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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