The Commission’s integration action plan for the coming budget period is a lengthy, empty, bland political word-salad of tired phrases, wishful thinking and blatantly contradictory statements. It’s to be implemented using bureaucratic EU project financing that seldom gives real results.
The plan is built on principles no one really opposes, such as “everybody matters, that no one should be left behind, and that all should be able to effectively exercise their rights and have access to opportunities and security”. However, the Commission doesn’t provide guidance on how to balance competing objectives or tackle the difficult questions migration bring.
Firstly, we know that the higher the number of migrants in a given place, the more difficult they will be to integrate. And those that fail to integrate, tend to congregate and form impoverished crime-ridden, religiously intolerant ethnic enclaves such as Molenbeek, parts of Malmö, and the banlieues of Paris.
Secondly, we know that material prosperity is what drives migrants to Europe (and makes them avoid the materially poorer parts of the Union). The plans focus on raising the migrants’ material standard of living through tax-financed housing, jobs and leisure activities. The plan risk attracting more migrants, which doesn’t square with the objective of integration or the aim of halting the trafficking across the Mediterranean.
Of the Member States, the model student for implementing the Commission’s proposed approach is Sweden. No prizes for guessing that the author of the plan is the Swedish Commissioner, Ylva Johansson. Sweden offers it all: full coverage by the social security system from day one, comprehensive employment subsidies, grants to ethnic associations, priority access to subsidized rental housing, and generous welfare to the unemployed and unemployable alike.
Nevertheless, Sweden has the largest employment gap and one of the largest gaps in education, between domestic and foreign-born. Sweden also hosts large and growing ethnic enclaves, and criminal clans enforcing checkpoints, a code of silence driven by fear and acts of racist violence against ethnic Swedes. Commissioner Johansson’s plan has failed in the country that tried it. And she knows it.
Surprisingly the Commission does not use this report as an excuse to dispel the myth that integration is free and easy, nor the fiction that migration will bring economic benefits “further down the road”. The Commission even highlights the often and rightly mocked theory that migration will save pay-as-you-go pension plans. In a toxic combination of southern European budgetary discipline and northern European legal fiction, the plan postulates that the cost of these benefits to migrants need not affect other needy groups.
The most disappointing aspect of the plan is that it completely lacks even a discussion of what the concept of integration and inclusion means outside the purely material. In her State of the Union address, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen referred to “European values” ten times.
On the very first page of Commissioner Johansson’s plan the obligatory reference to these values is made, but then it goes on to completely ignore what it means to our countries when a large share of the migrants hold very different value systems. There is no discussion of how to deal with the different fundamentally illiberal, dysfunctional and often anti-Western ideologies, beliefs and religions that accompanies many migrants to Europe.
The Commission’s thinking on this issue is at the same stage as Sweden was in the late 1990s when virtually all influence-wielding Swedes believed (or, at least, pretended) that integration could be solved with material benefits and that the cultural differences between the host country and migrants were marginal. This may be because Commissioner Johansson hasn’t learned anything or because she does not have any other tools.
Sweden is learning from decades of failed integration plans very similar to the one proposed by the Commission. If Sweden, with all its ill-spent wealth, wasted patience and unrequited goodwill failed, then why on earth would Europe succeed? Heed our warning. Reject this plan.