The Coming Migration Out of Sub-Saharan Africa
Christopher Caldwell
National Review, Aug. 8, 2019Almost the entire population of Italy, it seems, spent the last week of June watching a boat arrive from across the Mediterranean. It was the Sea-Watch 3, a Netherlands-registered ship funded by progressive philanthropists and captained by Carola Rackete, a 31-year-old German climate-change activist. Rackete
radioed that she was carrying 42 African refugees rescued at sea who were in desperate health. Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini holds that such ships rendezvous with traffickers just off the Libyan coast, and are really less interested in rescuing sailors than in transporting illegal immigrants to Europe en masse. “Taxis,” he has called them. And indeed, Rackete
had been doodling about at the edge of Italy’s territorial waters for several days, charting a course less consistent with any health emergency than with a wish to land her human cargo in the European Union, where it is easy to apply for political asylum and where even those whose applications are rejected are almost never deported. Since his Lega party began sharing power in a populist coalition a year ago, Salvini’s decision to close Italy’s ports to such ships has made him the country’s most popular politician by a mile — and arguably, though he is still only a cabinet minister, the leader of the Western European political Right.
This time Salvini failed. Rackete
broke through a line of Coast Guard ships in the pre-dawn hours of June 29 and made port on the island of Lampedusa, allegedly ramming a customs ship in the process, a maneuver for which she was arrested. Italians were riveted to their smartphones
and TV sets. A good number of Lampedusans even lined the docks in the middle of the night to holler their wish that she be prosecuted — and worse. But when “Carola,” as she was increasingly known to the public, was released in early July, a crowd of supporters waved signs with handmade hearts. She still faces criminal charges. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foreign minister, the Social Democrat Heiko Maas, backed Rackete
against the Italian authorities. “Saving human lives is no crime,” he said.If Rome and Berlin have been transfixed by a nautical incident involving only a few dozen African seafarers, it is for a simple reason: There are a billion more where those came from. And how Europe addresses African migration is going to determine what the population of the continent looks like a generation from now.Since the turn of the century, Europeans have been faced with the most basic question about their future: whether they have one. In some countries — especially Italy, Germany, and Austria — the native population has been shrinking for decades. Birth rates have fallen so low that each native generation is about two-thirds the size of the last. The decline was masked for a while by the size of the almost wholly autonomous Baby Boom generation, but now those native Europeans have begun to retire and die. Non-European immigrants, especially those from the Middle East and North Africa, have rushed to claim a place on the continent. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
____________________________________________________On EU Migration Policies, Italy Won’t Go Down Without a Fight
Stratfor, July 9, 2019Far fewer asylum seekers are now knocking on Europe’s door compared with the droves that flooded its borders just a few years ago. But thanks to Italy, the European Union is still grappling with immigration concerns. The Italian government recently threatened to stop registering migrants who arrive in its territory so that they can move to other parts of the Continent — thereby violating the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, which establishes that migrants have to apply for asylum in the country where they first set foot.
But despite facing possible sanctions for doing so, Italy’s government is showing no signs of backing down, especially since its tough anti-immigration stance has continued to serve to its right-wing party’s benefit at the polls. Thus, immigration will remain a central issue in Rome’s political agenda in the months ahead — providing fodder for even more diplomatic disputes between Italy and Brussels, as well as other EU member states, in the process.
The State of EU Migration
According to recent data released by the United Nations, around 141,000 migrants reached the European Union by either sea or land in 2018 — a far cry from the roughly 1 million people who arrived during the peak of the refugee crisis in 2015. The arrival of migrants has decreased every year since 2015 and is expected to drop again this year as well. These overall drops in migration are the result of several factors, including tougher immigration laws in several EU member states and greater EU cooperation with migrants’ countries of origin, as well as an agreement between Brussels and Turkey to prevent migrants from entering the bloc.
The data also shows that Syrian migrants, who were at the center of the 2015 crisis, now represent only 12 percent of all arrivals. International law makes a distinction between people who are escaping war or persecution at home and have the right to be granted asylum abroad and those who are seeking a better life abroad but do not qualify for asylum. Because of their country’s ongoing civil war, Syrian nationals thus have a much higher chance of being granted asylum than migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who are more likely to be deemed as migrants seeking economic opportunity. But despite this distinction, EU governments often fail to expel those migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected, leaving them in a legal gray area.
The U.N. data also revealed that Greece is the top entry point for migrants, followed by Spain. Italy, meanwhile, is in a distant third position with less than 3,000 arrivals in the first half of 2019. Moreover, sea arrivals to Italy fell by a staggering 88 percent between January and May, compared with the number of arrivals recorded during the same period last year. According to Eurostat data, asylum applications in Italy fell by 61 percent between 2017 and 2018 as well, with Rome receiving only 8 percent of the European Union’s total asylum requests last year (Germany, by contrast, represented 28 percent of the bloc’s total asylum requests). … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Migration from the Muslim World to the West: Its Most Recent Trends and Effects
Arno Tausch
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, May 21, 2019
This article analyzes patterns of global migration during the last five years, often associated with the rise of migration to Europe and the “European refugee crisis”1 since summer 2015, documented by the World Bank Bilateral Migration Matrix data (BMM),2 which allows researchers to analyze migration from every country of the world to every other country of the world.
The article aims to shed new light on these issues based on a thorough, global, and quantitative analysis of the international flows of the now more than 265 million global migrants. Based on cross-national data, gathered and documented for this analysis, it also provides first quantitative analyses of the predictable effects of these processes on the societies of the host countries of this rising global and OIC (countries of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) migration.3
The potential consequences of growing Muslim mass migration for the state of Israel, for the entire West, and for the worldwide Jewish communities are manifold. Recent Gallup data suggest that millions of people from countries often fundamentally and violently opposing Israel, and in which hating Jews is endemic,4 now want to migrate to the leading Western military powers, hitherto providing vital support to the Jewish state. At the end of the day and on a global scale, there are now 166 million people willing to emigrate to the United States, 46 million people to the United Kingdom, and 39 million people to France. The large majority of them are from poorer developing countries, above all in the Muslim world.
It takes little imagination to realize that, within just one to two decades, these expected monumental shifts in the underlying demographics of Western countries, caused by Muslim mass migration, may have very serious and even dramatic effects on the future support for the state of Israel and on its backing among the populations of the leading Western powers, and also on the Jewish populations living in Western democracies. With around a third of the total immigrant population in the entire EU-28 now originating from Turkey and the other OIC countries,5 the growing future Muslim presence in European politics and economics is not a fantasy but a reality.6 As this article will show, the European Union has recently become the world’s leading magnet of global migration, with around a fifth of global migration now flowing into the EU countries. There is no indication whatsoever that this is a temporary phenomenon that will abate in the near future. Europe seems to have found—as yet—no coherent answer to the refugee crisis and to the challenges of mass migration across the Mediterranean.7
Thus, one of the undoubted effects of the recent global migratory movements to Europe is what they portend in the long term for the rise of anti-Semitism and for Israeli security. This crisis is also combined with other intensifying economic and institutional shortcomings of the European Union and the European Monetary Union, which were already evident even before the economic crisis of 2008, and which will come to the fore in a downward spiral of European politics and economics in the near future.8 If anything, the problems will worsen after Brexit9 and the elections to the European Parliament in 2019.10
This article’s central message is that in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, rich Arab immigration-hosting countries, hitherto the main recipients of OIC migration, became more restrictive in their immigration policies, while a considerable proportion of OIC migration has now turned to Europe, accelerated by the instabilities wrought by the civil war in Syria. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The U.N. Agency for Palestinians Is Even Worse Than You Imagine
Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky
WSJ, Aug. 6, 2019
A corruption scandal involving sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation against whistleblowers and lots of business-class travel has gripped the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It represents a new low for UNRWA and an indictment of the idea of an international agency dedicated to a single interest. But it’s also a unique opportunity to see behind the curtain of a billion-dollar U.N. bureaucracy and phase it out.
The allegations come from a leaked UNRWA ethics report completed in December 2018 exposed last week by Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse.The published account accuses Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl of appointing Maria Mohammedi, with whom he had a relationship “beyond the professional,” to a newly created and fast-tracked role as senior adviser and flying her around the world in business class. The U.N. says it’s still investigating.
According to the report, Ms. Mohammedi’s new job allowed her to join Mr. Krähenbühl on his busy and expensive travel schedule. Current and former UMRWA officials describe him as perpetually absent from Jerusalem, a submarine who “surfaces for a couple of days” of public meetings then “disappears into the unknown for protracted periods.” UNRWA, which complains it’s strapped for cash, would have footed the bill for all of it.
The commissioner-general’s travel, the report explains, left chief of staff Hakam Shahwan in control of UMRWA’s operations in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, Mr. Shahwan himself stands accused of bullying staff, acting like a “thug,” bypassing procedures for procurement and other financial decisions, and excessive partiality to the Palestinian Authority. UNRWA says he was “separated” from the agency after writing anonymous emails to journalists trying to discredit the report. Mr. Shahwan says he’s on paid leave and hasn’t commented on specific allegations.
The 10-page report also accuses Deputy Commissioner-General Sandra Mitchell of using her power to get her husband, Robert Langridge, promoted to a more senior position. She stepped down but remains on staff. Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Langridge deny the allegations, as do Mr. Krähenbühl and Ms. Mohammedi.
In the past, UNRWA has been accused by Israel and independent researchers of employing Hamas members and using anti-Semitic textbooks. Rockets have also been found hidden at UNRWA schools on several occasions. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that an organization so corrupt at the bottom is even more corrupt at the top. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Canada Must Adapt Quickly To Attract Skilled Workers, Immigration Minister Says: Kathleen Harris, CBC News, Aug. 13, 2019 — Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen says Canada must be quick to adapt and innovate in order to remain a global leader in attracting skilled workers.
