Sooner or later, it had to happen.
The continued, unabated, influx of asylum-seekers from the disturbed regions of the world, across porous frontiers and a treacherous Mediterranean, has now produced a counter-tsunami.
The statesmen and leaders say one thing in public but then are being forced by their own people to do the opposite.
Instead of bridges and welcomes being extended, walls are being hurriedly put up and closed.
First, the numbers.
The war in Syria has produced a huge wave of migrants, upwards of a million or two, who have found refuge in neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and, increasingly, Turkey. A defective system of policing of frontiers has allowed this wave to bring huge numbers of immigrants to Greece and the Balkans.
For all the EU’s posturing regarding the redistribution of asylum-seekers, these and the other immigrants do not really want to be distributed among all the EU nations, such as the Baltics or the former Czechoslovakia. They have two or more countries as their preferred country of adoption: Germany, Switzerland and, increasingly, the UK for its lavish social regime.
In the UK, immigration has become a key political issue. Britain lost control over its borders when it promised free entry to all citizens of the Commonwealth. In recent years, although Britain is not in the Schengen area, it has faced a second flood from citizens of the new EU expansion, especially Poles.
The British immigration services do all they can to stem the flood but the results are quite weak. Nevertheless, the countryside around Calais is full of makeshift immigrant camps, as asylum-seekers do their best to sneak into or underneath UK-bound trucks and thus enter the UK.
There are regular battles with the French police and this week a video shot from a bus re-entering Britain showed crowds of asylum seekers trying to climb onto trucks in order to evade the French controls.
At the other end of the country, the French police are trying their best to stem the flood from Italy. Italy has become the poster-boy of the EU by saving so many asylum-seekers from a watery grave but then, once they are on land, the controls become lax and the asylum-seekers move through Italy towards its border with France.
This has been going on for years and the French police were quite laid back about it, turning the proverbial blind eye. Now, something has happened and the French are adamant that they will not take any more immigrants from Italy. The rocks at Ventimiglia have become a huge camp for asylum seekers.
Nerves between Italy and France have become quite frayed, with the French accusing the Italians of lax controls and the Italians counter-accusing the French of sending back immigrants who had not crossed over from Italy.
Italian premier Renzi has thundered that Europe must help Italy through the re-settlement of the immigrants according to a proposed scheme, but then events in Italy have shown that Renzi is incapable of distributing migrants in Italy itself.
The newly-elected governor of a province in the north of Italy has forbidden localities in that region from accepting the migrants that were being sent by the government to alleviate the huge numbers of them in the south. The newly-elected Mayor of Venice has ordered that migrants that have been housed in tourist areas must move out before the start of the tourist season because they could make tourists feel threatened.
In Britain, the Daily Mail carried pictures of British families who had been holidaying in Chios, a Greek island, who spoke of their harrowing experience, eating in restaurants while being watched by migrants sitting just outside.
Elsewhere, the Hungarians are erecting a wall to prevent asylum-seekers from entering from the Balkans. Italians are urging the same be done to stop the influx from Slovenia.
In Denmark, the recent general election produced a surprise due to the strong showing of xenophobic and eurosceptic parties.
In a Europe already battered by the Greek crisis and the Russian invasion of Crimea, this migration crisis, so often downplayed and swept aside, has now become one of its biggest headaches.
Saving lives at sea is noble and undoubtedly a human duty, but one would be foolish were one to ignore the whole context.
The main ethnic groups that have fuelled the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean come from sub-Saharan regions and from Eritrea and Somalia, very far from the Mediterranean shores. That shows the existence of strong channels across frontiers and thousands of miles of sand, with the migrants enduring huge sacrifices and risks as they search for a better homeland. As more make it to Europe, more are encouraged to try it.
Among them, there are undoubtedly real refugees from war and strife, but most of the asylum-seekers are economic migrants, eager to escape from the poverty and disease of their homelands, attracted by a chimera called ‘Europe’.
When they find that the real Europe is not the paradise they thought it was, they do not go back to their countries of origin but they settle down to a non-life in which they are non-citizens with no rights – a lower class of proletariat.
We here in Malta may have seen some aspects of this wave, but in no way do we have the inner city areas of neglect and worse that one finds on the continent. Public pressure in countries such as Italy has become decidedly xenophobic. When grumbles become generalised, the grumbles lead to a political outcome such as the emergence of xenophobic parties and, as we have seen, even issues between neighbouring countries that have lived in friendship for decades.
This is nothing like the waves of refugees seeking to escape from the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. These were fewer in number and the understanding was that they would go back to their countries once the troubles were over. In the current situation, these asylum-seekers are here for good.
There is no way one can see how this situation can be reversed. Note that the asylum-seekers do not include people from Libya, which is in the throes of a civil war. Note too that the refugees from Syria do not want to go to other Muslim countries but prefer one that is non-Muslim. All the talk about the EU setting up asylum-processing centres in intermediate countries has been just that: talk. So too all the talk about bombing and breaking up the boats on which the people cross.
It is also far too early to talk about integration and assimilation. There are countries in the world where people from different races and colours have integrated – I think here of Brazil. But even the US, for all the progress that has been registered since Martin Luther King, is not yet a completely integrated country, even considering the influx of Latinos and Chinese, etc. In Europe, integration is still light years away.
As for our country, its smallness and peculiar situation has kept it relatively free from the really dramatic tsunami that is causing all this upheaval. But considering our background and relatively ethnic homogeneity, even the small waves we have experienced have had a huge impact on our people, which has not been handled properly by our leaders.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have other things to worry about but, sooner rather than later, we too must face up to this tsunami, hopefully to integrate it as our forefathers have done on so many occasions rather than to allow it to contribute to our continuing disintegration as a people.
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