Slovakia says it will take in 200 Syrian refugees to help fellow European Union countries cope with an influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants—but with a condition:
All 200 of them have to be Christians.
“In Slovakia, we don’t have mosques,” an Interior Ministry spokesman explained, arguing that Muslim migrants wouldn’t feel at home in the Central European country because of its tiny Muslim population. So, he said, “we only want to choose the Christians.”
The stipulation is just one example of how the EU’s migration crisis is challenging Western European ideals of multiculturalism and stoking debate within the bloc over the meaning of integration, burden sharing and common values.
Facing a backlash from voters not used to much immigration from other continents, politicians in Central Europe and the Baltics are arguing that a growing stream of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans is Western Europe’s problem—and that large numbers of non-European, non-Christian people don’t belong in their countries.
The brewing conflict—set to intensify this fall as officials in Brussels renew efforts to relocate some of the tens of thousands of migrants now stranded in Greece and Italy—is pitting old EU countries such as Italy and Germany against the newer, former Communist member-states in the east. In countries that long were strong proponents of tighter EU bonds as they sought to pull away from Russian dominance, the concern that Brussels is redirecting migrants their way is energizing a field of euroskeptic politicians.
“We were under the supervision of Moscow once,” said Ondrej Benesik, chairman of the European Affairs Committee in the lower house of the Czech parliament. “Now a lot of people have the impression…that the same is happening in Brussels.”
The surge of people arriving on European shores or coming overland shows no signs of abating. In July, the number of migrants crossing into the EU hit a monthly record of 107,500—more than triple the number in July 2014—the EU border agency Frontex said Tuesday.
Among the former Communist states on the EU’s eastern edge, the crisis is felt most dramatically in Hungary, which has registered 120,000 asylum requests so far this year. The country’s location in the bloc’s southeast makes it the logical entry point for many Middle Eastern migrants who cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece and then attempt to venture to more-prosperous Northern Europe through the Balkans.
“We are afraid of them,” Hungarian pensioner Veronika Toth, who lives in a farm alone in the southern village of Asotthalom near the border with Serbia, said of the traveling migrants. “They come in groups of 20 and sit to take a rest in our gardens.”
On Tuesday, Hungarian officials said they would deploy several thousand police to patrol its 110-mile border with Serbia and introduce legislation that could punish illegal border-crossings with prison of up to four years.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose government is also building a razor-wire fence along the Serbian border to block the flow of migrants, is casting himself as a protector of European culture. He blames wealthier EU members to the west for drawing so many migrants to the continent with lenient asylum rules and welfare policies and forcing Hungary to deal with the fallout.
“Left-wing policies have led to illegal immigrants flooding Europe, threatening European countries with an unprecedented social, economic, cultural and security conflict,” the parliamentary group of Mr. Orban’s governing Fidesz party said last week.
Elsewhere in the EU’s east, the number of migrants has been minuscule in comparison—and politicians are fighting to keep it that way. In the first three months of this year, about 83,175 people submitted asylum requests in Germany—40% of the European total. In Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and the three Baltic states—which combined have about the same population as Germany—the total was 6,080.
The EU’s executive body, the European Commission, is eager to spread the burden more evenly. Brussels proposed in May that 40,000 migrants now in Italy and Greece and “in clear need of international protection” be relocated elsewhere in the EU. A quota system based on each member state’s economic output, unemployment rate, total population and number of migrants already taken in would help determine each country’s allotment.
Another 20,000 people currently in refugee camps in the Middle East and elsewhere outside Europe, many of whom have fled the conflict in Syria, were to be resettled inside the EU.
But in June, Central European countries banded together to reject the quota-system plan. Instead, some said they would take in small numbers of migrants on a voluntary basis.
Explaining why Slovakia would take in 200 Syrian Christians, as opposed to the 1,100 migrants that the EU had originally proposed, Prime Minister Robert Fico told an Austrian newspaper last week that the crisis wasn’t his country’s fault.
“I only have one question: Who bombed Libya?” Mr. Fico said. “Who created problems in North Africa? Slovakia? No.”
Slovakia also is offering temporary housing to 500 migrants requesting asylum in neighboring Austria, where shelters are over capacity. Those migrants need not all be Christian, the government says.
EU officials have signaled they will try to renew the redistribution efforts this fall. But politicians across the region have been making a point of showing they are willing to stand up to Brussels on the migration issue. In the process, they are roiling the political landscape in many of their countries.
Latvia’s National Alliance, a junior coalition partner in the government, loudly protested Prime Minister Laimdota Straujuma’s promise to take in 250 refugees—even after she rejected Brussels’s request to take nearly three times that number. Several hundred demonstrators also took to the streets of Latvia’s capital, Riga, in protest earlier this month.
In Poland, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz’s plan to accept 2,000 migrants—1,600 fewer than what the EU had called for—has turned into a wedge issue ahead of October’s parliamentary elections.
The politicians appear to be heeding public opinion. In a June survey by pollster TNS, 61% of Poles said their country couldn’t afford to accept more migrants. In Slovakia, a June SITA poll found that 70% opposed the country taking in Middle Eastern and North African migrants under the proposed EU quotas.
In the Czech Republic, a June poll by the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences found that more than 70% of Czechs said the country should accept no refugees or immigrants from Syria or North Africa—while 53% said they were open to receiving refugees from Ukraine.
“The Czech Republic for a long time was a homogenous society, so we are not used to different races and cultures,” Mr. Benesik, the Czech member of parliament, said. “A lot of people would say, ‘You are racist’ or ‘You are xenophobic.’…We are just more cautious.”
Officials in Western Europe counter that the refugee crisis is an emergency that can only be resolved if all member states share the burden more evenly.
“There are some EU states who clearly see Europe as some kind of benefit community where one only participates when there is money to be had,” German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told the tabloid daily Bild last week. “Those who carry on like this will destroy Europe.”
After fighting the EU’s quota proposal, which would have sent about 1,850 migrants to the Czech Republic, the government in Prague said it would take in 1,500 people on a voluntary basis as long as it was able to handpick those deemed able to integrate into Czech society and the labor force.
The bigger problem, some Czech officials say, is that the EU’s attempt to require member states to take in refugees is weakening support for European integration while ignoring the need to deter migrants from coming to Europe in the first place.
“For the first time ever, Europe seems impotent to deal with an issue,” Tomas Prouza, European affairs adviser to the Czech prime minister, said. “We managed to deal with the economic crisis, we managed to deal with everything else—I think this is the first time that it is easy to make the case that Europe doesn’t work.”