Special Reports
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Austria - a (Reluctant)
Land of Immigrants
While Ambivalent, Austria Continues to Absorb Thousands
by Mazin Elfehaid
Austrians worry a lot aboutimmigration. Of course they wor-ry about pretty much everything.But in this case, common wisdomtells them that more immigrants will mean higher unemployment,lower wages, and increasing bur-dens on the social welfare system. And while immigration is acontentious issue throughout theEuropean Union, it is especially so in countries like Austria, wherea high quality of life, economicstability and social benefits attractmore migrants than most otherparts of the continent. Yet at a time when restrictionsthroughout the E.U. are becom-ing tighter, Austria continues tak-ing in immigrants in increasingly large numbers and folding theminto economic and social life.In 2002, Austria natural-ized 36,382 new citizens, doublethe 18,321 in 1998, triple thenumber in 1990, according toMichael Jandl and Albert Kralerof the International Center forMigration Policy Development(ICMPD). And while these new citizens come from more than100 different countries the worldover, a full half from the formerHabsburg lands.Austria has a long history of immigration, largely due to itshistorical importance and geo-graphic influence. Large parts of what is now Central, and SouthCentral Europe was, at the heightof the Hapsburg Empire, part of Austria – including parts of Po-land, the Czech Republic, Slova-kia, Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia.Many contemporary Austrianshave roots in these countries,and roughly 9.1% of its currentcitizenry is foreign-born, signifi-cantly higher than the EU averageof 5.3%. Its quota of foreign resi-dents is 12.5%, even higher thanin the United States.The controversy surroundingimmigration largely economically motivated. Many worry that anincrease in immigration will bringlower average wages, higher un-employment and strains on socialsupports like health care. It is forthis reason that Austria’s FreedomParty (FPÖ) has called for zeropermanent immigration, statingthat “unrestricted immigrationlead to serious distortions of the job market and to substantialpressure on wages” in their party program.On the other hand, Europealso faces an aging population, whose pensions could depend onthe new energy and earning pow-er immigrants could bring to the workforce. While it has been suggestedthat migrants may help stem theseproblems, “the EU… says thatthe numbers of projected immi-grants would not be enough toovercome the lack of people of working age,” Steve Schifferesof BBC News reported. It hasinstead proposed increasing par-ticipation of women and older workers in the workforce.These issues have polarized Austrian politics, and public at-titudes towards immigration re-main ambivalent, as evidenced by the curtailing of labor-migrationand family reunification programsfollowing in the wake of the 2002 Aliens Act, which called for “in-tegration before immigration.”This policy, which slowly tries toincorporate long-term migrantsthrough required “integrationcourses,” and attempts to makethem part of the social network,remains in force today.Despite this ambivalence, Austria continues to absorb grow-ing numbers of immigrants: Ac-cording to the web-based Migra-tion Information Source (http:// www.migrationinformation.org/),the number of naturalizations in Austria has continued to increasefrom 17,785 in 1997 to about36,400 in 2002, with the totalnumber of migrants reaching74,786 in 2001.The evidence in favor of im-migration is strong, and contrary to popular wisdom, a well-plannedimmigration policy can be benefi-cial to a country’s economy.First of all, there seems to be“no obvious relationship betweenimmigration and unemploy-ment,” according to a study by the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development(OECD), Trends in Immigrationand Economic Consequences. According to the OECD, while immigrant populations ex-perience greater unemploymentand lower wages than native ones,immigration also “creates demandfor goods and services producedby the host population,” whichmeans there is also a larger de-mand for both goods and labor.In other words, immigrants canfuel economic growth.Studies support this hypoth-esis. In recent EU competitive-ness rankings, for example, thetop places went to the countries with the strongest social welfareprograms: Austria placing 3rdafter Sweden and Denmark, ina European Commission study conducted by the Center for Eu-ropean Reform in London.Immigrants represent a moreflexible labor reserve, often more willing to take jobs that requiremore relocation and mobility than natives. It seems no coin-cidence that the European coun-tries with the most comprehensivemigration policies, Sweden andDenmark, also have some of thestrongest economies.In addition, while immigra-tion does influence governmentbudgets, and thus social spending,the report concludes, “the effectsare complicated to calculate, whilethe net impact at the national levelis negligible.”The study points to two mainreasons why immigration can bebeneficial -- both of which apply in various ways to Austria. Firstly,most rich industrialized nationshave a shortage of skilled labor,particularly in fields such as Infor-mation Technology, or as in Aus-tria, in engineering and the highly skilled building trades. TheOECD reports that unemploy-ment rates in these fields are dra-matically lower than elsewhere.The second reason is that Eu-rope has an aging population, withthe proportion of people of retire-ment age increasing, and overallpopulation of the continent fall-ing between 12 to 17 percent overthe next fifty years. In 2040, thepercentage of the Austrian popu-lation over 60 will reach 35%, upfrom 20% in 1995. This meansthere will be significantly fewerpeople paying into pension sys-tems, as well as a drop in the over-all standard of living, at least asmeasured in financial terms.Immigration can change theseage structures, says the OECD.“Increased immigration wouldhave an immediate impact on the working-age population,” wrotethe authors. The report notes,however, that in many places theage-profile of immigrants is simi-lar to that of the native popula-tion, and for this reason immigra-tion alone cannot always be reliedon to solve this problem.However, in the Europeancontext, immigration in mostcases is not only helpful, butnecessary, in order for countrieslike Austria to continue grow-ing. While not always openly immigrant friendly, Austria hasgenerally been pragmatic, relyingon immigration fuel growth andsupply missing skills.This style of accommoda-tion, too, is an old tradition of theEmpire. And anecdotal evidencesuggests the trend is likely to con-tinue: With the Austrian economy booming, Austrian consulatesthroughout Central, Eastern andSouth Central Europe swarm withpeople hoping for a visa. Applications are up, and whilethere are no formal statistics of how many people are left waitingin line, officials in consulates inBudapest, Belgrade and elsewherehave been caught issuing hundredsof unauthorized entry documentsover several years in exchange forcash, resulting in recalls and em-barrassment at the Foreign Min-istry. Sometimes the reality is bestrevealed by what goes wrong.
Students at an EU forum: In the European context, immigration is not only helpful but also neccessary.
C o u r t e s y o f t h e E u r o p e a n U n i o n
by Dardis McNamee
Oh my! Poor Archbishop Amato! Poor Catholic Church!It’s hard not to smile. In an age when psychology has supplantedphilosophy as the defining lan-guage of human experience, andmorality is best understood in theframework of law and society, or-ganized religion is in trouble.Science, communication andprosperity have all conspired tomake religion feel obsolete. Sci-ence makes it look primitive;communication makes it paro-chial, and prosperity relieves thefeelings of helplessness on whichreligious belief is often built. Soin most developed countries,church attendance is dwindlingand candidates for the priest-hood increasingly few. Whatyoung man of talent will give upa natural human life of sexual loveand family for a place in a powerstructure that is collapsing beforehis eyes?Enter Dan and Blythe Brownand the worldwide best seller, TheDaVinci Code. In the guise of ahigh-energy intellectual thriller,the Browns have pealed away themask that has protected the Cath-olic Church from prying icono-clasts for nearly two centuries. Yes, we all know that they playedaround with the “facts,” discover-ing foundations under a cathedralthat aren’t there, inventing an aca-demic discipline that doesn’t exist.
Speaking at a Rome conference on April 28 Archbishop Angelo Amato,Vatican secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, urged his audience to consider boycotting the film “The Da Vinci Code,” as one way “to let the world know the story offends and defames the church.” If the kind of “slander, offenses and errors” contained in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel and the film based on it had been written about “the Quranor the Shoah (the Holocaust), they rightly would have provoked a worldwide uprising,” the archbishop told Catholic communications directors.– Catholic OnLine, www.catholic.org/international
Or even ascribing sinister motivesto the Order of Opus Dei that itprobably doesn’t deserve.But religion never had any-thing to do with facts; actually,religion is, by definition, based onsomething called a “leap of faith,”by which you simply decide to be-lieve something for which there is,and can be, no proof. And anyway, this is fiction,and these quibbles are beside thereal point.Because there is a real point. And you can be sure that if thesequibbles were all that was at stake,the Church would most probably have left well enough alone. Eventhey know that censorship is oneof the best ways to guarantee thesuccess of a film.The real point is thatThe DaVinci Code dramatizesto a mass reading public that theCatholic Church is the way it is by chance – it is something inventedthat can, therefore, be changed. Itcould have easily been some other way, if someone, or several some-ones, had won a round or twosomewhere along the way.The novel also brings out intothe open old church battles overthe position and role of women.These, as much as the feministmovement of the 1970s, threatenthe foundations of patriarchy insocieties the world over. The his-tory on this point – that women were definitively closed out of theChurch’s power structure by thereign of Constantine in the 4thCentury – is not contested.
The Da Vinci Code
The Church Fathers Have Every Right to be Afraid: Organized Religion is in Trouble
But for the public, it’s break-ing news, the evidence many been waiting for that there is nothingspiritual about male supremacy.It is now, and has only ever been,about power.Together, these radical no-tions are like land mines in thepastures of the Good Shepherd.Think of it: The DaVinci Codereveals the Church to be fallible,a flawed, evolving human insti-
Sacrilege!
tution, like any other. It showsthat Roman Catholicism as weknow it emerged out of a confu-sion of sources and that for politi-cal, rather than spiritual, reasonsdeveloped a set of rules, calleddoctrines, that, like civil law, werearrived at through negotiation,power struggles and wars of domi-nation...…whose winner got to writethe history.
ESSAY
Zeitgeist
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