Economic Migration and the Effects of Asylum Seeking in Europe - Essay Example

Topic: economic migration and the effects of asylum seeking in europe INTRODUCTION: Economic migration(Zhang, 2003) is the migration of peoplefrom one part of the world to another in order to find a job. The person then sends the money he or she has earned back to the country of his nationality. There are two kinds of migration(Papademtriou, 1991). They are economic migration and asylum migration. Asylum migration, on the other hand, is the forced migration by a man or woman from the country that he leaves because of wars, or dangers to his life. The following paragraphs explain the nuances of economic and asylum migration. BODY Economic Migration The book International Migration: Trends, Policies and Economic Impact(Djajic, 2001) states that there are many illegal immigrants that have traveled from a far far away native land to try their fate looking for work in the United Kingdom and other European Countries. The Massive waves of traveling races and persons that have left their love ones to enter the borders of the European Union countries has now changed the demographic shape of Europe, Britain and the United States. There have been many comments about side with or side against the advantages and disadvantages of illegal entrants(Hatton, 1998) to the European Union and other industrialized countries. There have been comments about the influence that illegal immigrants have on war on terrorism. The fresh news about the horrors in New York City and Washington caught the United States by surprise. The Twin towers and a part of Washington had been attacked by immigrants living in the United states. These immigrants had studied how to drive the airplane and then they used this knowledge gained from the United States to hijack four airplanes. The two airplanes had hit and totally toppled the twin towers in the New York Skyline. At the same time, another hijacked plane rammed against a part of the Capitol where President George Bush holds office. A fourth plane that was hijacked had crash far from its target. News went around stating that the passengers were able to fight the hijackers thereby lessening the death toll to only the plane passengers. In the article International migration and economic development; lessons from low-income countries(Lucas, 2005) the international migration as well as the counterpart economic recovery brought by these illegal immigrants to their home country and the country the work for in violation of the immigration law divided into four major destinations First, working immigration(Knipe, 1996) occurs when Eastern Europe citizens travel to the rich and highly industrialized Western Europe to earn European dollars(Toro-Morn, 2004). The money is then funneled back into their own country to feed their families, sent them to schools and to be able to buy a car, a home and other personal assets. Second, people from the African maghreb have joined the Eastern Europeans to find work in Western Europe. Third, illegal and legal immigrants that work as contract workers in the Persian Gulf come from far away South Asia and also Southeast Asia(Glazier, 1986). Fourth, this is called the brain drain phenomenon.for people from the East and Southeast Asia travel to the United States to work as nurses, doctors, accountants, engineers and the like. Meanwhile, the article Migration and the dynamics of empire(Kurth, 2003) the 21st century is the time of empires. During the olden days, the empires are Britain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands. The empires were then identified as the Habsburg, Romanov and the Ottoman empires. Currently, many will claim that the only empire is the United States. Seemingly, all global events revolve around and is affected by the action and non action of the United States. Evidently, President George Bush of the United States disagreed with the United Nations not to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein for. In unison, the our current 21st century can also be identified as the era of immigration. More than one hundred years ago, the citizens of Europe, specifically Great Britain, left their homeland to stay permanently immigrate and live in their colonies like the United States. Also, at this time, many people had already left their rural hinterlands of the multinational states located in central Europe and eastern Europe in order to migrate to their metropolitan centers. Also, many preferred to travel to the United States. On the contrary, the direction today of imperial migration now focused on the reverse of the western pattern. A huge group of people have now changed their minds. Many the citizens who had immigrated to the colonies like the United States are now planning and even implementing a change of residence. They are now immigrating to their home county like Spain, Portugal, United Kingdom and others. Furthermore, many people at this same time have left the current colonies of the United States like Guam and the Marianas Islands to immigrate to the United States. For over a hundred years, the United States willingly accepted droves of immigrants form the European Union but it has not admitted into its shores the immigrants from the properties the have recently taken name the Philippines and the Carribbean islands. Currently, the United States is accepting immigrants from its empires in the Latin American and the East Asia and refused acceptance from the European Union countries. Naturally, due to the impact of imperial immigration, the United States has now been defined as a non national state in terms of in the classical sense, or even in the traditional American sense as understood during much of the 20th century. Evidently, the huge number of immigrants to the United States has now caused a stir whenever the American national interest is discussed. For, The United States has now huge communities divided according to their family. Definitely, the causal connection between the empire and immigration has been joined ceremoniously together to form the dynamic duo to literally change the demographic population of our world. The theories of empire and immigration are both innovating the traditional ideas of national interest and international politics and could displace them with the new ideas of transnational interests and global politics. These two theories of empire and immigration have now been intersected by a third powerful influence. This third influence is that the United States and the suicide terrorists It has been known that the Al-Qaeda and the other terrorist groups have also entered the equation immigration and empire equation to complicate the situation. The United States has been secretly but swiftly increasing the territory of its empire. And, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the most pronounced symbols of, respectively, the economic and the military power of the American empire. News reports say that the attacks on them had been hatched and prepared by Muslim immigrants living within Europe and the United States. However, the continuing threats of the terrorists have affected the laxity of the immigration process to the United States. The issue of immigration has now been affected by the terrorist attacks causing the tightening of the United States' security in all its entrance points. Consequently, the combination of empire, terrorism and migration has been scrutinized and studied well by the United States national security agency, Homeland security. Also, the Europeans termed the United States as the empire and its subordinate territories as colonies in terms of empire description. Furthermore, the closest colony the United States had aside from the European colonies is Asian's Philippines and also Puerto Rico. The United States took this countries from Spain in the United States - Spanish war. These two countries had been converted to commonwealth and later were granted their independence. The United States also had other colonies which include American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Panama Canal Zone. The article Europe tightens migration: critics say Europe's treatment of immigrants is damaging the relationship between the Mediterranean's north' and south.' Arabs are calling for observers to monitor abuses(Borowiec, 2002) stated that the United States war against Islamic terrorists is now a big stumbling block for the North Africans in their wish to migrate to the rich part Europe. Many governments are now decreasing the maximum number of migrants from the Arab countries. furthermore, immigrants that are currently in place in Western Europe have been socially ostracized and discriminated because of their religious belief. This runs smack against the law on discrimination due to religion. This was the topic discussed by the speakers for the assembled for the 13th International Symposium at Tunis, Tunisia. People have complained about the label of TERRORIST being attached to them. Some countries called for a more relaxed policy, while others deplored the "terrorist label" applied to Arabs after the Sept. 11 attacks. The report further stated that the immigration roads entering the Western countries appears to be threatened, there is danger of hurting the immigrants seeking work and freedom. There is also danger that the economies of the countries that receive them will be affected. The human consequence will result to producing lines create a new line of division, with countries of the Mediterranean's "south" asking for free access to the more affluent "north." But, Western Europe remains prepared to accept Arab immigrants, but within defined quotas. Happily, after the Tunis meeting the red Germany's ruling left-of-center/green coalition proposed to reform the laws to permit larger immigration (of "qualified" labor) to offset its falling birthrate. The scrutinized new law will "control immigration better than before, and also lessen reduce violations of the law on requests for asylum," said German Interior Minister Otto Schily. Further more, Germany has a large Muslim-immigrant population, that is estimated at more than 3 million, mainly from Turkey. Members of the conservative opposition argue that the immigrants from Muslim countries rarely assimilate into the predominantly Christian communities of the host countries and treat their stay in Europe as a temporary economic necessity. In addition, the European Union has signed association agreements with Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The agreements states that the need to combat illegal immigration by criminals seeking "to enrich themselves on the misery of others and by trafficking of the most odious kind," According to Christ Pattensaid Chris Patten, European commissioner in charge of external relations. In his address at the conference, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali described the right to migration as "a fundamental part of human rights" and "a factor of stability and cooperation on both shores of the Mediterranean." Stressing that immigration influences policies, cultures and markets, he hoped that "the recent events will not curtail the movement and cut the bridges between countries." To Noureddine Hached, assistant secretary-general of the 22-member Arab League, "migration has become a social issue, frequently causing misunderstandings." Pointing out that immigrants from the Maghreb, as North African countries are called, constitute a majority of all immigrants to Western Europe, he complained that many were losing their Arab identity. An estimated 2.35 million people from the Maghreb nations -- mainly from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco - have their homes in eleven European countries. But, This figure does not include those who have become naturalized citizens of the countries in which they now live, including some 500,000 in France. Hached claimed that xenophobia has been on the rise after the Sept. 11 attacks. Consequently, the Arab League has proposed an observer group to monitor the treatment of immigrants in Europe. "Free movement of goods should be accompanied by free movement of people," he said. Also, Hedi Mhenni,who had been a member for that a central-committee member of the RCD and a conference speaker, has filed a formal complaint that "by closing the door to legal immigrants" European governments are now enticing illegal immigration. Smuggling people into Europe has become a virtual industry, with many migrants paying fortunes to travel under hazardous conditions in search of a new life and economic opportunity. Many immigrants from Arab countries "are deprived of union membership, permanently threatened with deportation and rejected by the local population," added Mhenni, noting that 30 percent of North Africans living in Western Europe are unemployed. "Many immigrants live in fear and uncertainty," he said. "Their children are disoriented; they don't know where they belong." In the article Justice And Home Affairs : Canary Islands Immigrants Come For Work, Not Asylum(No author, 2006) over nine thousand immigrants have reached the Canary Islands every year in order to find work. They are called economic migrants. For, the illegal immigrants stated that they were willing to sacrifice staying away from the family in order to find work. These migrants were willing to leave home because they could not find work back home. They are willing gamble with the dangers of traveling in order in order to bring home the much needed money. Undoubtedly, the Canary Islands has been a usual destination point of migrants looking for work. For, the other places are Melilla, Ceuta, Malta and Lampedusa. And, in the article When do social networks fail to explain migration Accounting for the movement of Algerian asylum-seekers to the UK.(Collyer, 2005) This shows that many Algerians have family links to people living in France. Many Algerians continue to travel to France. Evidence from a many sources show that in the pre-industrial period, the population of England was highly on the move, even over short distances. However, much of this movement migration into the United Kingdom. the immigrants were usually adept at engineering works to help fill the needs for labour in the manufacturing, trading, and service sectors of the early urbanizing economies(Siddle, 2000). Also, the book seeks to give labour the potential for multiple source analysis when scrutinizing migration issues. It draws upon the findings of a recent research study seeking to explore 'The Liverpool Community and Urban Growth, 1660-1750'. 2 That investigation had hired employees using multiple record linkage to construct detailed biographies of individual townsfolk and to reconstruct their associations within the widest social and occupational base. Set against the results of the aggregate studies of Liverpool to date, 3. four detailed case histories will be presented to demonstrate migration and mobility characteristics at the experience level of the individual, and of the individual's interaction and connectivity with others. At the Restoration, it has been estimated that Liverpool had little more than 1,500 inhabitants. By the end of the seventeenth century, the population total had risen to approximately 5,000-5,500 and was to almost double in the first 20 years of the eighteenth century, and twice again to reach 20-22,000 by the late 1750s. 4 Analysis of parish register totals of baptisms and burials had revealed that natural increase throughout the period was often slight, and between the mid-1720s and mid-1740s almost negligible. Indeed, the cumulative surplus of baptisms over burials between 1660 and 1760 amounted to slightly less than 5,500. The book entitle Repatriates or Immigrants(Smith, 2003) stated that In an insightful and thorough review article dealing with various theories of international migration, Douglas Massey and several coauthors address the aspect of World Systems Theory that argues that the process of economic globalization has created advantageous cultural links between core capitalist countries and their hinterlands. In many instances, these links are long-standing, and are based on the bureaucratic structures built by core colonial powers in peripheral colonies. One consequence of these deep-rooted links is the movements of natives of the periphery to the capitalist core that occurred in the post-World War II, postcolonial period. These "natives" included not only those formerly colonized (for example, South Asian Indians who went to Britain or Moluccans who went to the Netherlands), but also the descendants of natives of the core born and residing in the periphery who were supposedly "repatriated." To this one might add, as Willems suggests in his chapter, a third group - the colonists who, although born and raised in the core, spent the remaining time of their life in the colonies. What are the effects of asylum seeking in Europe In the article Migrants and refugees: why draw a distinction(Riera, 2006), refugees from countries where wars were a daily routine are classified as immigrants. The 1951 convention clearly states that Refugees are unwillingly leaving their home country for fear of their life. The major reasons for applying for asylum(Wightman, 1990) is that the refugee has a reality based fear that he or she will be persecution on account of race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Also, for the past many years, the refugee identity has been broadened to include other people who have unwillingly been forced to run away from events that pose a serious threat to their life and liberty. However, refugees(Nam, 1990) differ from the ordinary immigrants because they escaped from their home country to ask for international aid in order for them to survive in another country. Also, in the article Europe's Unwelcome Guests : Resentment Against Immigrants, Even Those Seeking Asylum, Is At The Boi, Nation, The, May, 2002 This is the story of the fourteen year old stowaway from Eritrea. He keeps dialing numbers in his cell phone as he tries to look for work. He had left his home country because his parents were killed in a war in Ethiopia. He swam at night towards a Greek boat parking there at night. He then climbed into the boat without anyone noticing him. He planned to find work to pay for his studies. He is only one of many statistics in the asylum migration story. The article On the frontiers of a needy world: like most western Europe countries, Switzerland is seeing a rise in asylum applications, stated that one day an Iraqi man inside Switzerland stated that he had set up a busy income generating restaurant in Baghdad. His Mother and sister are United States citizens. Because he had contacted his two relatives in the United States, Iraq punished him with nine months behind bars. After his release, he paid a human smuggler four thousand United States dollars to secretly bring him to the west. He has against Saddam's regime, the war and the motives of the West. As remedy, he is staying now in Switzerland as an illegal immigrant. In fact, more than five hundred thousand people have sought ASYLUM(Massey, 2003) from the West. The reasons range from they were running from the enemy, they tried to escape persecution, and poverty as the best and most common reasons for people to run away from their own country and seek greener pastures in the West. The government of the United Kingdom has now reached one hundred thousand asylum seekers in 2002. Although, Switzerland's size is only twenty five percent of the one hundred thousand of Britain is not okay because Switzerland has a small territorial space as compared to London or the United Kingdom itself. As a result, Switzerland has the highest per capita asylum application rates in Europe As in Britain, many of the countries look at the asylum issue as a pancake for both are hot. Also, other countries look with disdain, fear and suspicion at persons who file for asylum(Schuster, 2003). Many people think of asylum seekers as crime perpetrators and drug dealers and users. This comment is reinforced when these asylum seekers live in rural communities. In a November referendum voting in Switzerland, the people voted against the asylum laws by 0.2 percent. If the asylum laws had been approved, the government would agree to shut down the entrance gates to Switzerland. Also, in the month of November, a referendum on tightening Switzerland's asylum laws was against by a margin of only 0.2 per cent. Had it been passed, stated the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the country would have decided to 'more or less shut its doors to people fleeing persecution'. In December the town of Meilen, near Zurich, hit the headlines with a proposal to bar asylum seekers from most public amenities and from parts of the city. After an outcry the plans were relaxed. In Switzerland, as in Britain, the voices of fear and reaction often drown out those of welcome and support--but the networks of volunteers across both countries testify that the louder voice is not telling the full story. Switzerland, after all, is a country that has a diversity of languages, where he knows that its four national languages and its largely self-governing cantons. In fact, Every third person in the city of Lausanne is not Swiss. And many who are now Swiss citizens grew up elsewhere--like my host and hostess, Tom and Brigitte Zilocchi, (he in Luxembourg, she in Germany). Also, in her job as the Protestant Church's liaison with refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in Vaud, Brigitte Zilocchi oversees a plethora of voluntary relief and befriending initiatives. For, ARAVOH, a group of seventy volunteers set up in 2000, when the Federal Government opened a reception centre for asylum seekers (CERA) in Vallorbe (population 3,000). Last year 11,000 asylum seekers passed through CERA, transforming this small town into a major interface between Switzerland and a needy world. The centre is one of four in Switzerland where asylum applicants are processed and given health checks before being sent to wait in a canton for the outcome of their cases. They remain at CERA for one to two weeks, receiving full board but no cash. They are allowed out into the town for a couple of hours in the morning and afternoon. Another Asylum seeker has met at the station by Christiane Mathys, a feisty grandmother. As they continued fighting their way through the wind and snow, she regales me with her run-ins with the town council over the funding of ARAVOH. The presence of CERA has been a challenge for a community where, not so long ago, a 'foreigner' was someone from France. There have been some thefts, though none of the major crimes or rapes that the locals feared. The asylum law seems to favor the male gender. This is what can be interpreted in the international law and the rules of international law. While the rules of international law (Indra, 1999)are commonly estimated to be abstract, objective, and gender-neutral, feminist jurisprudence has emerged over the past decade as a systematic critique of the practice and profession of law, with its central theme that law is an inherently gendered system reinforcing male domination. It has been argued that the impact of 'neutral' laws is not always equal and that laws based on men's lives do not effectively incorporate women's experience: "Asking the 'woman question' means examining how the law fails to take into account the experiences and values that seem more typical of women than of men, for whatever reason, or how existing legal standards and concepts might disadvantage women" ( Roach Anleu 1992; Romany 1993; Binion 1995). In this context, a feminist perspective, with its concern for gender as a central category of analysis and its commitment to equality between the sexes, provides a substantial challenge to the international asylum management. CONCLUSION: Economic migration is the migration of people from one part of the world to another in order to find a job. The person then sends the money he or she has earned back to the country of his nationality. Based on the above data, The book International Migration: Trends, Policies and Economic Impact(Djajic, 2001) states that there are many illegal immigrants that have traveled from a far far away native land to try their fate looking for work in the United Kingdom and other European Countries. The Massive waves of traveling races and persons that have left their love ones to enter the borders of the European Union countries has now changed the demographic shape of Europe, Britain and the United States. Economic migration is an economic necessity for the capitalist country can pay lower wages to the economic immigrant. In return the immigrant can send back his hard earned money to his family back home. The family then spends money in their home country thereby making the wheels of economics and business move on faster with the infusion of more money. In the article Migrants and refugees: why draw a distinction(Riera, 2006), refugees from countries where wars were a daily routine are classified as immigrants. The 1951 convention clearly states that Refugees are unwillingly leaving their home country for fear of their life. The major reasons for applying for asylum is that the refugee has a reality based fear that he or she will be persecution on account of race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Asylum migration is a necessary migration. The asylum migratory needs help from the other country in order to survive the rest of his life away from the dangers of the wars and dangers of living in his own country. REFERENCES: Djajic, S. International Migration: Trends, Policies and Economic Impact, Routledge, London, 2001 Lucas, R., International migration and economic development; lessons from low-income countries., Edward Elgar Publishing London, 2005 Riera, J., Migrants and refugees: why draw a distinction, UN Chronicle, Dec, 2006 bJose Riera Kurth, J., Migration and the dynamics of empire, National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 Borowiec, A., Europe tightens migration: critics say Europe's treatment of immigrants is damaging the relationship between the Mediterranean's north' and south.' 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Knipe et al., Crossing Borders: Migration, Ethnicity, and AIDS, Taylor & Francis, London, 1996 Read More