Majorityrights News > Category: Immigration

When jokes threaten to become reality

A long time ago at the beginning of this ‘refugee crisis’, people used to make a joke and say, “If this keeps up, liberals might start asking for a bridge to be built so that no one would need to smuggle humans across water any more”. Who could have known that this joke would become a jinx?

Watch this:

Youtube: The Bridge (28 Sep 2013)

Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad has called for the construction of a 200km long bridge from Al Huwariyah in Tunisia to Agrigento in Sicily. This is after Konrad had previously called for housing solutions to be constructed in Austria as hundreds of asylum seekers currently staying at the Traiskirchen reception centre in Lower Austria are sleeping in tents due to overcrowding there.

Education Minister Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek is tasked with devising proposals on how to integrate refugee into Austrian schools. This integration will likely be of the sort that parents of non-Muslim children will have no ability to veto. Integration of school systems never seems to come ‘organically’.

Social Minister Rudolf Hundstorfer will be looking for ways to ease the strictures of employment laws, so as to make it easier for big businesses to employ refugees, and for the purpose of lowering the standards that govern social bargaining at the enterprise and state level, the standards which Austria actually would have had to agree to have upheld upon joining the ERM back in March 1979. So now they have come full circle, and have ended up considering imposing a very ‘American’ form of social bargaining and employment laws, even though the European approach was supposed to have some significant differences.

Under the so-called emergency, the crisis that ‘demands’ compromise, one of the supposed prized qualities of the European labour market, will be dismantled for the benefit of a certain cross section of large companies which see it as being in their interest to use these migrants as a battering ram against any attempts to have any kind of organised labour movement in the continent. It is against this backdrop of the tendencies within the Austrian ruling class, that this bridge proposal is set.

Construction companies

The construction company STRABAG AG would get the contract for the bridge. STRABAG AG is a company that was created through the merger of ILBAU and STRABAG in the 1930s, both being founded by Anton Lerchbaumer. It acquired Deutsche Asphalt Group in 2002, Waltr Bau Group in 2005, it took on a majority stake in Ed Züblin in 2005, Adanti SpA, KIRCHNER Holding GmbH, F. Kirchhoff AG and Deutsche Telekom Immobilien und Service GmbH in 2008.

In 2013 the Supreme Court of the Slovak Republic stated that it believed that one of the companies of the STRABAG Group participated in bid rigging cartel of construction companies in that country. Amongst the companies involved in that cartel, was a company called Doprastav a.s., which is part of Doprastav Group. The illegal conduct centred around the D1 Highway which was constructed from 2004 and continued to have work done on it and its surroundings up to at least 2010.

STRABAG is managed by CEO Thomas Birtel. The Chairman of the supervisory board at STRABAG is Alfred Gusenbauer. Alfred Gusenbauer is an Austrian politician who until 2008 had spent his entire professional life as an employee of the Social Democratic Party of Austria or as a parliamentary representative. He headed the Social Democratic Party of Austria from 2000 to 2008, and served as Chancellor of Austria from January 2007 to December 2008. Since then he has positioned himself as a consultant and lecturer, and as a member of supervisory boards of Austrian companies, STRABAG being one of these.

Gusenbauer is known for having exploited the occurrence of the BAWAG Scandal, in which BAWAG—the bank of the Austrian Trade Union Federation—engaged in failed bets using risky undocumented derivative instruments held off-balance-sheet. After the losses became unmanageable, Fritz Verzetnitsch resigned from the Austrian Trade Union Federation in disgrace, and Gusenbauer used this opportunity to exclude all of the Trade Union leaders from the ballot lists of the Social Democratic Party, an action which moved the party to the right structurally.

STRABAG’s Gusenbauer and Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad obviously are not strangers to each other, seeing as they come from the same party and travel in the same social circles. In the world of business and politics, it’s quite often about who you know and who you’ve worked with. Aside from the fact that STRABAG is one of the largest construction companies in Austria, there is also the political connection that would exist between persons within the state and within that company’s structure.

Russian-Jewish Mafia involvement

A notable stakeholder in STRABAG is Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, a extremely wealthy Russian oligarch, who—when he is not exploiting the mineral and energy resources of impoverished Asians in Siberia—also has for some reason cultivated over the years a very amicable relationship with people who may or may not be associated with former Russian soldiers who had been veterans in Afghanistan who may be part of the presently existing heroin smuggling operations which have been occurring at an ever-heightening rate since the year 2005.

Additionally, Deripaska has a good relationship with the Russian-Israeli Mafia, which helped him with the purchase of Sayansk aluminium plant in Siberia when he was first starting up as a businessperson in the 1990s. He has a especially tight relationship with the Israeli business and crime figure known as Michael Cherney, who personally assessed Deripaska and pulled the necessary strings on his behalf. Deripaska has since operated in the debt of Cherney and the Russian-Israeli Mafia. Cherney also operates security think tank groups, which may or may not be actually just front groups which allow him and his criminal networks to plug into the stream of intelligence exchanges that go on in the War on Terror, so that he can smuggle contraband through conflict zones with less risk of detection. Cherney also publishes anti-fascist publications through the Michael Cherney Foundation which is registered as a ‘charitable foundation’.

Interfacing with activist groups

The proposal for this Africa-to-Europe 200km long bridge, whose construction contract sits at the centre of all of these groups and individuals, also is associated with a local Austrian ‘anti-racist’ activist group. That group is named Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, which in English is ‘Centre for Political Beauty’.

The Centre for Political Beauty refers to itself as a group that “makes art” for the purpose of encouraging the European peoples to adopt a more liberal-humanitarian outlook on the world. Much of what they do is done for the sake of “not rendering void of the legacy of the Holocaust”. One of their members, Massimo Sestini, is perhaps known to Majorityrights readers because he is one of the persons who has consistently been providing ‘humanistic’ photography of the migrants to various media outlets including the British Newspaper, the Guardian, since at least mid-2014. The power of images cannot be underestimated.

The Centre for Political Beauty takes its activism beyond simply creating static pieces of art, and in fact, merges art with political action while invoking shadows of past events which they believe hold immense sway over the European psyche.

Here are four relevant examples of them merging art with political action:

• They have removed sections of the Berlin Wall monument, the sections that contain Christian cross logos with names on them. They have removed some of these because they have transferred those crosses to the outer border fences of the European Union, and affixed them there. In some images African migrants are posing with the crosses for photographs. This is a kind of art creation that is apparently supposed to symbolise the idea that the internal wall between the West Germany and East Germany that was removed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is ontologically the same as the border between Europe and Africa which they believe would be removed after the fall of racially cohesive European identity.


• They plan to actually cut holes into some segments of the EU border fences on 09 November 2015, during the commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This would allow migrants to break through the fences at the precise timing of the celebrations, so that they can link the celebration of one thing, with the celebration of another thing that they plan to superimpose onto it.


• Since the idea for the creation of a bridge between Africa and Europe is a project that would take them until the year 2030 to complete if it gets started on time and isn’t thwarted in some way, they want to call on Austria to supply state funding for 1,000 rescue platforms to be permanently installed into international waters between North Africa and Italy. The first one of these platforms will be unveiled in the water on 01 October 2015, in Licata Harbour. The press will be invited at 0630 on that day.


• Dead African and Middle Eastern bodies will be exhumed and transported from the sea and into the capital city of Germany. The bodies will be displayed and placed into open shallow graves in plain view, so that persons running the media operation can then talk about the ongoing crisis in terms that have allusions to the narratives of the Jewish Holocaust.

They are absolutely serious. It would not be hyperbolic to say that the intention behind these actors who have come together to make these things happen, is that they would like to inflict extreme demographic damage onto the European Union.

The resources being allocated to these plans, and all such operations, stand in stark contrast to the fact that countries in the South of Europe have been placed under austerity policies so harsh that civil society in countries like Greece are breaking down, and money allocated to even basic state functions like national defence have been so low that the topic of whether enough counties are meeting the basic NATO obligations is often raised.

Yet, mysteriously, certain richer state governments of north-western and south-central Europe seem to be very capable of sourcing funds for extravagant migrant rescue operations and even funds for building a 200km long bridge. Where is it coming from? It’s coming from your bank account via taxation.

“Keep Polish goats safe! Throw out all Muslims.”

30,000 Poles shouting “fuck Islam”

“Fuck allah akbar! fuck Muslims”

Going for the coup de grâce

E.U. votes to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers across Europe:

BRUSSELS — With Europe’s refugee crisis escalating, European leaders on Tuesday approved a plan to spread asylum seekers across the continent over the objection of Central European nations.

The plan to distribute 120,000 migrants across Europe is a first step toward easing the plight of the men, women and children who have been shunted from one European nation to another in recent weeks, a grim procession of human need in one of the world’s richest regions.

But the decision to override the dissenters means the European Union will be sending thousands of people to nations that do not want them, raising questions about both the future of the ­28-nation bloc and the well-being of the asylum seekers consigned to those countries. Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia voted against the measure, a rare note of discord for a body that usually operates by consensus on key matters of national sovereignty. Finland abstained.

For all the controversy, the plan would find homes for just 20 days’ worth of new arrivals to Europe, a measure of the scale of the crisis and the baby steps the continent has taken to address it. E.U. leaders will meet in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss broader measures to stem the flow, including bolstering the region’s border controls and stepping up support for the overburdened refugee camps along Syria’s borders.

But after Tuesday’s bitter vote, it was unclear how much common ground remained among leaders.

“Some people will say today that Europe is divided because the decision was not taken by consensus,” said Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg. “If we had not done this, Europe would have been even more divided and its credibility would have been even more undermined.”

Wealthy nations such as Germany have faced tens of thousands of asylum seekers arriving every week. Leaders there have welcomed Syrians fleeing their war-ravaged country, but have also said they cannot shoulder the entire burden on their own.

“We are doing this out of solidarity and responsibility, but also out of our own interest,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said after the meeting. He said the agreement would “prevent more people who are currently in Greece from coming to Germany.” The country expects up to 1 million asylum seekers this year alone.

A first step

Proponents of the plan acknowledged Tuesday that it was just a first step to address the much bigger crisis. According to the U.N. refugee agency, more than 477,000 people have arrived in Europe so far this year via often-dangerous sea crossings, and 6,000 now land on Europe’s shores every day —up sharply even from August, when the figure stood around 4,200 a day.

Germany’s national railway company announced Tuesday that it was suspending rail service to Austria because its trains have been overwhelmed with refugees. It was the latest example of national infrastructure apparently unable to meet the challenge.

Central European leaders condemned the vote, warning that Europe would suffer as a result of the plan to force them to accept asylum seekers.

Breaking down Europe’s migrant crisis

A look at the numbers behind the stream of refugees flowing into Europe as political leaders struggle to ease the burden.

“Very soon we will see that the emperor has no clothes,” Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said on Twitter. “Common sense lost today.”

The numbers will be drawn from Syrians, Iraqis and Eritreans coming ashore in Greece and Italy. Germany, France and Spain will take the most. Of the 120,000 spots approved on Tuesday, only 66,000 were immediately assigned to specific countries, with the rest to be assigned later. An additional 40,000 slots were agreed to earlier in the summer.

The final agreement did not include an earlier proposal to penalize countries that did not take in asylum seekers, so it was not immediately clear how the E.U. would deal with nations that refuse to comply with the plan.

At least one country, Slovakia, said after the decision that it would not take in any of the migrants.

“As long as I am prime minister, mandatory quotas will not be implemented on Slovak territory,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico told his parliament’s E.U. affairs committee.

Almost 1,300 people will be sent to Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has crusaded against the mostly Muslim asylum seekers, saying they are on a campaign to de-Christianize Europe. He has built a 109-mile ­razor-tipped fence to keep them away from his country’s frontier with Serbia and in recent days has started to expand this barrier to the borders with Romania and Croatia.

Despite Hungary’s opposition to the asylum seekers, a government spokesman, Zoltan Kovacs, said Tuesday that his country would abide by the plan.

“This is a compulsory decision, and we are going to respect it,” said Kovacs. He said Hungary’s leaders looked forward to discussing the “real causes” of the crisis on Wednesday, adding that solutions include reestablishing border controls and improving the refugee camps closer to Syria.

Refugee preferences

Under the distribution effort, each nation would continue to make its own decisions about whether to grant asylum to individual applicants. Hungary, which grants just a tiny fraction of asylum requests, could continue to be far harsher than Germany, which is relatively generous, particularly to Syrians.

There are few guarantees that asylum seekers would actually stay in the country to which they’re assigned, especially given the lack of border controls between most E.U. nations. Migrants would risk losing benefits if they left one country for another, but, for example, few may want to stay in Poland, next door to Germany’s high wages.

Nor was it clear how E.U. policymakers would take into account the refugees’ preferences. Some countries offer far more generous benefits than others. Many refugees also want to be reunited with family members who already live in Europe.

“They say when you are in Vienna, you can go anywhere,” said Wassim, 28, from Aleppo, Syria, who made it through a bustling border crossing at Nickelsdorf on the Austria-Hungary frontier. He hoped to travel quickly onward to the Netherlands. He gave only his first name out of fear of possible reprisals against relatives in Syria.

Ahead of the E.U. decision, the U.N. refugee agency had pushed hard for action, saying that further delays would create an even more dangerous situation for the streams of people fleeing the Syrian conflict. More than 4 million Syrians have already moved to the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

“It’s very, very clear that there is a need for a united common response from European countries,” said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency.

Despite Europe’s divisions, some refugee advocates said policymakers seem to be slowly coming to terms with the crisis.

“What is widely acknowledged now is that the conditions in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan are going to become untenable for a large number of people,” said Madeline Garlick, a guest researcher at the Center for Migration Law at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “We are further than we were some time ago.”

          Lech Poznan fans protest immigration of refugees by boycotting Europa League opener
         
           
          Poznan (Poland) stadium: UEFA announced 1Euro of each ticket goes to #refugees #nrx THIS is white identity on display

While most of the clubs across Europe are showing their support towards the refugees, Polish football club Lech Poznan is completely against the cause, The Guardian reported. The supporters carried out a planned boycott during the Europa League match against Portuguese club Belenenses, as they were against UEFA’s decision to donate a euro from every ticket sold to the refugee cause.

The Inea Stadium which had an average attendance of 20,000 people last season, saw a small crowd of 3,000 supporters on the day. The match ended in a tie, with both teams finishing goalless.

The fans were clearly against the idea of refugees moving to Poland and put up a banner which read “Stop Islamization” over one of the stadium entrances. This though was not the first time that the team’s supporters committed such an act. On a previous occasion, the team hung a banner that read “This is obvious and simple for us, we do not want refugees in Poland”.

While Poznan was the only club to participate in a boycott, cases of the anti-refugee movement have also been reported in Olympique Lyonnais from Ligue 1 and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The Bundesliga and the Premier League teams though do not share this sentiment and have shown their support towards refugees on several occasions.

Lech Poznan display their hostility towards refugees in Poland (Image source: 101GreatGoals)

To draw the lines of friends and enemies properly this time and then to find the martial spirit which knows no compassion for an enemy that will not comply with the requirements of our existence and well being.

To lose compassion, to lose anti-racism, which is anti - viz. against - social classification (and group discrimination accordingly), to find the will to “other” even their fairly benign individuals, classifying them as being of the mortal group pattern and finding the will to smash them, as need be, on our behalf, anything to drive them away from any imposition upon us - but most of all, losing compassion for those who would bring them upon us.

On African population explosion,
Steve Sailer, September 19, 2015

African Population Explosion: The Graph That Explains the 2015 Migrant Crisis:

Population-1950-2015

The demographers of the United Nation’s Population Division have quietly released their World Population Prospects: 2015 Revision report.

Above is a graph I put together from their new data that explains much about the “Migrant Crisis” of 2015.

As you can see, way back in 1950, the population of the Middle East was only 18% as great as the population of Europe, while Sub-Saharan Africa was only 33% as large. Even in 2000, the Middle East had only 49% of the population of Europe, while Africa had almost caught up to Europe with 88% of its population.

But from 2000 to 2015, the Middle East added 124 million people, making it now 65% as populous as Europe.

In this century alone, Sub-Saharan Africa has added 320 million people, making it 130% as populated as Europe.

Some of this information about the past is new. For example, the U.N.’s estimate of the population of the continent of Africa back in 2010 has grown by 13 million people, or over 1% between the 2012 Revision and the 2015 Revision. When it comes to population, the past just isn’t what it used to be.

But what about the future?

As a general pattern, the U.N. has found, the completeness of the counts tends to be worse in the fastest growing countries. Thus, the harder the U.N. has looked at Africa in this decade, the more people and more new babies it keeps uncovering.

It turns out that while the total fertility rate in Africa is falling, it’s falling quite a bit more slowly than the U.N. had expected as recently as back in the previous decade. Sub-Saharan Africa simply isn’t behaving like the rest of the world.

The upward adjustment in Africa’s population projections in the 2012 Revision of World Population Prospects came as a shock. But the 2015 Revision forecasts Africa’s population in 2100, about one lifetime from now, to be another 5% higher than the U.N. projected just back in 2012.

Here’s my graph of the 2015 numbers:

Population-1950-2100

Wow.

The U.N. now projects that, despite lower fertility in some Muslim countries such as Iran, the population of the Middle East will surpass that of Europe in 2045 and reach 937 million by 2100.

As for Sub-Saharan Africa, the U.N. foresees the population growing to 3,935,000,000 (3.9 billion and change) by 2100. (The total population of Africa and the Middle East will be 4,872,000,000.)

That’s probably not going to happen due to some combination of (A) intelligent self-restraint, (B) mass migration, and (C) Malthusian Nightmares (war, famine, disease, etc. etc.) keeping the population of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2100 from being more than six times as great as Europe, which would be an 18-fold increase in 150 years.

Keep in mind that there’s not a one to one relationship between population growth and emigration. In general, people try to assess whether the future at home looks brighter than the present. But people in Africa and the Middle East can see their countries’ futures will be more crowded and constrained.

Personally, I hope the reason that this graph doesn’t prove accurate is largely (A) intelligent self-restraint. But at present, white people don’t seem to be making much of an effort to facilitate and encourage reasonable family planning in Africa. Because that would be, you know, racist.

Which is the worst thing in the world, much worse than the U.N.’s population forecast.

READ MORE...

All of the Croats have been arrested, and the migrant trains have been stopped.

Independent.ie, ‘Hungary seizes migrant train from Croatia, disarms 40 Croatian police and arrests train driver’, 18 Sep 2015:

Hungarian authorities seized a train bringing migrants into the country from Croatia, disarmed 40 police on board and detained the driver after over 4,000 migrants arrived across their border, the head of the Hungarian disaster unit said.

Gyorgy Bakondi told reporters the Croatian train that shipped the refugees and migrants to Magyarboly came without any prior notice, like the rest of the new arrivals coming on other trains and on buses.

Hungary registered and disarmed the 40 police who escorted the train, he said according to a video posted on M1 state television’s website.

[...]

The row between the two countries and their respective handling of the migration crisis has deepened as Hungary’s foreign minister on Friday accused Croatia of pushing migrants to break the law by “illegally” breaching Hungarian borders.

“Rather than respecting the laws in place in the EU, they (Croatia), are encouraging the masses to break the law, because illegally crossing a border is breaking the law,” said Peter Szijjarto, speaking in Belgrade following talks with his Serbian counterpart. [...]

It seems to be a matter of incentives here. The Croats are trying to avoid having to deal with the problem by sending the migrants deeper into the European Union, because they don’t want to have to keep and process the migrants that have already entered Croatia. Hungary’s way of dealing with the migrants is to block entry with a ‘fast solution fence’ along all the areas that are not separated from other countries by a river.

If Hungary continues to maintain its position, they may create a domino effect of incentives whereby all other countries will have to erect fences that face outward, and move migrants outward after processing and declining their refugee applications, rather than just passing the buck ever deeper into the continent.

Providing that this continues, Hungary may be seen as having done a lot to save Europe from disaster.

                               
                                                                            It can be done.

Croatia puts migrants on buses to Hungary:

Croatia started transporting migrants to Hungary by bus on Friday (18 September) after the country’s prime minister said Croatia cannot cope with the influx and will redirect people towards Hungary and Slovenia instead.

Croatian police put refugees on to more than 10 buses in Beli Manastir, a small town 6 km from the Hungarian border, and some 30 km from the Serbian border.

Word has it that Juncker is socially conservative and therefore does not relish the migrant crisis; but he is a businessman who is looking after business interests for himself, business constituents and to maintain his position as an EU representative of those interests.
                           
That is why he felt constrained to put across a plan to try to preserve the Schengen zone by diffusing responsibility among its members and (in his theory) that might dilute the impact of the migrants. 

An additional aspect to the psychology of his position is that he is from Luxembourg, one of the smallest European nations. One can imagine business persons from small countries finding the delay and tedium of having to go through border controls as they move in and out of a Luxembourg every 15 minutes an insufferable handicap.

Nevertheless, from a WN/ethnonationalist perspective, particularly until such time as the borders of the entire zone are secure from non-European imposition and those who are already here are drastically reduced in number by means of repatriation, the Schengen zone will have to give way to tighter national border controls.

From an ethnonationalist point of view, in any event, there has to be more national accountability to their own and to European people as a whole.

Is this the end of Schengen?

         

Sep 16 2015: In last week’s State of the Union speech, European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker referred to the Schengen Area – a border-free travel zone made up of 26 European countries – as “a unique symbol of European integration”. After Germany’s recent announcement that it would be “temporarily reintroducing border controls”, some say that unique symbol is in jeopardy.

A look back at the past 30 years since the agreement was signed can help clarify what exactly is at risk.

What is Schengen?

The Schengen Area is made up of 26 European countries that have removed border controls at their shared crossings. The agreement was signed in 1985 by five members of the EU, and came into force 10 years later. Following the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, the Schengen agreement became part of European law. That meant all new EU members had to sign up to it, although Britain and Ireland had already been given the right to opt out. As the map below shows, four non-EU countries – Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein – are also members of the area.

Why are people talking about the end of Schengen?

We are experiencing a global refugee crisis. Around the world, 60 million people have been forced to flee war, violence and human rights abuse – levels not seen since World War II. Hundreds and thousands of those people have attempted the often perilous journey to Europe in search of a better, safer life.

Some of them haven’t made it – while the image of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a beach in Turkey shocked the world, many more have died trying to get to Europe. According to figures from the International Organization for Migration, 2015 could end up being the deadliest on record.

Of those who do make it over, the majority have been heading to Germany. The country expects to take in 1 million asylum seekers by the end of the year, more than all other EU countries collectively received in 2014. It is in response to these huge numbers that Germany decided to re-impose its internal border controls. The country’s interior minister said the move aimed to “limit the current inflows to Germany and to return to orderly procedures when people enter the country”.

Some have been quick to emphasize the temporary nature of this decision. But with countries such as Austria and the Netherlands now following suit, others think Schengen’s days are numbered.

Has anything like this happened before?

The option for a country to temporarily reinstate border controls was actually built into the original agreement, as the European Commission pointed out last weekend: “The temporary reintroduction of border controls between member states is an exceptional possibility explicitly foreseen in and regulated by the Schengen Borders Code.”

In the past, countries have chosen to exercise that right. For example, in 2006 Germany reinstated border controls when it hosted the FIFA World Cup. France did the same in 2005, following the terrorist attacks in London. In what was perhaps a precursor of the troubles to come, during the post-Arab Spring mass migration of 2011, politicians in France and Italy called for deep reforms to the agreement.

So what’s different this time?

Even in Schengen’s early days, critics pointed to one big flaw: freedom of movement within the Schengen area only works if the common external borders are fortified. With many frontline countries such as Greece already experiencing crises of their own, the task of strengthening those external borders has become even tougher.

The stakes were raised this summer after a heavily armed terrorist suspect was apprehended on board a train travelling between three Schengen countries. The ease with which he had moved around the area prompted some to refer to Europe’s open-border policy as a terrorist’s paradise.

Perhaps more importantly, people’s attitudes within the area are starting to change. This recent crisis is just one in a long line of turbulent events for Europe these past months and years. Whether they are right to do so, some blame the union for these developments. While Schengen and the free movement of people might be at the core of the European project, for some that no longer seems worth fighting for. A poll back in July showed that the majority of western Europeans would like to see Schengen scrapped, and last year former French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for it to be “immediately suspended”.

But with so many people now displaced by conflict and violence, others argue that the European project – which has brought peace to a continent previously locked in war – has never been more important.

As plans to share out asylum seekers more equitably across the European Union make little progress, many will be closely watching the developments for hints of what it means for Schengen.