Oldal 81 [81]
Demography and migration | 79
this approach “almost obsolete” today (see e.g. Goldstone 2021, 269). In any
case, European public discourse is loaded with a double concern nowadays:
fears of a population explosion in the world, and worries about a population
implosion within Europe. Combining these two generates a third concern
about the shrinking proportion of the European population globally: from
11.68 per cent in 1960 to 5.7 per cent today, and only 3.7 per cent by 2070
(EPRS 2021, 1; European Commission 2021, 4).
This international context also brings us to one of the hottest potatoes
in European public debates today: migration. As you might have noticed,
this is a word that we have hardly used in this chapter so far. One specific
reason is that migrants should be seen neither the source of, nor the solution
to essentially home-grown demographic turbulences in Europe, which we
discussed above. Mobility within, and immigration to Europe, while they are
intertwined with these in many ways, deserve to be discussed on their own.
This is what we will do right now.
MIGRATION AND POLITICS
— Tamás Dezső Ziegler —
a. Misleading political discourses about migration
Migration has taken centre stage of heated Europe-wide political debates,
which will surely have a strong effect on European life in the future, especially
in the light of demographic trends explained above. Seemingly, if we only
scratch the surface, we find two distinctively differing political views about
this topic: one is a more open, welcoming, mainstream, rather ‘technocratic‘
perspective about migration. Contrary to this, we find the more critical,
sometimes even xenophobic view of migration, which opposes most forms
of migration, stresses the relevance of divergent cultures, and would limit
migrants’ access to European countries as strictly as possible. Why we write
“seemingly” here is because these two sides in real life policing are nearly
never as coherent and intact as their rhetoric.
For example, as will be explained below, the seemingly open pro-migration
mainstream parties and movements in Europe and the seemingly open leaders
of the EU have, in fact, often accepted harsh measures against migrants and
refugees. Other actors, which advocate limiting migration in their speeches,
often do exactly the opposite in their action. A good example of this is
the Hungarian state, where on the rhetorical level Prime Minister Viktor
Orban is very strongly against accepting migrants. However, while several
measures were introduced to hit asylum-seekers as harshly as possible, the
state also established in parallel an Investment Immigration Programme,
which welcomes wealthy investors (some of them with a dubious background).