Don Flynn*
Halfway through December seems like a good time to sketch out some ideas on what 2015 might come to mean in a history of immigration which has yet to be written.
My provisional take is that it will come to be seen as the year in which the movement of people into and out of the country became finally and indissolubly Europeanised. There are circumstances in which we could easily imagine this to be a good thing, with progressive, forward-thinking governments working together to see how the movement of people is going to play its role in promoting sustainable growth and the welfare of populations, while at the same time cementing human rights and fairness right the way across the system.
Sadly this isn’t the way in which immigration has been considered by governments for a long time. The resulting dysfunction has meant that Europe has become associated in the minds of many with turmoil and threat. The image of desperate refugees landing on the Greek islands; the bodies of children washed up on holiday beaches; people pushed back by thuggish police action on the borders of Hungary; or the migrants living in the squalor of the ‘jungle’ camps in Calais will probably be the abiding memories of the past year for many.
Failure to anticipate the inevitable chaos
The truth is that these chaotic scenes have arisen for reasons which have less to do with the sheer press of numbers than with the utter failure of the European authorities to anticipate the inevitable flow of people away from the war zones which now stretch in great conjoined arcs across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and into North Africa.
