The Swiss Wake-Up Call

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/opinion/the-swiss-wake-up-call.html

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Brussels may call them the villains, but we should be grateful for the Swiss. Their Feb. 9 vote in favor of reintroducing immigration quotas for citizens from the European Union, by a very narrow margin of 50.3 percent, could well prove to be a salutary shock.

The trouble over migration within Europe has been brewing for months, but it finally took a small, very rich country outside the union, with a dreamlike unemployment rate of 3.5 percent and a tradition of politically incorrect referendums, to force us to take a hard look at this crucial issue.

In fact, the Swiss have succeeded where David Cameron failed. The British prime minister tried to kick-start a debate in the European Union when he called last November for immigration restrictions, but he framed it in the wrong terms.

When Europeans talk about immigration, it can be confusing. Immigrants are people arriving from outside the European Union, mostly from Africa and Asia; their movement is heavily regulated by the union’s member states. Migration refers to citizens of the European Union moving from one member state to another. Free movement of people is a cornerstone of the European Union; Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, even described it as one of the union’s “greatest successes.” Latvian electricians can live and work in Britain, Spanish engineers can move to Germany and Dutch pensioners can retire to the south of France. And they have, by the millions.

Free movement worked beautifully as long as the European Union was small and prosperous. With a big wave of enlargement in 2004, when eight former East Bloc nations joined the union, came the first tide of migrants, as Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians and others began to move around in search of better wages. In 2007, two more countries, Romania and Bulgaria, were allowed in, on the condition that their citizens wait another five years, until Jan. 1, 2014, to look for work elsewhere. At the time, nobody paid much attention.

Then came the sovereign debt crisis, changing everything. As recession hit several euro-zone countries and unemployment soared, foreigners no longer felt as welcome as before. Native anxiety began to spread. The extreme right became more vocal. Anti-immigrant and Euroskeptic movements took off. Mainstream political parties panicked. Under pressure from the U.K. Independence Party, Mr. Cameron pledged to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union.

This is how one of Europe’s “major successes” turned into a political liability. Politically speaking, the Swiss referendum is a disaster because elections to the European Parliament are just three months away, and fears are growing that anti-European Union parties could collect as much as one-third of the vote. Just look at who rejoiced first after the Swiss poll: Nigel Farage, the U.K. Independence Party leader; Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front in France; and Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. (A tweet by Mr. Wilders said it all: “What the Swiss can do, we can do too: cut immigration and leave the EU.”)

In a way, the free movement of people is like the euro: an achievement of historic proportions but politically ill-conceived. On a continent where 70 years ago people were still slaughtering one another, today 500 million citizens can live wherever they wish in 28 countries. Yet, even if the free movement of people was rightly seen as a pillar of a new European community, its proponents could not foresee either the fall of the Iron Curtain or the euro crisis, both of which put millions of people on the move. Like the common currency, free movement is an attribute of federal systems — but the European Union is not a federal state.

Many of the arguments used by politicians opposed to immigration are not supported by the facts. Last month the British government shelved a report on “benefit tourism” for lack of evidence. The Financial Times reported government statistics showing that the number of European Union migrants moving to Britain were balanced by those of Britons living abroad.

When Mr. Cameron calls for rules to stop “vast migrations” within the union, he has in mind the 600,000 Poles living in Britain. But he forgets to mention the 2.2 million Britons living in Europe, nearly 800,000 of whom chose Spain. Mobility, after all, is a two-way street. As regards benefits, migration experts have found that citizens from Eastern Europe who move to Western Europe are mostly young and trained — and so less likely to use national health or social services, and more likely to work and pay taxes.

A new O.E.C.D. study shows that, since the beginning of the financial crisis, mobility inside the European Union has been even higher than in the United States. Migration has in effect become an adjustment mechanism in response to labor market shocks. This is why Germany has welcomed not only cheap factory workers from the East but also unemployed graduates from Southern Europe, whom Der Spiegel dubbed “The New Guest Workers.” And why the British, French and German public health systems, hit by shortages of physicians, have welcomed Romanian doctors, 14,000 of whom have left their country since it joined the union.

The Romanian and Bulgarian invasion of Britain after Jan. 1 predicted by Mr. Farage hasn’t materialized: Those people left their countries years ago, mostly for Italy and Spain. Bulgaria saw its population drop from 9 million in 1989 to 7 million in 2012 as people either moved away or stopped having children.

But perceptions do matter, and the Swiss vote can’t be dismissed. If the overdue debate on migration finally happens, European politicians should eschew an all-or-nothing mind-set and focus on correcting the migration imbalances within the union. As for the euro, they may well find that the solution is more integration, not less. And any discussion about the consequences of the free movement of people within the union can’t be a substitute for a new and much-needed approach to external immigration which, judging by the number of boats tragically sinking off Lampedusa, shows no signs of abating.

Sylvie Kauffmann is the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde.