No Melting Pot : Europe Busy Closing Door to Foreigners

They come at night, braving the treacherous strait in leaky 20-foot fishing boats called pateras .

Paying up to $1,700 for the nine-mile illegal crossing to Europe’s southernmost tip, many Moroccans ante up their life savings, gambling on a brighter future in a land rich beyond their dreams.

Occasionally, winds and currents in the Strait of Gibraltar swamp the overloaded boats, tipping their human cargoes into the sea and almost-certain death.

Occasionally, the Moroccans are caught by Spanish authorities and returned.

Networks of Smugglers

But with luck, they reach the shadowy networks that smuggle them to Madrid, to the French border and to menial black market jobs in the inner cities of northern Europe.

Algeciras Police Chief Javier Fernandez calls them espaldas mojadas-- literally, those with wet backs--and says it is almost impossible to stop them completely.

“The coast is too wide and we are too few,” he said, shrugging.

Their numbers--hundreds each week, according to most estimates--are small compared to the 850,000 Mexicans caught attempting to cross illegally into the United States last year.

But for a continent where people already feel overwhelmed by a rising tide of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, they add a worrisome dimension to a serious problem.

A Multicultural Europe

Western Europe’s social democracies are only now digesting the sobering fact that most of the estimated 10 million to 15 million foreigners among them are no longer foreigners but part of a new multicultural, multiracial, multireligious Europe.

The presence of these outsiders, the majority of whom arrived legally and by invitation, represents one of the most fundamental and deep-seated social changes in Europe since World War II.

Certainly Europe is accustomed to immigrants and refugees. Its catalogue of wars, revolutions and persecutions has seen to that. But the resettlement of large numbers of non-Europeans is a new and unsettling phenomenon.

Consider, for example, that:

-- By 1995, every second child born in Brussels, the self-proclaimed capital of Europe, will be Arab.

-- Twice as many Britons speak Urdu, Punjabi or Gujarati as Welsh, the native language of Wales.

-- In France, an estimated 700,000 Arabs will be eligible to vote in the next presidential election, a number nearly twice as large as the margin that separated the candidates in the 1974 presidential election.

-- In West Berlin, three of the city’s television stations now broadcast in Turkish.

-- In Spain, road signs have appeared in Arabic to ease confusion among the estimated three-quarters of a million Moroccans who cross the country every summer on vacation trips from cities to the north.

For a part of the world whose principal experience with non-Christians has been in religious wars and colonial exploitation, the ramifications of this population shift are considerable--and occasionally disquieting.

Protests surrounding Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” the death threat against Rushdie by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the subsequent assassination of a leading Muslim clergyman in Brussels sent shock waves across the Continent.

“The Rushdie affair,” Britain’s Home Secretary Timothy Renton commented in an interview, “is a new dimension for a lot of people who haven’t really thought about . . . the idea that a distant prophet, a religious leader, can lay down a fiat, a law that Muslims throughout Europe can take as a binding commandment. . . .”

Aside from adding to social tension, what West Europeans call “the foreigners issue” has complicated European attempts at unity, tilted the political equation in several countries, raised questions about the future role of the Continent’s generous but hard-pressed welfare states, influenced demographic trends and begun to change the way Western Europe views itself as a society.

Rooted in Economic Boom

Paradoxically, Europe’s problem is rooted in its post-World War II economic recovery. To ease crippling manpower shortages that threatened to strangle the boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, governments and large corporations recruited cheap, unskilled labor abroad.

With the lure of a quick fortune, Turkish “guest workers” arrived to sweep streets of Geneva or build Volvos in Goteborg, Sweden, at wage levels they had only dreamed of. Moroccans and Tunisians came to dig coal in French Lorraine or stoke the coking ovens of West Germany’s Ruhr region.

Leaders of Britain’s textile industry, in order to remain competitive, did not buy costly machines but recruited cheap Pakistani labor to work the old ones. Jamaicans answered ads in Kingston newspapers and took jobs driving London’s buses, trains and subways.

In more recent years, large numbers of illegal laborers, mainly from North Africa, slipped into Spain and Italy and found work picking grapes and in construction.

Influx From ‘Colonies’

Adding to the influx, war and unrest in formerly colonial areas brought in hundreds of thousands of additional refugees in the 1960s and early 1970s.

By the time the oil crisis pitched Europe into recession in the mid-1970s, many guest workers had established roots, brought wives and started families.

Gradually, dreams of going home began to fade. And only then did the long-term implications of Europe’s massive recruitment begin to dawn on its policy-makers.

Today, in an atmosphere where individual countries are desperately trying to close their doors to more outsiders, “the foreigners issue” has complicated European Community efforts to dismantle by 1992 the checkpoints on borders dividing its member nations.

“There are few issues in Europe more challenging,” said C. D. de Jong, a senior official in the Dutch Ministry of Justice. “We’re doing a lot of thinking.”

So are many others. Right-wing parties that appeal to anti-immigrant sympathies have sprouted in several countries, including West Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Belgium.

In recent West Berlin municipal elections, a party headed by a former member of the Nazi SS shocked political observers by taking advantage of an anti-immigrant backlash and winning 7% of the vote, enough to topple a coalition headed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats.

A few weeks later, an election in Frankfurt produced a similar result.

In a country that recently coined the word ueberfremdung , which means “overwhelmed by foreigners,” the same issue could decide who will be chancellor after next year’s national elections.

Extreme Right Reacts

In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front revived the country’s extreme right with the simple message that France’s 5 million residents of foreign origin must either become completely assimilated or go.

Le Pen collected more than 4 million votes in last year’s presidential election on that theme, and from his hillside chateau on the western outskirts of Paris, he recently launched, with the same idea, his party’s campaign for June’s European Parliament elections.

“The call for Europe is to defend the historic, ethnic, cultural and spiritual identity of the European people,” he declared.

The idea that 350 million West Europeans could feel overwhelmed by a minority population representing barely 4% of their total number seems a puzzling overreaction. Ethnic and racial minorities make up roughly five times that percentage of the U.S. population.

Explosive Combination

But in Europe, the concentration of minorities in large urban areas, together with intense competition for social services and jobs, makes for a potentially volatile political cocktail.

In a region where indigenous populations have begun declining, high birthrates among minorities inject additional fears of being overwhelmed.

“Europe is subjected to a threat from the demographics of the Third World and Islamic expansionism,” Le Pen said.

But most important, Europe, unlike the United States, has developed no melting pot to immerse new arrivals in its culture. Its instinct has been to isolate rather than absorb new minorities.

Citizenship Strictures

In some instances, access to citizenship in Europe has been tightened. Official discrimination is often demoralizing.

A West German-born son of Turkish parents living in the country for 20 years may yearn to be like his peers, but he has no automatic right to citizenship, and his special “foreigner status” prevents him, among other things, from becoming a public servant, a doctor, a pharmacist, a policeman or even a railroad locomotive driver.

“Second-generation youngsters want to be the same as German kids--study, play and dream of a future, but everywhere there are limits,” said Barbara John, who runs an immigrant assistance office for the West Berlin city government. “If we don’t open up and become more flexible, there’s a danger of real difficulties.”

Immigration Cut Sharply

Except for family unification, European governments have virtually ended immigration from Third World countries. (Immigration from Eastern Europe, however, has increased sharply amid a more relaxed East-West climate, with about 200,000 East Europeans arriving to resettle in West Germany alone last year.) Authorities also scrutinize refugees and political asylum-seekers from outside Europe far more closely than in the past.

In most countries, acceptance rates for political asylum-seekers have dropped from between 80% and 90% in the mid-1970s to around 10% today. Some refugee aid groups fear that tough new European Community proposals could effectively shut the door completely.

People dealing with caseloads say the shift reflects not so much a hardening of criteria as a new breed of applicant--one not fleeing political persecution but seeking a better life style.

But they admit that the public mood also plays a role.

“It is a fact of life that (our) society wants us to say no,” said De Jong, the Dutch Justice Ministry official.

Strengthening Frontiers

As the European Community’s 12 member states work to dismantle their internal frontiers, the debate centers on how--not whether--to strengthen the Community’s frontiers with the rest of the world.

In the corridors at EC headquarters in Brussels, immigrants are a problem usually lumped together with drug-runners and terrorists on the list of headaches. Visa requirements have already been tightened, making visits by foreigners’ families more difficult to achieve.

In Madrid, Spanish officials talk of a new coast guard service to crack down on illegal immigrants. They say that beginning next year Moroccans entering Spain legally will be required to have visas, return tickets and minimum funds for their European stay. Some predict that this will bring chaos.

“We’re under a lot of pressure from the other (EC) countries to resolve this,” said Aquilino Gonzalez, a senior official in the Spanish Interior Ministry. “If the door is open in one of the 12, it’s open in all 12.”

Second-Class Rights

For foreigners already resident here, the discussions have raised the prospect that they will find themselves with a form of second-class rights in a post-1992, border-free Europe.

At present, an Algerian legally a resident in France has as much access to the French job market as his French counterpart, but if present EC thinking prevails, he could be blocked from joining his French counterpart on a transfer to work in Britain.

“What 1992 represents is a transformation of nationalism into a white continentalism, altogether more tight, resilient and with more power,” said Christopher Mullard, a professor at the University of Amsterdam.

When Europe sent out a call for guest workers in the 1950s and 1960s, “no one placed any limits on the residence of those recruited,” noted Lutz R. Voss, a senior official in the West Berlin Internal Affairs Department. “People just assumed the guest workers would return (home) after a few years, so officials didn’t even think along those lines.”

They do now.

With Western Europe struggling as hard today against unemployment as it once did to recruit labor, several governments have offered lucrative incentives to persuade these workers to go home.

Return Fare Offered

The Netherlands has even offered to pay the return fare for unemployed immigrants, then send them Dutch social security benefits once they get there.

Some have gone, but far more have stayed.

In Britain and, to a lesser extent, France, social tensions have boiled over into street violence. Bitter riots in London and some northern English cities earlier in this decade shocked British authorities into drawing up one of the Continent’s few race-relations programs.

In most countries, however, community relations are characterized more by mutual suspicion, subtle discrimination and low-grade hostility.

Bitter Reaction

“Once we were well-liked; we helped build the ‘economic miracle,’ ” recalled Serdar Yilmaz, a 26-year-old Turkish-born travel agent who, as a child, followed his father to West Berlin 20 years ago. “Now, people see there are 2 million unemployed and 4 million foreigners and say, ‘Just ship ‘em home.’ ”

Azeddine Guessous, Morocco’s ambassador to Spain, said: “These countries came to recruit workers for their boom and recovery, but the moment there are problems, the first victims are those who contributed most. We don’t think it’s just.”

But any serious discussion of repatriating Europe’s foreigners has long since been overtaken by the fact that to an increasing extent they are no longer foreign.

French sociologist Juliette Minces estimates that at least 60% of the people with North African roots living in France and widely viewed as immigrants, are, in fact, French-born.

Feel They Belong

“They feel this is where they belong,” she said.

In Britain, roughly half the nonwhite population was born in the British Isles, and two-thirds of West Germany’s 1.5 million Turks are under 16.

But for Europe’s new minorities, there are also some reasons for optimism.

Nonwhites now appear in British television ads, an important development, according to civil rights groups, because many rural Britons have had no contact at all with minorities.

In Britain and France, where an earlier, more liberal attitude provided generations of colonials with citizenship, minority groups have created voting muscle.

In Britain’s 1987 general election, four nonwhite candidates, including the first black woman, won seats in the House of Commons; while in France, second-generation North Africans, called Beurs, achieved a major success by winning more than 500 of the 36,000 seats in municipal elections last year.

Breakthrough in France

“It is an important breakthrough,” said Arezki Dahmani, president of France Plus, an immigrant-rights organization. “It means France has accepted our permanence.”

Such public figures also provide important role models for a generation bereft of cultural signposts. Some have even had the temerity to suggest that their heritage has something to offer Europe.

In an interview with French television, Koshi Yamgnage, a Togo-born engineer recently elected mayor of the small Breton village of St. Coulitz, explained why he consulted so many residents before making decisions that other politicians might make on their own.

“For me, it’s not possible to take an important decision without consulting the people,” he said. “It comes from my African culture.”

Times researcher Christine Courtney contributed to this article.