Europe Germany And The Migrant Crisis

The migrant crisis has a solid grip on Europe. For months it’s been in the forefront of news accounts. As 2015 comes to a close, it’s apparent that the challenges and problems this situation poses for the EU are only the beginning. The continent faces ever greater numbers of people fleeing the third-world. The reasons are many, the problems they bring with them too. If allowed to go unchecked, they could prove to be insurmountable. The essay encompasses many facts and figures, some scarcely known to the general public, even to those who are forced to live through the largest waves of human migration seen in this part of the world since WWII.

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 2,0, College of Europe (Department for European and Governance Studies), language: English, abstract: In the years 2015 and 2016, the European Union (EU) and (some of) its member states were facing a very high number of asylum-seekers. This inflow revealed the shortcomings and dysfunctionalities of the European asylum system and plunged the EU into one of its biggest crises: Member states could hardly agree on common measures, and different national preferences for dealing with asylum-seekers led to profound and ongoing political divisions. Germany, which particularly was affected by the inflow, sought to ‘europeanize’ the phenomenon and to distribute the loads more evenly across the EU – but met major resistance. Contrarily to the widely held view – both in the academic literature and the European public – that Germany, in recent years, has shaped and even dominated European politics, it largely failed with its main policy proposals in the refugee and migrant crisis. To uncover the reasons, the present thesis applies an analytical model of ‘political leadership’. Based on current academic research, relevant newspaper articles and self-conducted expert interviews, it is argued that there might have been supply but not sufficient demand for successful German political leadership. In doing so, this thesis so far is the only larger academic paper that explicitly links the latest research on political leadership with Germany's role in the EU's refugee and migrant crisis.

For a long time migration to Europe has been a subordinate issue on the public agenda. But with the recent wave of refugees from Arab and African countries, the question of how the EU, national governments and societies are able to cope with the arrival of millions of migrants, has become a core theme of public discourse. This volume displays the debates for the countries which are on the migration routes or which are among the most desired targets, hence are the most affected. The book thus attempts to give a broader European perspective on the migrant crisis and its public repercussions. (Series: Studies in Political Communication / Studien zur politischen Kommunikation, Vol. 13) [Subject: Migration Studies, Politics, European Studies]

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,7, University of Applied Sciences Essen, language: English, abstract: The problem of this term paper is the same which millions of Europeans discuss daily, does the refugee crisis create more advantages or more disadvantages? Does it entail risks or does it bring more opportunities than expected? This paper is intended to give a picture of migration in Europe and to show that migration is a widespread and strategic component of the industrialization history of Europe over the last 300 years. Starting with the migration of workers from Westphalia to Amsterdam in the 18th century or the migration of Italian workers to German railway and urban con-struction in the 19th century. Migrant workers who came to Paris and German Jews who fled to neighboring countries as far as the USA. It is intended to show how history can contribute to seeing today's refugee and immigration policy in a different light and to correcting the notion that Europe is not a continent of immigration. There will not be a comprehensive overview of individual events, but rather a focus on how migrations arise, happen and end. How they give host countries the chance to develop, but also the risks involved in receiving and caring for refugees. The focus of this work will be on the flow of refugees from 2015 to 2018.

This edited book examines the experience of small states in Europe during the 2015–2016 migration crisis. The contributions highlight the challenges small states and the European Union faced in addressing the massive irregular flow of migrants and refugees into Europe and the Schengen Area. Small states adopted a number of coping strategies and proved relatively effective in navigating the storm they faced. Externally they pursued strategies of shelter-seeking, hiding, hedging and norm entrepreneurship, while domestically they tended to securitize migration and to pursue scapegoating by blaming the EU and other states for the nature and magnitude of the crisis. During this crisis management, their small administrations proved resilient and flexible in their responses, despite suffering from limited resources and being subject to the shifting preferences of stronger actors. This book shows that independent of whether we view the migration crisis as a crisis for the European Union or Europe as a whole, or how we interpret the intensity and severity of the crisis, this was a crisis for small states in Europe. The crisis disrupted the liberal and institutionalized order upon which small states in the region had increasingly based their policies and influence for more than 60 years.

Since 2014, more than 60 million people have been displaced from their homes across the Middle East and Africa. The European Refugee Crisis, as it has come to be known, is now the largest such crisis since the aftermath of World War II. How have local communities reacted to the influx of asylum seekers? And what can we learn from their responses? Frances Trix here offers a wide-ranging ethnographical and anthropological study of local, individual responses to refugees, from Macedonia to Germany. Based on extensive interviews and field work in Europe, Trix focuses for the first time on the ways that refugees have been welcomed – or not, as the case may be – by various individuals and communities. Her work ranges from Macedonians who established an NGO and lobbied to allow the refugees to use the train, to the police charged with border management; from a German organic food store owner who by her actions set the positive tone in her village, a retired IT manager who coordinates refugee volunteers for his entire town, to the district work organisation director who deems refugees unsuitable for multiple reasons. The material is measured throughout against Trix's anthropological experience, as well as reference to the historical and political contexts in which events are unfolding. This book is essential reading for all those working on the refugee crisis and the prospects – both local and global – for the future.

Media have played an important role in framing the public debate on the “refugee crisis” that peaked in autumn of 2015. This report examines the narratives developed by print media in eight European countries and how they contributed to the public perception of the “crisis”, shifting from careful tolerance over the summer, to an outpouring of solidarity and humanitarianism in September 2015, and to a securitisation of the debate and a narrative of fear in November 2015. Overall, there has been limited opportunity in mainstream media coverage for refugees and migrants to give their views on events, and little attention paid to the individuals’ plight or the global and historical context of their displacement. Refugees and migrants are often portrayed as an undistinguishable group of anonymous and unskilled outsiders who are either vulnerable or dangerous. The dissemination of biased or ill-founded information contributes to perpetuating stereotypes and creating an unfavourable environment not only for the reception of refugees but also for the longer-term perspectives of societal integration.

An unprecedented number of people is currently on the move seeking refuge in Europe. Large parts of European societies respond with anxiety and mistrust to the influx of people. Nationalist, anti-migrant parties from Slovakia over Germany to the UK have gained increasing support among the electorate and challenge the political mainstream. Europe is struggling how to respond. While the search for solutions is ongoing one pattern seems to be emerging: Fortress Europe is in the making. Unfortunately, few of these discussions and measures consider the structural root causes and dynamics of migration, the motives of migrants or societal challenges more thoroughly. This book seeks to address this deficit. Taking migration and asylum policies as a starting point, it analyses the various dimensions underpinning migration. In doing so, it identifies why receiving countries are in many ways part of the problem. To eschew an overtly Euro-centric perspective and stimulate a debate between science and politics, it contains contributions by academics and practitioners alike from both shores of the Mediterranean.