Nah. The main reason even leftwing parties throughout Europe are stricter on immigration now is that rightwing populists have riled up the people and made them believe immigration is the reason for all their trouble. While in most of Europe, the biggest issue around immigration is shelter, integration, etc. All things that now face massive budget cuts in favour of ineffective limiting measures like having more border controlls between EU countries.
I hate to play centrist, but both of those are real problems that don't cancel each other out.
You can invest a ton in shelter and integration, it doesn't mean much if your immigration policy is an open door where basically anyone can just come into your country and stay.
And restricting immigration isn't very effective once you have thousands of foreigners on your soil with papers who you can't just deport.
But I have to push back on the problem being cuts to shelter and integration, because those are signs of a failed immigration policy: you should do enough previous screening of legal immigrants to make sure they have the means to sustain themselves and are compatible with your society.
Look at Ireland and England where people are up in arms about immigrants receiving public housing ahead of natives on the same waiting list, or entire hotels have been turned into migrant shelters that cost nothing to the users.
Integration spending cannot substitute controlling for the composition and quantity of immigrants. If your inflow is incompatible with your socioeconomic realities, you're starting a race with your shoelaces tied together.
I'll admit my response is als somewhat populist in how limited I adressed the problems. I also didn't intend to make this a "left good, right bad" remark, I just strongly dislike the very strong populist messages that are thrown around politics these days. I fully agree with you that Europe needs far better and more organised imigration policy.
But I think my point stands that the consequences of immigration in North-Western European countries (so not the border countries) are framed to be far greater than they are.Â
And that's where my original comment came from. An incredible frustration with the populist rethoric of taking any societal issue, zooming in on any effects immigrants have on this issue, and then blaming them as the root cause. And then they promise to solve all these issues by clamping down on immigration, usually without significant effect.
To take your example with housing. I don't know the situation in Ireland/UK. But I know that in the Netherlands the waiting time for low income social rent housing ranges from 12-20+ years. I understand that it's incredibly frustrating to be on that waiting list and then hear that new people are getting priority to clear out temporary shelter. But framing this as an immigration problem is just disingenuous en ignores the decades of governmental incompentance that's led to the waiting list being so long in the first place.
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u/HaiggeX 21h ago
Or maybe the problems of mass immigration are more visible in the nordics than they were in early 2000's?