A clean-shaven rightwing version of German anti-refugee xenophobia

Author Ruud Koopmans in his new book Die Asly-Lotterie (The Asylum Lottery)¹ offers a clean-shaven version of common and often dishonestly employed scare arguments against refugees.

Xenophobes often describe refugees as “illegal immigrants” or “migrants,” the latter implying that they just decided to wander into Europe more-or-less on a whim. The arguments that Koopmans attempts to advance against refugees to Europe in a “respectable” way include:

1. Employers want to use them to take away your jobs and lower your wages. This argument is at least as frivolous in Europe as it is in the US.

2. They don’t “integrate” well. (It’s their own fault if they don’t fit in, even though we Respectable People hate them and consider them disgusting for just existing.)

3. They are welfare loafers. (The perennial favorite racist trope against minorities in the US.)

4. Muslim terrorists! Muslim terrorists! Muslim terrorist groups do operate in Europe. Effectively combatting them would be greatly helped by European governments building trust among Muslim communities instead of, you know, demonizing all Muslims. (Terrorism in Europe is also not limited to Muslims.² I’m just sayin’. )

5. Criminal foreigners! Any time someone presents figures they claim to show the criminal inclinations of a hated group, their claims deserve careful scrutiny. Unless you’re just fond of the ritual of getting drunk with your buddies and somebody throwing out some story that may or may not be true so that everybody can then starting bitching about, “Criminal foreigners! They should be deported!!” Sober people actually trying to understand statistics like those presented in Koopmans’ Chapter 5 would want to know, for instance, whether the statistics show convictions or “refugees suspected” or some other category. And since refugees and asylum seekers may be afraid to report crimes to the local officials, the percentages of “refugee crimes against native citizens” may well be inflated.

That fifth chapter, titled “Victims and Perpetrators,” which is devoted to that latter category is probably meant to be the core of the argument (polemic is more like it). The “perpetrators” here are, of course, the Evil Foreigners and the victims are good native Germans. For convenience in plucking out themes for Stammtisch (Good Ole Boy) grumbling, the chapter includes subheads of “Refugees and Criminality”; “Suspects, Behavior of Those Reporting Crimes, and Convictions”; “Overrepresentation of Refugees in the Crime Statistics”; “The Role of Protected Status and the Country of Origin”; “Murder and Homicide”; and, “Sexual Violence.”

On the last item: Just as accusations of rape against Black men in the US have always been a racist theme and all too often a justification for lynch-murder, stories of rape (true or false) by immigrants/refugees against German (or other “white” European) women play a particular role in hate propaganda against refugees and immigrants.

I don’t have a lot of patience with people making racist or nationalist demagoguery around rape. Rape is a serious crime and deserves to be taken seriously for what it is, not used for sleazy hate slogans. The readers can judge for themselves to which category Koopmans’ presentation on the topic belongs.

Koopmans’ recommendations for solutions are basically just another version of the usual conservative blather, which winds up being endlessly rehashed versions of, Secure the borders! Deport asylum-seekers! The people-smugglers/human traffickers are the real problem! Pay some other country to take them! Or maybe just let them drown in the Mediterranean Sea!

He makes a pitch for one of the xenophobes’ favorite tropes, the “Australian solution.” The actual Australian policy is gruesome and brutal enough. But the European xenophobes’ version of it comes basically down to: Send the *!*&7%*$! refugees to some island and let them rot! Especially in Germany and Austria, the “Australian solution” has strong historical echoes of the “Madagascar Plan.”³ Koopmans praises Britain’s criminal idea of sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda as a praise-worthy (from his perspective) example of that approach.

Reviewing Koopmans’ book, Ludger Pries observes diplomatically, “The book contains many strong claims that are not backed up by empirical evidence and precise academic work.”⁴

A lot of it is full of crap, in other words.

However, political demagoguery based on race or petty-nationalism or religious bigotry or pseudoscience is driven by a toxic combination of emotion, falsehoods, and half-truths. Facts matter in refuting and defusing it. But for that to work, the facts also have to be presented in a way that at least defuses the demagogic packaging.

The anti-refugee issue has been helpful to the far-right parties like Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD). To a significant extent, that is a reflection of the fact that mainstream and left parties often do a poor job of directly countering false claims about refugees and immigrants. And when extremist anti-immigrant claims gain currency as true, those claims then become a gateway drug to other absurd and fanatical claims: “compounding the problem of accepting any one type of unsubstantiated claim is the fact that people who accept one type also tend to accept other types more—thus potentially greatly increasing the risk of negative consequences.”⁵

Pries elaborates on Koopmans’ book:

There are various proclamations regarding frequency of events, but no method for calculating measures of correlation appropriate to the subject. It also gives one pause that the state of scientific research on the subject is used only selectively and in a very limited way. The book is neither a differentiated "ruthless balance" nor does it provide a "captivating proposal".

Koopmans’ citations of the Austrian immigration expert Gerald Knaus on the subject of refugees being sent to “third states,” for instance, could leave the impression that Knaus puts greater confidence in this as a general solution than Knaus’ own frequent public positions on the subject would indicate. For instance, Knaus has been very critical of the possibilities of the agreement the EU concluded in July with Tunesia, for instance, which he sees as seriously inadequate and not adequately protect the safety of refugees.⁶ (So far, the Tunesia agreement has been mainly a public-relations stunt.)

What about all those Ukrainian refugees?

Koopmans does provide some information on a distinct political oddity, the lack of significant political backlash from far-right groups against Ukrainian refugees. Before I read it, I was hoping it might provide some insight into why so far, the far right groups are not agitating against Ukrainian refugees, even though in the first year after the February 2022 invasion, the EU countries received up to five times as many Ukrainian refugees as the 1.1 million that came into the EU in the first year of the 2015-16 refugee influx, which was and still is described as a crisis.⁷

For anyone who stops to think about the comparison, it would raise the obvious question of why anyone can call 2015-16 a “crisis” at all after the lack of any comparable hysteria in 2022-3 over Ukrainians.

Koopmans’ treatment of this subject is a fairly repulsive repetition of various xenophobic arguments. He defends (white) Europeans against the suspicion that Ukrainians are considered “good” refugees in comparison to “bad” refugees because of white racism. But then he goes on to basically argue - in a “highbrow” way, of course! - that people in the EU were more receptive to Ukrainians because they are white and that that makes total sense. Thoug he notes that there “is no justification for racism.” We’re trying to keep tings respectable-sounding, after all!

While white racism is certainly plausible as a partial explanation, there is no shortage of ethnic narratives in western Europe against eastern Europeans. After all, the Nazis had a plan to treat (non-Jewish) Ukrainians as basically a slave race. With plenty of spurious propaganda arguments to support the plan.

In the Reichskommissariat [Ukraine], ruthlessly administered by Erich Koch, Ukrainians were slated for servitude. The collective farms, whose dissolution was the fervent hope of the peasantry, were left intact, industry was allowed to deteriorate, and the cities were deprived of foodstuffs as all available resources were directed to support the German war effort. Some 2.2 million people were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave labourers (Ostarbeiter, or “eastern workers”). Cultural activities were repressed, and education was limited to the elementary level. Only the revived Ukrainian Orthodox Church was permitted to resume its work as a national institution. Somewhat better was the situation of Ukrainians in Galicia, where restricted cultural, civic, and relief activities were permitted under centralized control. [my emphasis]⁸

Ideas of the racial inferiority of Ukrainians may not be uppermost in the minds of most Europeans. But among the far-right groups that drive anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe generally, they are far more familiar.

I hate to promote the bad habit of attributing superpowers to Russian propaganda. But it’s hard not to imagine that part of the reason for the lack of anti-Ukrainian-refugee agitation is that the far right’s idol Putin isn’t promoting it yet. Russian officials may consider it desirable in the current phase of the war to not throw up an political hinderances to Ukrainians leaving the country.

It’s also the case that the EU actually pursued a smart and humane policy on Ukrainian refugees since the 2022 Russian invasion. (The EU does manage to do some things right occasionally!) Ukrainians were already allowed to travel in the EU visa-free for three months, so crossing the border to the EU didn’t make them instantly “illegal immigrants.”

The EU also invoked an EU emergency measure that designates Ukrainians refugees with the legal category of “displaced persons” and allows them to immediately be allowed to work in their new countries of residence and to receive benefits without having to go through a lengthy asylum applications process. The emergency designation is currently extended to March 4, 2024.⁹

Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of NATO, said in an interview that appeared Sunday, “we must prepare ourselves for a long war in Ukraine.” ¹⁰ Among other things, that means it is quite unlikely that a large portion of the millions of Ukrainian refugees currently in the EU will be able to return to Ukraine in March 2024.

Here is Koopmans himself¹¹:

1. Koopmans, Ruud (2023): Die Asly-Lotterie.Eine Bilanz der Flüchlingspolitik von 2015 bis zum Ukraine-Krieg. München: C.H. Beck.

2. Aljazeera (2020): Austrian police seize weapons intended for German far right 12/12/2020. <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/12/austrian-police-seize-weapons-intended-for-german-far-right> (Accessed: 2023-46-09). “The Austrian police have seized a huge cache of automatic weapons, explosives and hand grenades intended to arm far-right ‘extremist’ groups in Germany.“

Lister, Tim (2021): What a staggering gun cache discovered in one suspected neo-Nazi’s house says about far-right extremism in Europe., CNN 11/17/2021. <https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/17/europe/austria-far-right-extremism-intl/index.html> (Accessed: 2023-16-09). “In a raid on a house in the town of Baden, [Austrian police] found an arsenal of weapons and 1,200 kilograms of ammunition – as well as Nazi paraphernalia and a large amount of gunpowder.”

BBC News (2023): Bell, Bethany & Armstrong, Kathryn (2023): Drugs and guns seized from extreme-right Austrian biker gangs. BBC News 06/29/2023. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66059738> (Accessed: 2023-16-09). “Among the weapons seized were "35 long firearms, 25 sub-machine guns, 100 pistols, over a thousand weapons components, 400 signal weapons", according to the interior ministry. Grenade launchers and more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition were also recovered.”

But: Look! Over there! Scary Muslims, scary Muslims!

3. Madagascar Plan. Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center, n/d. <https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206635.pdf> (Accessed: 2023-17-09).

4. Pries, Ludger (2023): Weder Bilanz noch Vorschlag. Soziopolis 06.06.2023. <https://www.soziopolis.de/weder-bilanz-noch-vorschlag.html> (Accessed: 2023-16-09). My translation from the German.

5. Bensley, D. Alan & Watkins, Cody T. (2023): Who Believes Unsubstantiated Claims? Skeptical Inquirer 47:5, 31-34.

6. Migrationsdeal mit Tunesien "in jeder Hinsicht gescheitert". Plus 24 (Austria) 01.09.2023. <https://www.puls24.at/news/politik/migrationsdeal-mit-tunesien-in-jeder-hinsicht-gescheitert-so-gerald-knaus/306786> (Accessing: 2023-17-09).

„Sicher eine Krise der Europäischen Union“. ZDF Heute Journal 17.09.2023. <https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/heute-journal/fluechtlinge-migrationsforscher-krise-100.html> (Accessed: 2023-18-09). In this interview, Knaus’ perspective certainly seems far removed from the tone and quality of Koopmans’ analysis: to Knaus’ credit!

7. The UN posts statistics on Ukrainian refugees, which also require some close reading of border crossings to and from Ukraine.

Ukrainie Situation Flash Update #55. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 09/15/2023. <https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/103483> (Accessed: 2023-20-09).

Operational Data Portal: Ukrainian Refuege Situation. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) n/d. <https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine> (Accessed: 2023-20-09). This site is not dated but does show dates for the statistics given.

8. The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine. In: Lubomyr, A. Hajda, Ukraine. Britannica Online 09/18/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/The-Nazi-occupation-of-Soviet-Ukraine> (Accessed: 2023-18-09).

9. Update on long-term policy for refugees from Ukraine. Government of the Netherlands 16.12.2022. <https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2022/12/16/update-on-long-term-policy-for-refugees-from-ukraine> (Accessed: 2023-18-09).

10. Cater, Leaonie (2023): NATO chief warns Ukraine allies to prepare for ‘long war’. Politico EU 09/17/2023. <https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-chief-jens-stoltenberg-warns-ukraine-allies-to-prepare-for-long-war/> (Accessed: 2023-18-09).

11. Die Asyllotterie: Was schiefläuft in der Flüchtlingspolitik. FFGI: Frankfurter Forschungszentrum Globaler Islam YouTube channel 07/03/2023. (Accessed: 2023-18-09).