All Decry System of Illegal Workers, While All Use It

Every day in Europe, from a shady square in the Spanish Canary Islands off the African coast to a muddy street on the outskirts of Warsaw, from the humming Channel ports of Calais and Dover to a mountain town in the Swiss lakes, would-be illegal immigrants in the tens of thousands gather for yet another battle of wits and will with the authorities.

It can be as innocent as asking for a job picking strawberries at a few pennies a basket to negotiating a price with a smuggler for crossing a border in a crowded truck or leaky boat. There are those who come from halfway around the world to sweat 12 hours a day washing dishes in London’s Chinatown, and those who use their maternity leave to earn untaxed money while their mothers watch their babies. It is all in the service of finding something a bit better: a cell phone, a car, schooling for children, a brace for a withered leg.

Sometimes there is a tragedy, as there was Monday in Dover, when British immigration officers opened a big, white Mercedes truck from the Netherlands and found 58 Chinese illegal immigrants suffocated in a container, among the tomatoes the truck was transporting. The truck belonged to a company that had been approved for European Union freight operations just three days before, and apparently the novice driver had forgotten to turn on the cooling system.

After such tragedies, there are invariably investigations, speeches of regret by politicians, demands for reform of the immigration laws, calls for harsh punishment of the smugglers. The next day, in those same leafy squares and muddy roads, hopeful migrants gather again, waiting their chance. The same employers looking for cheap labor are there, the same consumers looking for cheaper goods are there and the same poor countries supporting their finances with the hard currency sent back by illegals are there. It might be permitted to wonder whether anyone really wants the system to stop.

Globalization might be a more powerful force in 2000 than compassion. A specialist in migration, Professor Emmanuel Terray of the Graduate School of Social Sciences in Paris, suggested, in the newspaper Liberation, that the tears shed in the First World for the Third World after the 58 bodies were discovered in Dover were crocodile tears. He noted the experience of France, which in 1975 announced a policy of cracking down on illegal immigration in the interest of providing opportunities for legal migrants. In fact, the professor said, the number of illegals in France seems to have remained steady at 250,000-400,000. In 1981 and again in 1997, France announced amnesties so that illegals could get legal residence. In both years, about 180,000 people responded, indicating that in between the crackdowns had done no good. Since the illegals come to work, and since someone is employing them, the economy must be using their labor, the professor argued.

Nor does there seem to be any abating of the traffic in illegals. A few hours after the horror in Dover, 36 laborers--32 Moroccans and four Algerians--were found jammed into a truck in southern Spain, on their way to agricultural work. They had not eaten in four days and were considered lucky to be arrested, because they might easily have died. A few hours after that, police in southern England stopped a Belgian truck and found nine Iranians inside, all clients of smugglers.

The questions surrounding immigration, in both Europe and the United States, are as full of contradictions as any in politics. The United States, in its mythology “a nation of immigrants,” in fact gave preference in its immigration policy through much of the 20th century to white people from northern Europe, with southern European people allowed some access and the rest of the world subjected to strict quotas. The Justice Department estimates there are 5 million illegal immigrants in the United States now, attracted by jobs that are low-paying to U.S. workers but high-paying to them.

Europe’s problems are complicated by applicants for political asylum. Once inside a country illegally, asylum-seekers can apply for protection and are free to work, with support by the state, until their cases are decided. Countries with liberal asylum laws, such as Germany, Britain and Switzerland, are magnets for illegal immigrants from poor countries who sneak in and then hope to hang on as their asylum requests creep through the courts.

Countries such as Spain are in the midst of even wider contradictions. Spain has a low rate of legal immigration--less than 2% of the population are immigrants--but there is great need for agricultural labor because Spanish agriculture has become industrialized in the last 20 years and Spain is a leading supplier of fruits and vegetables to the countries of the European Union. Spanish farmers thus use illegal labor while unskilled Spanish citizens travel to other European countries, such as Switzerland, to work legally for higher wages.

Immigration in all its legal and illegal manifestations is one of the driving forces of European politics. The rise of the far right to positions of power in a number of countries--the Freedom Party of Joerg Haider in Austria, the Democratic Union of the Center in Switzerland, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the National Front in France--has been based, in part, on anti-immigrant policies. While making populist appeals to national identity and order, it is the presence of foreigners--particularly illegal foreigners--in their midst that they decry the loudest. It is this issue that confirms these far-right parties’ appeal to an increasing proportion of voters--and it is also the issue that mainstream parties refuse to address in any realistic way. *