Oldal 83 [83]
OCR
Demography and migration | 81 that he also controlled the leaders of Europe to allow mass immigration into their countries. Nevertheless, the criticism of open borders is not to be ignored, or taken lightly. The prominent late historian Walter Laqueur, for instance, also expressed similar views, though in a somewhat softer, more conventional way. Laqueur was highly unsatisfied with the general state of the European continent, including the lack of proper answers to social problems, economic crises, low fertility rates, and the negative effects of migration. In his opinion, such issues could be attributed to the lack of desire to assimilate, the widespread presence of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, and the rise of far-right forces as a response to all this. In his opinion, fundamentalism is sometimes even supported by the state: for example, the German state is actively financing fundamentalist imams (Laqueur 2007; 2012). What he described is a slow erasure of norms and culture taken for granted earlier in Europe. b. Friendly rhetoric hides an inhospitable Europe Contrary to the above, what we can ascertain if we check the policies in European countries and the EU is that they are not at all as open as they are portrayed. In the radical criticism of Jozsef B6récz, for instance, [t]he physical exclusion of non-“White,” non-west-European subjects ... takes place through supra-state legal means - via the European Union’ shared visa regulations -and through a murky reference to the requirement of the never meaningfully defined “European identity” as a legal precondition for any non-EU-member state to be allowed to file a membership request in the European Union. All that is taking place in a context in which, as we have seen, the semantic fields of west “Europeanness,” Pink skin tonality and “Whiteness” overlap to a considerable degree, particularly if we define “Whiteness”... as a set of global privilege claims. In that sense, the institutional arrangement of the European Union, especially its shared border policing and foreigner/migration “management” systems, function as quasi-state organizations created with the purpose of preventing access to the territory of western Europe defined, hence, as a “White” space - by members of Other societies, racialized as non-“White”. (Böröcz 2021, 11) This criticism by Böröcz becomes interesting if we check the present migration landscape in Europe, and especially add the latest securitisation of the topic (Bello 2020). This securitisation has even changed the language in EU documents, which started to talk about irregular migration instead of refugees, for example. Several patterns show the unfriendliness of the present European system. First of all, in most EU documents, only third country nationals are called migrants. EU citizens are handled differently. This, then, has an effect on the
