Re: I'm curious how do you see European Union? Do you support all nations under one flag or do you see it as bigger government leading to more oppression?
Europe's Love-Hate Affair With Foreigners
December 24, 2000
THE WORLD
Europe's Love-Hate Affair With Foreigners
By ROGER COHEN
pub34.ezboard.com
Excerpt:
The fears may prove costly. David Hale, the chief economist at Zurich Financial Services, argues that one reason the United States may continue to outperform Europe lies in "its demographic characteristics and high tolerance for immigration."
"During the next 10 years," he said, "the working age population of Japan will decline by 6 percent, in Europe it will stagnate at best, and in the United States it will expand by at least 10 percent." The potential result: a Europe short of labor and struggling to finance retirement payments.
But a European reaction may be at hand. Europeans often argue that their cohesive social model must be defended against the raw social fragmentation of American multiculturalism; they tend to insist that immigrants adapt to local culture rather than introduce new ones. But they are looking closely at one American idea. Several governments are coming around to the view that a model similar to the American H-1B visa - allowing skilled foreign workers into the country - needs to be adopted. In the United States, this program has been expanded to allow in 585,000 workers over the next three years. Germany has now offered 20,000 so- called green cards for qualified foreigners.
This would mark a shift, albeit small, toward controlled immigration and away from the policies that have made family reunion, asylum-seeking and illegality the only roads into Fortress Europe. But the deeper problem appears political and cultural. "Politicians have forced us into parallel societies by denying for so long that we existed and pretending for so long that we would go home," said Safet Cinar, who heads an association of the 130,000 Turks in Berlin.
The problem of immigration in Europe has existed for a long time. Global culture, economics, demography and reactionary politics have now brought it to a head. The corpses on Europe's borders demonstrate its gravity. In his pioneering 19th- century book on nationalism, "What is a Nation?", Ernest Renan pointed out that the idea of the nation was based on shared habits and language but also on a shared ability to forget past hatreds.
Paraphrasing Renan, it may be asked, at the beginning of the 21st century, how a nascent United States of Europe hopes to further the peace and prosperity that the European Union has brought without overcoming the enduring prejudice that divides Christianity and Islam and without burying, once and for all, the ethnic bigotry that has little basis in a multinational history and has so repeatedly plunged the continent into war.
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Answer: Neofascism....
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