3071-The political economy of new slavery

2
Migration and Security: The Wrong
End of the Stick?
Jeroen Doomernik
Introduction
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. Relatively
minor incidents are easily blown out of all proportion 1 and the many
examples of well-integrated Muslim immigrants (and their descendants)
are just as ignored as any other aspect of ‘normal’ everyday life. It should
be noted, however, that not all European states respond in similar ways
to such cultural challenges. Those that are founded on the assumption
of cultural homogeneity (for example, France and Germany) are more
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