Migration and Security: The Wrong End of the Stick?

Abstract

It would almost appear as if states need security threats, either because there are institutions or individuals therein who make a living out of identifying and combating such threats to the well-being of the state, or maybe because the political community is in a permanent need of defining the ‘others’ (potentially dangerous) for the benefit of being able to define who we are as people who belong together. If there is some truth in this assumption, we can perhaps at least partly explain why the collapse of communism by the end of the 1980s was followed by a growing concern among policy-makers, opinion leaders and scholars for the links between immigration, foreigners and security issues. This development could be observed in most if not all Western states. In the United States, Myron Weiner (1993) was among the first scholars to discuss all the potential risks involved with (more) international migration. Theoretically those can be manifold (Weiner and Teitelbaum, 2001). In Europe, ethnic differences and their potential for conflict within immigrant receiving states was put on the agenda time and again. Well before 11th September 2001 the many Muslims who had immigrated from the countries surrounding the Mediterranean to France and northwestern Europe and from former colonies in Asia to the United Kingdom had become the main targets of such discussions.