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xenophobia: a vote winner

alf.sa | 16.09.2010 21:10 | Anti-racism | Migration

The news was terrifying: In France police frog marched entire gypsy families out of a nation that once upon a time gave us the intoxicating motto: “Liberty, fraternity, equality!”

September 17, 2010

XENOPHOBIA: A VOTE WINNER.

By Uli Schmetzer
www.uli-schmetzer.com

Venice, Italy – The news was terrifying: In France police frog marched entire gypsy families out of a nation that once upon a time gave us the intoxicating motto: “Liberty, fraternity, equality!”
In Hong Kong, Asia’s largest melting pot, mobs turned savagely against Filipino maids and workers and in the United States, traditional home to immigrants from every corner of the world, the hunt for illegal Latino migrants resembled the way the fascists once searched for Jews.
In Italy, a nation with more Italians per capita abroad then anyone else, an uncouth, loud-mouthed party with anachronistic slogans, a hate-foreigner policy and separatist and racial ideals has become the country’s most powerful voting block.
And in Australia, the continent with more space then anyone else, the general election last month was fought over which party could be toughest to keep boat people out.
Each of these despicable actions has one common denominator: Xenophobia. And it’s a winner.
Historically fear of ‘the other’ has led to wars, ethnic cleansings and genocides. But today politicians from one end of the globe to the other are actively stoking xenophobia to win votes, to perpetuate their popularity or to stimulate nationalism. And it works.
With more people then ever before in human history on the move in search of a decent livelihood the blame for recession, unemployment, rising crime rates and any kind of shortage is quickly and conveniently laid at the feet of newcomers, immigrants, legal or illegal, with different religions, skin color or ethnic background.
Globalization, once hailed as the milestone of the 21st Century, has been turned into protectionism, of course not when it comes to the movement of goods but only that of people.
In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy, his credibility rock bottom thanks to corruption scandals in his government, regained momentum by ordering police to round up hundreds of Roma (gypsies) and bulldoze their make-shift shacks and low-budget homes. Police escorted the gypsies to aircraft flying them back to Rumania though some families had lived in France for decades.
When the European Union’s Justice commissioner, Vivianne Reding, told the European parliament the French action was similar to the rounding up of gypsies during the Nazi occupation of France Sarkozy shot back he was happy to send more gypsies to Luxemburg, the home of the commissioner – though it was pointed out there was no legal clause in France’s constitution to justify his expulsion order - to ANY country.
But Sarkozy’s popularity rating rose.
As the recession bites deeper in the United States some States have unilaterally imposed laws to hunt down Latino immigrants who may have lived in the USA for years but have never acquired residency cards. The regulations allowing police to check the IDs of people resembling Latinos has enraged human rights groups who have compared it to the Nazi hunt for Jews in Hitler’s Germany where fascist agents stopped any pedestrian with Semitic features.
In Hong Kong, home to some 400,000 Filipino maids and domestic servants, Filipinos were beaten up, many fired from their jobs, in what appeared to be an orchestrated anti-Filipino campaign by the media and the authorities. The spark for the anti-Filipino fury was a bungled Manila police rescue mission of a tourist bus hijacked by a crazed policeman who had been dismissed and demanded his job back. In the Keystone Cop style rescue operation 11 Hong Kong tourists were killed, either by the hijacker or the rescuers.
Although Hong Kong authorities denied their irate statements about the rescue precipitated the anti-Filipino mob scenes analysts felt the outburst came in the wake of an economic slow down and rising unemployment for which many blamed cheap Filipino labor. Similar orchestrated riots against certain nationalities are often used on the Chinese mainland to reinforce nationalism and also serve as a safety valve for popular discontent.
The same reason, a stalled economy, has been exploited by Italy’s ‘Lega’ (Northern League) to gain baffling support among the Italian electorate north of Rome. The Lega’s agenda calls for separatism from the poorer and less developed South of Italy and the expulsion of foreigners, mainly African immigrants.
With this platform the ‘Lega,’ – once considered a batch of comical hillbillies from the northern provinces headed by a bumbling but deified leader, Umberto Bossi - have managed to gain such a strong foothold among the electorate that they virtually run the coalition government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, occupying nearly all key ministerial posts.
In Australia a laid-back public has traditionally voted for one or the other of what is dubbed colloquially as ‘Our Two Evils’ -- the Liberal-Country Party or the Labor Party. For decades the two took turns governing. But in August this year, for the first time since 1942, the electorate was evenly divided – 72 seats for either party – a hung Parliament.
If the choice in 1942 was about World War II at a time Australians still solidly stood behind the White Australia policy (keeping ‘colored folks’ out of the country) the electoral campaign in August was fought almost over the same issue: How to keep those colored folks - known today as ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ - out of Australia.
Of course times have changed. For many years now the southern continent, sparsely populated and in need of consumers and workers, has allowed just about a million colored people and non-whites to sink roots. Walking through Melbourne and Sydney these days is almost like strolling through a South-East Asian capital.
Yet when it comes to procuring votes no holds are barred, especially in the current global xenophobia. Both parties quickly reopened the old Pandora’s Box by scaring white folks with the prospect of colored folks sneaking into Oz illegally to commit all kinds of dastardly crimes and offenses, depriving bona fide Aussies of rightful jobs and bringing with them nasty illnesses to boot.
Both parties spared no venom yet barely differed in their recipe to deal with the unwanted. One promised to drop the undesirables into internment camps run by impoverished New Guinea and East Timor, both countries to be paid in cash for looking after them. The other party supported a scheme to drop the boat people off on remote offshore islands where they could be ‘processed,’ a bureaucratic solution that can take years to determine if such people qualify for refugee or asylum status.
The issue was not unlike a budget debate. One party thought allowing three boats a year ‘in’ was enough. The other party felt a few more boats would be more humanitarian. If one red the news all this sounded like an ‘emergency’ (not unlike the hue and cry over immigration in the USA and Europe) to safe the southern continent from an invasion of refugees from Sri Lanka to Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh and the dark part of Africa where people have been persecuted, starved or slaughtered for ethnic or religious reasons.
In reality there is no such emergency. Australia had just 4,000 boat people trying to land on its shore over the last year BUT has an official quota to allow 13,000 to settle in the country.
In the final irony all this xenophobia is a double-edged sword: Not one of the countries clamoring for the expulsion of illegal labor could survive without serious economic damage if it expelled its cheap labor force. That force enables most companies to remain competitive with Asian rivals and supplies the seasonal and menial jobs shunned by their own citizen as too demeaning – or too hard.
Worse, no country really desires to make their illegal migrant work force legal because once legal those workers will no longer be content to remain ‘cheap labor.’

Uli Schmetzer was a foreign correspondent for almost 40 years. He is the
author of ‘Times of Terror’ an autobiography and the novel ‘Gaza”
based on his experiences in the Middle East.
Both books are available on www.amazon.com

alf.sa