Peeling an onion: the “refugee crisis” from a historical perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper asks a simple question: why did Western and other European politicians become so alarmed and, in some cases, downright apocalyptic at the rise of asylum seekers in 2014–16, especially compared to the previous refugee crisis in the 1990s? This paper argues that in 2014/2015, a “perfect storm” developed, bringing together factors that in the past had been largely unrelated and then converged with new ones. Peeling the onion of societal discontent with migrants and refugees has revealed five necessary and sufficient conditions: (1) discomfort with immigration and integration of colonial and labour migrants from North Africa and Turkey (1970–80s); (2) growing social inequality and widespread pessimism about globalization (1980s–); (3) A growing discomfort with Islam (1990s–); (4) Islamist terrorism (2000s–) and (5) the rise of radical right populist parties (2000s).

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• migration
• social inequality
• populism
• islamophobia
• terrorism

Acknowledgements

This article is the elaboration of my inaugural lecture as Adjunct Professor at Aalborg University on December 2, 2016. Some of the arguments in this paper build on Van Houtum and Lucassen (2016). I am especially grateful to Henk van Houtum, Hein de Haas and Thomas Spijkerboer for their stimulating contributions to the debate on the “refugee crisis” and to Dennie Oude Nijhuis for his advice on the dualization process. Furthermore I thank the participants of the inaugural workshop “Global Labor Migration” at the University of Maryland, 20–21 April 2017 and the comments of anonymous referees of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Leo Lucassen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2334-4810

Notes

1 Halbe Zijlstra in Algemeen Dagblad, 10 October 2015 and Rutte's open letter, published by his political party (VVD) in all Dutch newspapers (https://vvd.nl/briefvanmark/) on 22 January 2017.

2 Some 226,000 Hungarians in 1956 and ultimately over 200,000 Czechs in 1968 and subsequent years.

3 Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Ireland. I used the numbers published by the UNHCR in their Statistical Yearbooks (starting with UNHCR 2001, which covers the entire period 1990–1999). As the data for Italy were interrupted, I decided to leave this country out.

4 http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-93-1039_en.htm?locale=en.

5 This paragraph is based on the ample information provided on border deaths since 1993 by: http://www.unitedagainstracism.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Listofdeaths22394June15.pdf.

6 BBR News, 19 June 2000 (’58 dead in port lorry’) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/796791.stm.

7 A connection with Syrian refugees was mentioned following the November 2015 attacks in Paris but turned out to concern false identity papers held by two of the perpetrators (M. al-Mahmod and Ahmad al-Mohammed), who pretended to be refugees upon entering the EU at Lesbos on 3 October 2015.

8 This may also influence the rate of mixed marriages (Lucassen and Laarman 2009), which tends to be higher among natives and children of colonial migrants.

9 E.g. Paul Scheffer in the Netherlands, David Goodhart in the United Kingdom, Thilo Sarazin in Germany and Alain Finkielkraut in France.

10 OECD data https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm.

11 And other smaller Northwest European countries.

12 Temporary work increased from 15.5 per cent to 20.2 per cent between 2005 and 2015, with the share of self-employed rising from 12.4 per cent to 16.5 per cent in the same period (OECD).

13 In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn launched his election campaign only in 2002.