Migration has long been a politicized issue in Europe but has gained particular attention since the 2015 wave of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. These migrants attempted to find safety in Europe amidst violent conflicts and state failures in their countries of origin. Many arrived by sea. The numbers of migrants arriving to Mediterranean cities in Italy and elsewhere overwhelmed local authorities and strained relations between states of the European Union, while (wealthier) countries in the north received fewer migrants, at least initially.
As Linda J. Cook points out in her preface, the original project involved migration from post-communist countries in Europe and Eurasia, primarily to destinations to the west. Russia received many migrants from Central Asian countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, who typically worked for low pay under precarious conditions. Migrants from central and east European countries moved to west European destinations (including the UK, until the Brexit referendum of 2016). If a migrants’ country of origin had joined the European Union, they had legal access to the labor market and to social protection. However, as Cook observed, their presence provoked resentment among some citizens of west European states, which could be exploited by populist movements who promised to restrict immigration.
Upon the recommendation of peer-reviewers, Cook expanded the initial focus of her work to include both the asylum-seekers who reached European shores in 2015, and the migrants escaping the conflict in Ukraine to go either west (primarily to Poland), and occasionally, east to Russia. As a result, the scope of the book is very broad, encompassing a large number of states with varying political regimes, institutions, and socioeconomic circumstances over essentially a twenty-year period. Wisely, Cook chose to focus on a select group of migrant-receiving countries, with much attention going to Italy, Poland, and Russia.
Building upon the work of political scientist Diane Sainsbury, Cook examines the relationship between the politics of migration and social welfare policies. This relationship flows in two directions: in the twenty-first century, the notion that social welfare is a costly drain on societal resources has been embraced in the narratives of the political right. After decades of exposure to the rhetoric of austerity, the idea that social welfare spending is a net cost has become deeply embedded. This discourse paints immigrants as making new demands on scarce resources. The perception that social welfare resources are strained, and that immigrants impose new demands on these resources, contributes to the hostility that some European and Russian citizens feel towards migrants. In some countries, such as Poland and Russia, “welfare nationalism” has altered existing social contracts by extending access to social welfare benefits for some categories of migrants over others. Those preferred migrants are deemed by the state to be closely related to the nationality of the host country, through shared language, heritage, and nebulous criteria of cultural affinity (which seems to be a euphemism for whiteness).
Although Cook acknowledges that some political parties, primarily on the right, seek political gain from exploiting fears of migrants, she could have gone further to probe and to critique their discourses—and to discuss the views of those who challenge xenophobia. In this volume, parties such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, receive more attention than the political actors who defend inclusive policies. The idea that migrants drain more resources than they generate is a rhetorical device; it is not a fact unless proven with empirical data. A full discussion of migration politics should include the net benefits that migrants can potentially provide to their economies over the long term: through employment in sectors that need more laborers, expanding the size of the taxpaying population, and in offsetting the health care and pension costs of an aging population. The notion that social welfare is unaffordable is one of the most pervasive and pernicious myths of contemporary neoliberal politics, which deserves to be vigorously contested at every turn.
As Cook observes, the openness of Poland and other EU states to Ukrainian refugees after Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022 stands in contrast to the skepticism towards migrants from Arab countries and sub-Saharan Africa. This is because some migrants are regarded as being in more desperate circumstances than others, and because Russia’s actions in Ukraine were seen as a direct threat to the security of European countries. It was also because some migrants were seen as more “deserving” than others, a value judgement which Cook notes can be made arbitrarily, drawing upon prejudices against groups deemed to be “outsiders.”
