6-22-17 This enthusiasm for a more centralized, more powerful EU is not shared with equal enthusiasm by European citizens: 48% want powers returned to the individual member countries.
Citizens, overall, do not feel they have benefited from European integration in the same way Europe’s elite does. Whereas 71% of elites report feeling they have gained something from the EU, the figure among the public is only 34%.
Even more worrisome for national leaders, a clear majority of the public — 54% — feel that their country was a better place to live 20 years ago, before the euro existed.
The findings of the Chatham House survey reflect a growing public frustration with Brussels’ tendency to ride roughshod over their voices and concerns. In a recent Pew poll a median of 53% across nine European countries surveyed, excluding the UK, support having their own national referendums on continued EU membership. And while most do not want to leave the bloc altogether, many European citizens want to ensure that their voices are heard.
That is unlikely to happen: engagement and consultation have never been Brussels’ strong points. According to Fredrik Erixon, a Brussels-based economist and co-founder of European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), the EU’s gaping lack of democratic accountability and legitimacy and its determination to plow ahead with integration regardless of popular support (or lack thereof) will ultimately be its undoing.
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/06/22/eu-political-class-pushes-integration-rides-roughshod-over-citizens-concerns-frustrations/
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1-29-17 Berlin made mistakes with its “open-door” refugee policy, which “went off course” and saw hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entering the country over the past two years, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble admits.
The German government is currently trying “to improve what went off course in 2015,” Schaeuble told Die Welt’s Sunday edition in an interview. “We politicians are human beings and we also make mistakes, but one can at least learn from them,” he maintained.
On Friday, Handelsblatt cited a Finance Ministry report that shows Germany spent €21.7 billion ($23.3 billion) on tackling the refugee crisis in 2016. https://www.infowars.com/german-official-we-regret-open-borders/
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12-27-16 Italian businesses have lost billions of dollars due to refugee related problems such as counterfeiting, shoplifting and illegal vendors. Many of the refugees don’t have jobs, putting a strain on government budgets. Only 34,000 of the 1.2 million refugees in Germany have found jobs. Shariah law is gradually being implemented in some of the countries, as officials accommodate their intolerant religious views.
The European Union set up a quota system requiring member countries to accept a certain number of refugees. The refugees mostly arrive by boat in Turkey, Greece or Italy, and then disperse throughout Europe. They are not screened; there is no way to determine their true nationality or names. The number of refugees is likely to increase, as the atrocities in Aleppo, Syria, continue escalating. News of the free welfare from Europe’s socialist and borderline socialist countries has spread to Africa, and so migrants from that continent – not even refugees fleeing persecution – are now flooding the shores of Italy even more than Greece. The Balkans closed its borders in March, but smugglers are still getting the refugees to western Europe.
Professor Anna Bono of the University of Turin, an expert in African migration, revealed: "in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa there are advertisements inciting people to go to Italy, explaining that everything here is free.” Half of the prostitutes in Italy are Nigerian.
Obama is following suit, allowing thousands of refugees into the U.S. Each one costs taxpayers $64,370 for their first five years here; 91 percent receive food stamps and 68 percent receive cash assistance. Of the total 85,000 refugees admitted into the U.S. last year, a record 38,901 were Muslims, a higher number than Christians admitted.
There were 12,587 refugees from Syria alone, 99 percent who were Muslims.
In contrast, a country very similar to us, Australia, announced in October that it would not be accepting any refugees, with few exceptions (like Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech.)
https://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2016/12/27/europe-reaping-what-it-sowed-with-open-borders-policy-for-muslim-refugees-n2263851
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12-15-16
The birth surge is encouraging news for Germany, which has the world’s lowest birthrate (excepting Japan, Singapore, S. Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan*). As in many developed countries, “there’s a dearth of millennials” having babies to replenish the ranks of workers who help finance pensions and health care for retirees, says Stijn Hoorens, a Rand Corp. demographer in Brussels. Immigrants are generally in their childbearing years, and once established in their host countries they tend to have bigger families than native-born counterparts, Hoorens says.... German-born moms have an average of 1.4 kids....
In the U.S. a recent study by the Pew Research Center found that foreign-born women now account for 23 percent of births, though immigrants represent only 14 percent of the population. “Were it not for the increase in births to immigrant women, the annual number of U.S. births would have declined since 1970,” the study said.
Germany has Europe’s largest immigrant population, including 3 million with Turkish roots. The country is still short of the 2.1 babies for every woman of childbearing age that demographers say is needed to prevent population decline. The recent influx of refugees could help with that, as most come from countries such as Afghanistan and Syria, where average family sizes exceed those in Europe, Hoorens says.
Births had started to inch upward even before the arrival of almost 2 million refugees over the past three years. Thomas Bernar, head of the maternity clinic at the Helios Kliniken hospital in Pforzheim, a heavily immigrant city, says his clinic had logged almost 1,600 deliveries in 2016 as of Dec. 9, more than the total 1,479 for all of 2015. The hospital is expanding its maternity ward from 17 to 24 beds and hiring more midwives and doctors.
The boom may not last: second-generation immigrants tend to adopt the childbearing habits of their host countries. The birthrate among Mexican-born women in the U.S., for example, has fallen more than 26 percent over the past decade, according to Pew. That decline has been offset by more-recent immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East who tend to have more children. This raises the question of what impact President-elect Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant position will have on the birthrate. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/europe-s-migrant-flood-brings-germany-a-much-needed-baby-boom
*see for birthrates: http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-lowest-birth-rates-in-the-world.html
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flashback:
-Reisepass photo: Alamy
4-20-2012 Mr Sarkozy has threatened to pull France out of Europe’s border-free travel zone if more is not done to tackle illegal immigration. The Franco-German proposal will be discussed at a meeting of EU interior ministers next week.
The EU’s passport-free travel zone has been under unprecedented pressure since April last year after Italy gave residence permits to more than 25,000 Arab migrants, allowing them unfettered access to the rest of the continent.
France, the likely destination of the mainly French-speaking Tunisian immigrants, responded by temporarily closing a key railway frontier with Italy and by introducing tough extra checks for papers on immigrants.
In March, Britain joined Germany, France, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Sweden to demand EU intervention to plug a hole that is allowing illegal immigration via Greece into the rest of Europe. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/9216791/Germany-and-France-try-to-curb-open-borders.html
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