COVID-19, E.U. Immigration, and Freedom Day for Germany

With 28 member countries and 446 million people, the European Union is, after China and India the next most populated region on Earth. The United States is next with 330 million people. Population size and prosperity matter when it comes to immigration. A thousand immigrants or refugees in a city of a million won’t be much noticed or have much economic or cultural impact.

Refugees and immigrants can challenge communities, and in 2015 Pew Research reports 1.3 million asked for asylum in Europe. Five years ago the events were dramatic: Migrant crisis: One million enter Europe in 2015 (BBC, December 22, 2015):

Most crossed by sea, with more than 800,000 travelling from Turkey to Greece. Half are migrants from Syria. …

The huge influx of migrants has caused significant political rifts within the EU, with some states inside the border-free Schengen area putting up fences and reimposing frontier controls.

Hungary and Slovakia are taking legal action at the European Court of Justice to challenge EU plans to share asylum seekers across EU states.

Meanwhile, many migrants and refugees are pressing to be allowed to settle in richer northern countries like Germany and Sweden.

E.U. countries and political parties have responded very differently to new refugees and immigration. Political leaders in Poland and Hungary don’t want the E.U. to make them accept “their share” of refugees (See: EU refugees: The West pays, the East obeys? (Acton Institute, June 23, 2017). Yet German cities are asking for more refugees: Dozens of German cities petition to take in more refugees (DW, January 13, 2020).

National Review in Europe’s Extremist Parties Won’t Solve the Migrant Crisis (June 12, 2019), notes that discontent over refugees has led to surge of political support for extreme parties in E.U.:

With the widespread success of nationalist parties such as National Rally and Alternative for Germany, and enthusiastic supporters of the European Union such as the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, voters have signaled that the political landscape is becoming more fractured between those who resent and those who fully endorse the EU.

But the opposition seems to be against E.U. bureaucracy, not just refugee resettlement programs:

But is the backlash against migration — note that the desire for various “exits” seems to have died down as the Brexit debacle grows — really a result of, and therefore a revolt against, the EU project itself? Not exactly. In actuality, it is a story of missed opportunities for the Union. In fact, the EU should have made Europe better, not worse, at handling the migrant crisis. A bloc with a population of 508 million should have been able to absorb a migrant wave that included 1 million people in its peak year, 2015. Current migrant numbers are far lower.

Fast-forward to 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns
The memory of the 2015 refugee surge fades and recent refugee numbers are far lower. More recent crises include Brexit: the UK departing the E.U. as of January 31, 2020. The U.K made up about 20% of the entire E.U. economy, and negotiations are still underway on how to manage trade, migration, and other policies between the UK and the now smaller E.U.

Then the pandemic hit, damaging the already fragile Italian economy, and hitting Belgian, French, and Spanish populations and economies hard. Somehow Germany, the E.U.’s largest economy, managed the pandemic better, with fewer hospitalizations and deaths.

Sweden chose a different course by relying on voluntary measures instead of lockdowns. Swedish elder care facilities were poorly managed (as elder facilities were in Italy, Spain and other countries). Also Sweden had higher initial death rates than neighboring Denmark, Finland, and Norway. Recent immigrants and refugees in Sweden suffered and died at higher rates from Covid-19. (Many point to lower Vitamin D levels, since Vitamin D is key to immune responses. See, for example: Vitamin D deficiency in immigrants (Elsevier, June 11, 2018) and More evidence that lack of vitamin D is linked to COVID-19 severity (MSN, June 19, 2020). (Vitamin D deficiency claims are still questioned by public health agencies so issue is controversial.)

Recently though, there is much positive news on Sweden’s no-lockdown approach to the pandemic:
• No country for face masks: Nordics brush off mouth covers (Yahoo News/AFP, July 30, 2020)
• ‘We see no point in wearing a face mask,’ Sweden’s top virus expert says as he touts the country’s improving COVID numbers (Fortune, July 29, 2020)
• Sweden, Which Never Had Lockdown, Sees COVID-19 Cases Plummet as Rest of Europe Suffers Spike (Newsweek, July 30, 2020)
• Covid Success Story Stands Out for Its Controversial Mask Policy (Forbes, July 25, 2020).

And Germany, there are protests against continued lockdowns since Covid hospitalizations and deaths have been so low for so long:

Protesters against coronavirus restrictions have gathered in Berlin for a demonstration titled The End Of The Pandemic – Freedom Day.

Germany Covid deaths have been at 10 or less per day since May, and confirmed cases below 1,000 since early May.

What connections are there, going forward, between the pandemic and E.U. immigrants and refugee policies? A history of E.U. immigration is reviewed in Immigration in the European Union: problem or solution? (OECD Observer, Summer, 2000, but listed in Bing as July 9, 2020. Maybe only side column data updated?)

The novel coronavirus hit the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain, and Belgium hard. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reports:

As of 26 July 2020, 181 568 deaths have been reported in the EU/EEA and the UK: United Kingdom (45 738), Italy (35 102), France (30 192), Spain (28 432), Belgium (9 821), Germany (9 118), Netherlands (6 140), Sweden (5 697), Romania (2 165), Ireland (1 764), Portugal (1 716), Poland (1 664), Austria (712), Denmark (613), Hungary (596), Czechia (368), Bulgaria (338), Finland (329), Norway (255), Greece (201), Croatia (133), Slovenia (115), Luxembourg (112), Lithuania (80), Estonia (69), Latvia (31), Slovakia (28), Cyprus (19), Iceland (10), Malta (9) and Liechtenstein (1).

According to Worldometers, the highest death rates per million in the world were in the European countries Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, and Sweden (also independent cities of San Marino and Andorra).

But the positive news for E.U. immigration and refugee policy seems to be that the two economies most welcoming to immigrants and refugees, Germany and Sweden, have recovered best from the Covid-19 pandemic. And those are the countries where most immigrants and refugees would like to be anyway.

From EU refugees: The West pays, the East obeys? (Acton Institute):

The EU’s solution – forcing refugees to settle permanently in a nation of the EU’s choosing – is dangerous to, and rejected by, the refugees. The open door policy encourages thousands of people to risk their lives in order to come to Europe. Most of the immigrants choose to settle in Northern and Western European countries, which offer more generous social programs, rather than post-Communist countries like Hungary or Slovakia. According to data from Lithuania, as of March nearly 80 percent of refugees that had been relocated to that country departed for other nations within a matter of months.

This puts two EU “values” in opposition to one another: Is it moral for the EU to promise free migration to EU nationals while simultaneously forcing migrants to remain in a place they do not want to live?