Migrants and Welfare state :How European countries should respond to the migrant crisis?

Restoring from a summer break in August Chancellor Angeal Merkel surprised the European political establishment by describing Europe’s refugee issue as a bigger challenge than the greek crisis, which had overshadowed everything else in the first half of 2015.

In the past four months, Europe has been through a perfect storm of events that have uplifted the Asylum seekers issue, long seen as primarily a Southern Europe question, to the very top of the european agenda.

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All of a sudden, it seems the depth of the refuges crisis is beginning to register in Europe. It is a local, national and european problem that will require a pro-active policy that European leaders has not always been comfortable with in the past.

In the early nineties, the last time asylum seekers surged due to the Balkan wars the stakes where exactly the same. European countries were mired in the crisis with an unprecedented high unemployment rate and in the same time, cities have found themselves overwhelmed by a flood of asylum seekers who need to be housed, fed and treated for health problem.

The current migrant crisis is challenging the same way it did European countries in the early nineties. What is new is the upturn of new nationalist racist-populist political movements centered on “the problem of migration”. Social crisis across Europe and the breakdown of solidarity attached to Welfare state and citizenship have been exploited by a kind of nostalgic and reactionary populism that advances “cultural differences” as the rationale way for excluding all those who do not belong to the nation from social benefits.

This “new racism” (Baker 1981) emerged on the early eighties and rose in the nineties. These sentiments were first expressed by marginal parties, but as they increased their support by attracting votes from mainstream parties started to adopt some of the same anti-immigrant ideologies. This new racism has been instrumentalized by political and institutional pragmatism.

Political leaders across Europe have been unable to handle the issue of migration and welfare state due to their own contradictions. The current period is characterized by a hesitant admission that Europe needs immigrants for demographic and economic reasons by a growing awareness that border control alone cannot achieve effective migration realization and the new changes discourses on security and identity.

The recent history of European nationalism in the first part of the twentieth century left a legacy of racism and ethnocentrism, which provide an unpropitious climate for the reception of immigrants.

Europe is unable to overcome its internal conflicts between Universal ideals and old nationalism. As Agnes Heller stated in 1992 “the old Europe resemble a corpse whose hairs and nails, wealth and cumulative knowledge are still growing but the rest is dead”.

Social policies have been a crucial factor in shaping responses to immigration and settlement. Those internal contradictions led to both inclusive and exclusive welfare policies toward immigrants. Sometimes welfare systems play a positive part in the incorporation of immigrants into the society when welfare states were granted the same social rights to immigrants than the other citizens. Some other times welfare system contribute to exclude and marginalize immigrants when they grant them a legal status that denies them a normal welfare right. In such cases, immigrants either had severely limited mainstream welfare rights or were included in special schemes that often afforded inferior entitlements and segregated services.

Therefore it is time to restore the European ideals of Universalism. The migrant crisis is the historic occasion to overcome the internal difficulties of our established welfare states facing a declining capacity to maintain equity, and that of the nation state unable to accommodate incremental ethnic diversity.

The watchword must be Social Solidarity and Social responsibility. We are fully able to achieve those goals. One may remember that despite political leaders reluctance to face up immigration, educational authorities, local welfare agencies and local authorities have since a long time started to respond to this challenging question. A lot will be asked to the incumbent European leaders, they must recognize that we are in new world and find both the appropriate words and tools for it.