Europe is floundering due to immigration
The European Union is preparing for the implementation of its Migration Pact and the first thing it does —as you can read in Gerard Fageda's chronicle in this newspaper— is to activate the so-called "EU solidarity tool," so that states receiving less immigration can help—if they wish—those receiving more: either by taking in a portion of the immigrant population, by contributing funds, or by providing armed forces and other border security reinforcements. To this end, the European Commission has so far drawn up a list of member states it considers "under migratory pressure," and which are therefore deserving of help from other states because they suffer "disproportionate arrivals" of immigrants. These are states like Italy, Spain, Cyprus, and Greece. States with fewer immigrant arrivals, and which should therefore be helping the former (such as those in the Nordic bloc or those in Eastern Europe), don't even want to hear about them. They already prevented the solidarity tool from being mandatory, and it is reasonable to doubt that it will ever be applied if participation is voluntary.
Ultimately, it's about the age-old opposition between north and south. The states that, according to the EU, are "under migratory pressure" are those that, not so long ago, were known as the PIGS, a deeply pejorative term that formed an acronym with the initials of the countries it referred to as "pigs": Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. The prevalence of xenophobic, supremacist, and anti-immigrant rhetoric in countries with very low immigration rates—like those on the communist side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War—is a long-standing phenomenon that demonstrates that this hate speech is not only reactive: it can also be proactive. It doesn't only appear as a reaction to the arrival of a more or less numerous immigrants, but can also occur even without a large influx of immigrants. Because what makes this rhetoric thrive is not the "problems" generated by immigration, but fear and aporophobia (fear of the poor). Fear, racism, and disgust for the poor. These are the true fuels that make these inflammatory speeches burn.
These are precisely the discourses upon which Europe has built its fearful, reactionary, and hypocritical immigration policy. Dividing up immigration like dividing up filth, and calling this approach "solidarity," while Meloni renews the agreement with Libya to continue paying that country to do the dirty work of maritime surveillance (basically, machine-gunning and sinking boats full of defenseless people), means Poland or Belarus will fall sooner, but these same rhetoric has ended up contaminating a good part of the decision-making centers of the European Union and its member states, starting with the most powerful. A Europe with an aging population, in greater need of immigrants than ever before, yet cowed by the rhetoric of the far right. A bad omen.
