Geplaatst:29 mei 2006 11:23 - Gewijzigd: 29 mei 2006 11:23

Europe is rethinking its status ”haven for refugees”

VIENNA - Recent rumblings from the top echelons of governments across Europe suggest that the continent is rethinking its status as a haven for refugees as it becomes more suspicious that many immigrants are coming to exploit its social benefits and democratic principles.

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Earlier this month, Austria’s Interior Minister Liese Prokop announced that 45 percent of Muslim immigrants were „unintegratable”, and suggested that those people should „choose another country.” In the Netherlands, one of Europe’s most integrated refugees and a critic of radical Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, resigned her seat in parliament in the wake of criticism that she faked details on her asylum application to the Netherlands in 1992. And France’s lower house of parliament last week passed a strict new immigration law, now awaiting Senate approval.„The trend today more and more in Europe is to try to control immigration flow”, says Philippe De Bruycker, founder of the Odysseus Network, an consortium on immigration and asylum in Europe. „At the same time we still say we want to respect the right of asylum and the possibility of applying for asylum. But of course along the way we create obstacles for asylum seekers.”

„We speak of the need to fight immigration but we don’t have a clear position on whether we need immigrants”, says Mr. De Bruycker, noting the precipitous dip in population growth in European Union countries in the last half century. He adds that a series of recent incidents have affected the image of immigrants in the European mind. The murder of a Jewish man -Ilan Halimi- on the outskirts of Paris earlier this spring, for example, by a band of immigrant youths. Or the murder of a Malian woman and a Flemish child in Antwerp recently by the son of a founder of Belgium’s most far right party. „In Europe, we are still unable to accept that we are a continent of immigration”, says De Bruycker. (The Christian Science Monitor)