January 2018 - Uninhibited racism

Andrea Rea, Group for research on Ethnic Relations, Migrations, and Equality (GERME)

The president of N-VA [a Flemish nationalist party], Bart de Wever, claims migration is a danger to our social system. Has such a link been demonstrated Andrea Rea?

No, in fact Bart de Wever's statements even run counter to what studies have concluded. The National Bank of Belgium concluded, in a report published in 2016, that foreigners contribute to economic growth and are absolutely not a burden to the country's economy. Our research centre, GERME, has shown that refugees —obviously— cost the state when they receive a social integration allowance upon being granted residence. However, Belgium has not paid for their schooling, since they were educated in their home country, and as soon as they start working —as self-employed workers in certain cases—, refugees contribute to the country's economic growth and to an increase of the national budget and social security funds. Foreigners and refugees do not, therefore, jeopardise our social system; they actually contribute to securing its future.

Bart de Wever's rhetoric is nothing new, and Belgium is not an isolated case…

That's right: all societies build a hierarchy in which certain groups are stigmatised, racialised. The nature of these groups may shift in time, but the rhetoric remains unchanged: in the 1920s, Jews were called profiteers; in the 1960s, Italians were accused of coming to Belgium for its welfare benefits; then, Moroccans were said to abuse family allowances; and now, Africans and refugees are accused of threatening our social system. In this process, the racialised group is not just called different: more importantly, it is diminished and seen as inferior. Its members are ‘sub-citizens’, and their calls for equality in terms of rights, speech, and respect are delegitimised. In addition, the descendants of migrants who were stigmatised in the past often make this racist rhetoric their own, in order to set themselves apart from the new scapegoats. As the saying goes, ‘the last one in shuts the door’!

Speaking of descendants of migrants, you wrote an open letter to Italian minister of the interior Matteo Salvini, published in Le Soir on September 19.

Together with some fifty colleagues who are either migrants or second-generation Italian immigrants, we reacted to Matteo Salvini's remarks that what his country needs is not more African migrants, but for Italians to have more children. He is forgetting that between 1946 and 1955, Italy has exported 1.5 million workers, mostly young, to France, Germany, Benelux, and Switzerland. Italy's economic development in the 1960s is due in part to the country exporting much of its poverty, just like certain African countries today. Salvini responded to our open letter in a Facebook post. Comments soon started pouring in, and I was insulted, dismissed, intimidated… but saw very few arguments. It has become difficult to engage with controversial topics and to pursue civil debates, when confronted with a racist rhetoric that ignores, or even denies, history and facts.

We have mentioned De Wever and Salvini, but there are also Orban in Hungary and Trump in the United States… have politicians in 2018 emboldened racist speech?

In the 1980s, there was a brief period when local politicians engaged in racist rhetoric. This racism in the political discourse is now becoming part of the government's communication itself in certain European democracies. When politicians endorse racist positions, they legitimise them and change the norm of what can be heard and said; in effect, they enable racist speech in assemblies but also in cafés, in the streets, at work, and so on. This rhetoric presents a ‘thought algorithm’ where migrant is synonymous with profiteer or criminal. Reality, of course, is much more complex. The European Union wanted to be a society built on knowledge, but we are now becoming a society built on ignorance, which is an essential ingredient of authoritarian regimes.

What is the relationship between immigration and racism?

The racialised group is not necessarily the one that has migrated, as evidenced by the Aboriginal Australians or the Native Americans. Hierarchies are built into our societies at a specific moment in time, when a dominant group contributes to stigmatising a segment of the population and denying its members' rights. The racialised group is created based on two main dimensions: one is its identity, grounded in ethnic and cultural attributes, and the other is its lower status in the socio-economic hierarchy. For instance, a Polish member of staff at the European Commission will be referred to as an ‘expat’, while a Polish construction worker will be called an ‘immigrant’… Nothing new here either: the poor do not live and die like the rich, as Balzac wrote, thus contributing to the ‘racialisation’ of poverty.