Debunking these myths can be hard work. Hatred and passions overtake rational approaches and documented facts get swept away. It is even harder when Europe’s long history of almost constant population movement and mixing of cultures is ignored, untaught or forgotten. For example, it’s often said that the arrival of Arabs and Muslims in France started when post-second world war reconstruction efforts required a new labour force, or after Algeria became independent in 1962. Yet Algerians (especially from Kabylie) have been in France for at least a century. The French historian Benjamin Stora says the real challenge of immigration is “the challenge of knowing the other” – and it goes both ways.
The 2015 refugee crisis has held up a mirror to Europeans: it’s forced them to ask themselves who they are, how they define themselves and their actions. The 1.3 million people who reached the continent last year represented only 0.2% of the EU’s total population. It should have been manageable. Germany alone took in roughly 800,000. That’s equivalent to 1% of its own population, and is the same number it absorbed in 1992 when people fled the Balkan wars and ethnic Germans left the former Soviet Union.
If there was a crisis in 2015, it had less to do with the refugees – who knew what they were fleeing and where they wanted to go – and much more to do more with European governments and societies who did not all step up to the plate. In fact, Europe isn’t confronted with a refugee and migrant crisis. It’s the refugees and migrants who are confronted with a crisis of Europe. The scandal is that, in the Mediterranean, they have been paying with their lives.
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