EU elections May 26: Immigration and the far-right parties (Part 2 of 2)

The current EU immigration system rests on two major policies.

Part 1 is here.

The Schengen area and the "Dublin system"

The current EU immigration system is based on two major policies. One is the Schengen area, in which normal international border controls are dropped between countries who meet the border screening standards of the Schengen Agreement. If someone enters the EU in a Schengen country, e.g., flying from Canada to Germany, Germany does the initial border control screening, and other Schengen countries accept their screening as adequate. Which means that the visiting Canadian could then travel to France without having to go through French customs checks. This has benefitted intra-EU commerce and tourism greatly. This facilitates, for instance, commercial and tourist travel from Germany through Austria to Italy. And both would be significantly negatively affected if full border controls were reinstituted for those. Returning to non-Schengen practices for the very important commercial route from Germany through the Austrian state of Tyrol across the Brenner Pass to Italy would have a very detrimental economic impact.

The Dublin system is the EU arrangement that requires the country of first entry to register and process asylum seekers. In practice, this means that "peripheral" states of the EU that have borders with non-EU countries, notably Italy and Greece, are stuck with the main responsibility of processing asylum-seekers' claims. This means that for anti-imigration politicians like the AfD in Germany or Kurz and Strache in Austria, "keep out the refugees" doesn't have to mean "keep the refugees out of the EU"; for them, "keep the refugees in Italy and Greece" works just as well. This is an obvious point of tension between the keep-the-foreigners-out stance of Salvini's Lega in Italy and that of the AfD or Austrian anti-immigrations politicians.

Who are our "people"?

Another important feature of political xenophobia in the US and the EU is the theme that the needs of our country's people have to be protected by shutting out and persecuting immigrants. (Gregor Mayer, et al, "Das Europa, das sie meinen")Profil 12.05.2019:

The trick now is to suggest that saving Europe from pressing masses of migrants remains the most urgent task. Behind the bulwark of Frontex lines, border barriers and exit centers, the peoples in their national states are supposed to make themselves comfortable again. It would be most comfortable if sovereign institutions such as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Central Bank (ECB) no longer had any say.

But "the people" for rightwing populists are the ethnos, "an imaginary community of descent and affiliation," not the demos, "a politically defined community of public negociation and the balancing of interests and conflicts." (Definitions from Stefan Nowotny, Ethnos or Demos? Transversal Journal 9:2000)

So when European far-rightists or American Trumpists talk about "the peoples in their national states", they mean the true people in an ethno-nationalist sense, e.g., the Real Americans (white people, Christians), white non-Muslim and non-Jewish Germans and Austrians, white, non-Algerian French people, and so on.

In language soft-pedalled for the moment due to the embarrassment of Brexit, the far right parties' goal for the European Union is the same as it has been. Let national government do what they want on most policies regardless of EU laws and decisions, but keep the individual country veto on foreign policy questions. And enforce the Dublin system even more firmly. Unless you're Salvini's Lega or Orbán's Fidesz, in which case you want to be able to ignore international law and just keep asylum-seekers out altogether and expel ones who make it across the border without regard to the Dublin requirements.

The EU is not a federal union, but a multinational one. Nevertheless, there is at least a conceptual analogie for this far-right sabotage-the-EU-from-within strategy to that of conservative States' Rights advocates in the US, who demand states' rights when they disagree with federal laws and demand federal supremacy for laws they support. Still, the main thrust of the Europeans far right's program is very much nationalistic. One proposal discussed for immigration from Africa is for the EU to set up "asylum centers" in Libya where asylum applications would be processed before the applicants even come to an EU country. It's a demagogic and impractical proposal that Salvini currently favors, because he's showing how he wants to keep the foreigners out. But other far-right EU parties like the FPÖ are opposed to anything that represents even that much of a common EU policy on immigration.

"In the words of [Austria's] FPÖ Interior Minister Herbert Kickl, however, the 'primacy of politics' over the law applies. That means that law has to follow politics, the European Convention on Human Rights could be changed and nationalized - an "Austrian Human Rights Convention," Kickl calls it. (Profil)

(A German version of this post is available here.)