” “The challenge of acceptance

A further two tragedies have occurred in Italy’s coastal waters in recent days: scores of immigrant victims in search of hope. Even more dramatically relevant in this light seems the Pope’s message for the 89th World Migrant and Refugee Day, published on 2 December: “The persons particularly in need – recalls the Pope – include the most vulnerable foreigners; the migrants without documents, the refugees and asylum-seekers, those who flee their countries due to persistent, violent conflicts in many parts of the world and the victims – the majority of them women and children – of the terrible crime of the traffic in human beings. Even in recent days we have witnessed tragic cases of the forced migrations of people for ethnic and nationalistic motives, which have caused indescribable suffering in the life of the stricken groups”. The Jesuit father Joseph Joblin , former professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, has recently intervened on the question of migration in Europe, and recalled the “political responsibility” of taking appropriate decisions aimed at “reconciling the rights of immigrants to cross frontiers, practice their own religion and maintain their own customs and language, with the rights of the majority of the population in their host country”. We publish here a reflection on this question by Catherine Wihtol De Wenden , director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. In the course of the decade 1980-1990 Europe became a continent of immigration, but this reality has encountered difficulty in finding legitimation in the history of the individual states where doubts about national identities, an obsession with the risks posed by immigration and the widespread conviction that the presence of clandestine immigrants is an obstacle to integration still persist. New trends have emerged since the 1990s: the globalization of the trade in people, goods and capital which has had as its effect the acceleration of mobility and the growth of the number of countries and the categories of people involved in the migratory phenomenon. The multiplication of economic and cultural networks, the globalization of the mass media, have developed an “urge” for Europe in the migratory imagination with the consequence ( inter alia) of transforming – albeit in different ways – some countries of emigration into countries of immigration. They include Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Hungary and Russia. This enlargement of the migratory space has been accompanied by an accentuation of the variations in the influx and presence of migrants in the various countries, ranging from Luxembourg, where foreigners now account for 30% of the population, to Switzerland (18%), the United Kingdom (3.5%), Spain, Italy and Finland (each 2%). The persistence of the migratory pressure on Europe, both from the East and more particularly from the South, where the Mediterranean plays in some sense the role of the Rio Grande between the USA and Mexico, shows no sign of abating, due to the lack of any real alternatives to emigration: the prospects for development in the regions of origin and the dissuasive measures to curb the phenomenon do not appear to would-be emigrants viable short-term solutions to their problems. The persistence of clandestine immigration, the practice of the reunification of families (over 50% of annual entries in France) and the marked degree of mobility among migrants (seasonal workers, technicians, students) suggest that influxes are unaffected by dissuasive policies of control on the frontiers. At the same time the European countries of immigration are trying to curb migration of permanent type on their territory by hoping, in effect, for a temporary immigration which may respond to the contingent demands of the labour market, but which does not take account of long-term needs. Among immigrants, on the other hand, the tendency to settle permanently in their host countries may be observed. The harmonization of European policies on immigration control may involve risks such as the restriction of fundamental rights including the right to asylum, the widening of the disparity between the rights of Europeans and those of non-Europeans, the deviation from the goals of the Schengen accords, and the reinforcement of controls. But harmonization also holds out opportunities in the reaffirmation of fundamental rights, in the motivation of decisions, in the adoption of common positions, in other words in advancing European citizenship.