were nearly invisible, and had no effect on politics or the economy. Massachusetts, then probably the most advanced democratic society in the West, saw itself as enlightened and humanitarian. The first generation of Boston Irish were made as welcome as a mass influx of violent and destitute illiterates could possibly be. As Handlin wrote: Nativist fears failed to develop more significantly because the Irish before 1845 presented no danger to the stability of the old society. They were in a distinct minority and, above all, were politically impotent

Sitten alkoi maahanmuuttokriittisyys, joka eteni kova vauhtia ja saavutti lähes poliittisen hegemonian:

in the 1850s, that natives began to voice intolerant opinions, to mutter openly about the newcomers’ higher birthrates, to form radical and secret political parties, and to take active steps to exclude the Irish from their institutions. The xenophobic “Know-Nothing” party, so named for its secrecy rather than its obscurantism, won every major office in the state in the mid-1850s.

Later generations of Irish Americans would remember that establishment as the reactionaries of the second, Know-Nothing stage of immigration, not as the Good Samaritans of the first.

Vaikka hegemonia hetkeksi saavutettiinkin, loppujen lopuksi irlantilaiset käsittääkseni jyräsivät kanta-asukkaat Bostonin politiikassa.

Euroopassakin on turha luulla, että hetkellinen voitto Hollannin tai Tanskan tai Suomen vaaleissa on välttämättä lopullinen voitto tai edes lopullisen voiton ensi askelia. Demografia on ihmeellinen voima. Hetken näyttää että mitään ei tapahdu. Sitten tapahtuu murros.