6 August 2015
Moveable goalposts and flexible border-Are fences the answer?
by Lynda Goetz
With all the news of migrations focusing on Calais, assaults on the Channel tunnel and overloaded ships sinking in the Mediterranean, it may have escaped your notice that Hungary has been having problems of its own. Having joined the EU eleven years ago in 2004, it still has its own currency, the forint and has not yet joined the Euro. However, its border with the Balkans is a weak spot as far as immigration to the EU is concerned. Once inside Hungary it is not difficult for migrants to move to the more favoured Schengen group countries. This route is also far less risky than the sea routes via Greece or Italy. Last year Hungary received more refugees per capita than any other EU country apart from Sweden. Having seen somewhere between 54,000 and 80,000 asylum seekers enter the country this year (about 80% from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan), Hungary has announced that it is, as a ‘temporary measure’, building a 4m high fence along its 110 mile southern border with Serbia.
I am the granddaughter of an ‘economic migrant’ who under the new rules shortly to be implemented would today, almost certainly, have been classified as an ‘illegal’. The reason, of course, that this is not a problem is that my grandfather came here over a hundred years ago, when life, immigration and asylum were all very different.
My Hungarian grandfather was born in the town of Nagybecskerek (known as Zrenjanin since 1946) in 1889. In 1909, at the age of 20, young and without ties, he left a part of the world that had long been a source of conflict between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Turks and the Serbs to seek a ‘better life’. He could have gone to America, (many of his relatives did, I believe), but he chose to seek his fortune, like many others, in England, more specifically in London. At that time, for a period of around thirty years leading up to World War I, passports were not required for travel within Europe. Prior to this time they had been necessary; indeed in 1548 the Imperial Diet of Augsburg required the public to hold imperial documents for travel or risk permanent exile and in 1794, in the UK, the office of the Secretary of State had become responsible for the issue of British passports. The reason for the relaxation of the requirement for passports was due mainly to the rapid expansion of rail travel at the end of the nineteenth century and the general increase in wealth which meant many more people were crossing multiple borders, making enforcement of passport laws more difficult. Furthermore, although from 1878 records of incoming boat passengers were kept, those coming from Europe or the Mediterranean did not have to be listed, so, as far as I am aware, the details of the start of my grandfather’s new life in England is nowhere recorded.
According to Migration Watch UK, in the eighty years between the year of the Great Exhibition in 1851 and 1931, those born abroad added to the UK population by less than one million. After the Second World War the foreign-born population increased slowly, with around two million adding to the population in the forty years between 1951 and 1991. However, the foreign-born population of England and Wales doubled in the twenty years between 1991 and 2011, amounting to some four million or 13.4% of the population. Figures for net migration to October last year were 300,000. Those figures of course pre-date our latest crisis and it goes without saying that the figures do not include those ‘illegals’ we have somehow not managed to account for. Lord Deddington pointed out back in March that if nothing changes then ‘our population will reach 70 million within the next eight years’ and ‘we will need to build three cities the size of Birmingham in the next five years’; that is clearly not a practicable option.
England has always had episodes of immigration and the character of ‘The English’ (see Jeremy Paxman’s splendid book ‘The English: Portrait of a People’ and also Kate Fox’s ‘Watching the English’) as a people is, to a large extent, made up of all those different immigrants who have, over the centuries, intermingled and intermarried with the native population. What has happened over the last twenty five years and is continuing to happen is, however, unprecedented. Although our generous welfare system does clearly have some bearing on the situation, it is probably not the greatest pull of this country. The greatest pull is almost certainly the fact that English is the universal language the second language for almost everyone throughout the world. How much easier to try and find work and a new life in a country where you speak at least a smattering of the language rather than one where the language is a barrier. Add to that the fact that we are, on the whole a tolerant people who take the view that others should be left to get on with their lives as long as those lives do not interfere with the rest of the community and it is not difficult to see how the country becomes a magnet.
Back at the beginning of the twentieth century, the opportunities for people from all over the world to seek a new life in America, different parts of Europe or Australasia were so much simpler and so much more readily available. The problem now is much more complex. It is also one of scale. The population, not only of Europe, but of the world and in particular of the developing world, is increasing exponentially. Free movement of populations can no longer just happen. My grandparents’ union has, indirectly, produced a total of eighteen more human beings – their four grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren (there might well have been more had we all not taken so long to ‘tie the knot’ and so delayed the next generation of great-great-grandchildren). This increase in the human population is being replicated all around the world and even faster in many of the developing countries where in some cases 70% of the population is under 30.
Clearly, if you or I were stuck in one or other of the many countries around the world now in a total mess, then as an enterprising individual we would want to consider our options. The thought of ‘escape’ must come high on the agenda. Would we leave our partner and children and hope they could join us later? Best of all is to be young and without ties (other than parents of course, but they don’t really count at this stage) and responsible for no-one else. It is this category which makes up a large proportion of those risking all to have a ‘fresh start’.
What price freedom? Unfortunately there are almost no countries in the world now that need or want unskilled labour to add to their own underclass, nor indeed skilled labour that will take the already scarce jobs of their own citizens. Europe has gone back to the pre-First World War I situation of free movement, but each country is busy playing ‘pass-the-parcel’ with those who come through and there are so many ways in.
Hungary, from which my grandfather, young and without ties, ‘escaped’ in the early part of the twentieth century to come to England, is now, as an EU member dealing with its own immigration crisis. It has become a desirable destination, if not necessarily an end destination. In December 2014 its border with Serbia accounted for half of all border-crossings into the EU. Announcing the building of the 4m high fence along the 110-mile border, the Foreign Minister, Peter Szijjarto said Hungary could not wait for the EU to find a solution. Interestingly, Zrenjanin is now on the other, Serbian, side of that border.
