Session 2
Immigration and Asylum
Dr. Stephen Castles
I think these have been two very interesting perspectives, really rather different perspectives, on the issue we are trying to deal with today. I am not going to try and repeat or sum up what they've said, but I will try and pick out a few points and focus on them. I'd like to start with the question about why we are now linking on the one hand Islamophobia and on the other hand campaigns against asylum seekers and refugees. Why do we see an identity between these two groups? What I would like to suggest is that that identity doesn't lie in the groups at all, but rather in the receiving society. The question is: why do European societies create this exclusion of certain groups or even racism and discrimination against certain groups? It seems to me that it has very little to do with the characteristics of the group, but has much more to do with the needs – the social, political and psychological needs – of European societies, which are connected with traditions of nation building and how we've managed issues of migration and minorities in the past.
Until the 1980s nobody spoke about Islamophobia or refugees in this context. There was a widespread understanding that there was racism in all European societies against immigrants and maybe especially against non-European immigrants, particularly those with a different skin colour. The target has switched and we need to understand why. Certainly if we look at our own societies, we see asylum seekers are the number one issue when we talk about groups that people see as threatening, and Muslims are probably the number two issue. But, of course, very often the two are combined and there's a lot of discourse about the fact that many asylum seekers actually come from Muslim countries. So when we talk about convergence to certain policies, as was done in the first session – someone pointed out how much France and Sweden with very different models have come together – I'd say that it is often a convergence in policy failure, because if you look at either France or Sweden, you find very high levels of segregation on the basis of ethnicity and origin. I was very surprised to find, that Sweden, with policies which were very integrative or multicultural, had one of the highest degrees of residential segregation and occupational segregation of immigrants of any country in Europe.
I think these trends are linked to a very powerful discourse that started in the 1990s: that is the idea of the migration crisis, that the world is going through a migration crisis. Sometimes it is described as an asylum crisis, and it is affecting our countries. We can read this almost every day, particularly in the popular newspapers in this country. Now, as Mr. Al-Rashid pointed out, giving us some statistical data, this idea of a crisis is very unrealistic. The number of migrants is quite small, just two to three percent of the global population. The number of asylum seekers is even smaller. Most refugees stay in the poorer countries, only quite small numbers come to the developed countries. So why is there this feeling of crisis? Again we need to look at our own societies and understand why there are such strong feelings of insecurity amongst some sections of the population. It's certainly connected with the very rapid processes of economic and social change of the last twenty or thirty years, which we usually label as globalization. Certain groups in our societies feel insecure, and with very good reason because they have experienced changes that have been quite threatening to their economic and social position.
This has been intensified in the last ten years by what is often called the 'securitization' of migration: the idea that asylum and migration are actually security threats to our countries. A lot of people argue that this happened since the 11th of September 2001, but I think if you read policy statements, academic articles, the popular press going back to at least the beginning of the 1990s, the securitization is nothing new. What 9/11 has done has been to give a very convenient legitimation, so yes these fears have actually been proved true, although I would remind you that none of the terrorists of 11th of September were in fact asylum seekers or refugees.
So what is the real reason, why is it really happening? Well, obviously, it would take a very long time to even try and explain that, and I think it would be inappropriate to try and do so now. But it is clear what is happening today with regard to immigration is symbolic of a much broader issue. We see Muslim migrants coming into western societies and asylum seekers as an expression of the crisis of the South. We see it as a way in which the South impinges on the North and it's being categorized as a threatening development which threatens the way of life and prosperity of the North. What we generally fail to see in this discourse is the way in which the North-South crisis has been created by a certain form of globalisation, which has actually disconnected large parts of the world from the prosperity of the global economy. What migration in fact does is to reconnect the South and the North in a way that is not planned or wanted by the North. Certain types of migration are wanted: developed countries compete to attract Indian IT professionals, the British national health service would collapse tomorrow if we were not recruiting nurses from the Philippines, doctors from India and Africa and so on. We want certain forms of migration. There are other forms we don't want. But we need them because, for demographic and economic reasons, we have an enormous shortage of less skilled workers. But we'd like to think we don't need people to do these jobs. And for that reason we make it difficult for people to migrate. We force them to migrate either through migration networks or through what's called the migration industry, in other words, less legitimate ways of migration. And then we stigmatize them and I think that process of stigmatization is really what we're talking about. It has convenient labels, one of them is Muslims and the other one is asylum seekers and refugees. So it's a complicated issue and it's not one that we can deal with in any great depth here. But what I really want to do is add a perspective and say: let's look not only at the characteristics of the people who have come as immigrants and who have formed new groups within our societies. Let's also look at the reasons why our societies stigmatize certain groups and seem to have a need to do so. Thank you.
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