3071-The political economy of new slavery

38 Migration and Security
likely to see diversity as a threat than those that have more plural
traditions (for instance Britain, the Netherlands or Belgium). Yet even
within the latter states we have been witnessing an increased sense of
alienation, projected by the native populations onto the immigrant
populations in general and the Muslims among them in particular and
vice versa. We can merely observe this trend and no analysis allows us
to establish the causal relationships beyond reasonable doubt. But even
then, the increased focus on security issues as arising out of immigration
and immigrants will certainly not have helped to decrease tensions.
Above, the suggestion might have transpired that this ‘securitization’
of immigration and immigrants solely came about because a new threat
had to be defined. This obviously would be too simple, since migration
patterns and the size of migration flows started to change at around
the same time that the Soviet Union started to crumble. What’s more,
with the Cold War being over, the West lost much interest in regions
that soon thereafter were to become the scenes of massive human rights
violations.
First of all, we are to have a closer look at those flows – taking the
European Union as an example. Subsequently, we will discuss what
types of related changes the world as a whole has gone through. The
main issues to be explored are the effects globalization has on migration
patterns and volumes in general, the predominantly defensive strategies
most, if not all, developed states have developed in response and the
unforeseen consequences thereof; an increase in the smuggling and
trafficking of human beings being one of the most significant among
them. This frequently appears to lead to situations of vulnerability and
exploitation of migrants, in its most extreme form turning them into
modern-day slaves.
Migration in a globalized world
Even though fears concerning hordes of people migrating from East
to West (images of millions of prospective migrants sitting on suitcases
awaiting their chances were invoked in the media) never came true,
considerable migration did take place after the collapse of communist
regimes in Central Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In
the beginning of the 1990s, Germany alone saw the arrival of more
immigrants than the United States of America in the same period
(Doomernik, 1997b). A large proportion of new arrivals was made up
by ethnic Germans, so-called Aussiedler, who had an automatic right to
German citizenship. 2 These migrants were among the few privileged