Joel Kotkin published a very interesting article this week. The headline, Who’s racist now?, sounds like sweet revenge, like resentment that Europe understands the United States unfairly. Basically, the author rebels against the traditional vision from old Europe of the conservative character and close to racism of the United States, and recalls the repercussion that the laws to control illegal immigration on the Mexican border had in the European media. But, as if he harbored a feeling of contempt from this side of the Atlantic, he is taking advantage – and I think rightly so – to lash out now against that well-thinking Europe in the face of the “evil” of the United States and which, however, has allowed a escalation of anti-immigration discourses and the increase in the political representation of the extreme right. France with its secret archive of non-sedentary ethnic minorities, their rejection of include Romania in the Schengen area and theexpulsion of Romanian gypsies (with the final approval of the European commission), recognition of the failure of multiculturalism in Germany, the embarrassing episode of Badalona or the ceremony of malicious confusion on the use of public health by immigrants inSpain, on < a href="http://observadorglobal.com/europa-y-la-ofensiva-de-la-extrema-derecha-n11528.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rise of the extreme right in Holland and Sweden… A hysterical escalation.
Although I don’t often agree with Kotkin, I do think that what he says has a lot of weight. We have dealt so much with sheriff Arpaio, the hunts the undocumented in Arizona or burgeoning of new state immigration laws in the United States, that we are unable to care about the germ that is spreading incubating in the enlightened, old and decent Europe of free movement. Perhaps from this side of the Atlantic the history of slavery and racial segregation in the United States continues to weigh heavily while Europe prided itself on being a land of freedom. But that already happened. The United States has always known how to live with immigration, but it is Europe that is now facing its contradictions.
Kotkin’s article ends with a thought-provoking sentence:
Of course the U.S. still has its bigoted Islamophobes, just as it has its own small cadre of vicious Islamists. One law of history appears to be that morons will be morons. But America’s culture seems strong enough to resist the anti-immigrant hysteria emerging throughout Europe. This is one case where the difference between America and Europe may prove a very good thing indeed.
Is European culture ready to resist anti-immigration hysteria? If hysteria gnaws at both the United States and Europe, the key is to see who will have the resources to fight against it.
Photoby Juan José Figueroa on Flickr under the Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License