Europe’s negative attitudes towards immigrants were demonstrated when immigrants started gaining support across parts of Western Europe. This was evident when the freedom party in Syria won an extra seat in the provincial government. This led to the shootings and killing of individuals who supported this party, and the losers regarded a multicultural society as a criminal society. This popularity is because of the high tolerance level of countries in Western Europe, particularly Sweden and Netherlands (Glazer 361). This popularity has been because of the high number of immigrants that have been witnessed in the preceding years in France, Germany, and Britain experiencing the largest influx of immigrants from different countries. This was confirmed by the rapid increase in the populations of these three countries, with a particular increase in the number of immigrants. This influx led to public utterances that were highly discriminative against immigrants who formed most parts of Europe during this time. These utterances were common from mainstream political parties who took issue because the high numbers meant competition for governmental positions (Glazer 362).
However, this strong criticism was because immigrants in Europe at this time were Muslims who were of Turkish origin. Moreover, this large population consisted of those individuals who came from rural villages such as countries like Turkey, Algeria, and Bangladesh. They were highly distinguishable from the European Muslims who consisted of the black communities coming from the United States of America. Mainstream politicians started adopting similar anti-migration positions and parties (Glazer, 363).
The European economic crisis has led to a decrease in employment levels, and the large inflow of immigrants leads to competition for the scarce jobs, the reduction in quality of life, and they drain welfare benefits (Glazer 364). The Muslims have failed to integrate into mainstream societies and continue to influence other individuals in a society based on their faiths. However, this sentiment has been shared uniformly over the whole of Europe. Countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands have had rival political parties, and the whole country receives unprecedented shares of votes from immigrant political parties (Glazer 361).
The European countries have refused to acknowledge that the human workforce is slowly declining due to the low birth rates. This has led to a decrease in immigrants because these economies have begun to slow down (Glazer 365). Europe is faced with high pension costs due to a high rate of retirement from individuals in the workforce. The majority of the workforce is aging, and most individuals are encouraged to retire early and venture into private life. This compounds the pension costs for the government, and it becomes difficult to compensate such individuals. The best remedy is to allow the flow of immigrants to fill the vacant job positions in order to generate adequate resources to sustain the economy (Glazer 366). The government should also strive to integrate Muslims into society. Moreover, some of the immigrating Muslims are native-born, and this makes it easy to allow them into society (Glazer 367)
However, this positivity side of things has not been shared by several European countries who continue to resist. This includes countries such as France, Germany, and Britain. These nations have continued to pass laws that inhibit, and are solely intended to stop the immigration of Muslims into their countries. Moreover, they have gone a step further to limit the spread of Muslim culture and religion by passing laws that ban Muslim dressings such as headscarves, burqas, and minarets. This has gone against the spirit of globalization, which has been championed by many European countries (Glazer 368). These countries have also established discriminative laws based on language requirements, citizen tests that discriminate against Muslims. The immigrants in these countries have continued to suffer due to homelessness, lack of employment, or low pays and discriminatory conditions o work (Glazer 368). This sends negative signals to countries that are sources of workforce Europe needs.
Works Cited
Glazer, Sarah. “Europe’s immigration turmoil.” CQ Global Researcher 4 (2010): 289-320. Print.