Europe Tightens Regulations for Admitting Refugees

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

European liberals were battered by the populist wave that began in 2023 with Geert Wilders’s surprise election victory in the Netherlands. It continued through 2024 with state elections in Germany, local elections in the Czech Republic, the Freedom Party’s first-place finish in Austria, and the collapse of the French government.

As a result of a massive failure to manage migration policy and its consequences, the political establishment in country after country is losing ground to radical movements on the right.

Meeting in Brussels last October, European Union leaders faced a groundswell of demands for tightening their borders and making the bloc a more hostile destination for migrants and asylum seekers, following this recent surge in support for anti-immigrant parties.

The most prominent topic was migration, with EU leaders agreeing on a shift in the European Council’s approach to the issue. The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, acknowledged this was a major challenge. He indicated the gathering would “focus on concrete measures to prevent irregular migration including strengthened control of our external borders, enhanced partnerships and reinforced return policies.”

The tenor of the debate was a far cry from 2015, when the EU was faced with a migration crisis. Well over a million migrants and refugees, mainly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, sought help then. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU’s dominant national leader at the time, famously said, “We can manage that.”

The real pressure on municipalities and the sense of chaos and disorder, however, benefited the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which entered the federal parliament for the first time in 2017 and became the largest opposition party. It still is, as an election approaches.

Things calmed down somewhat after that. But numbers began to rise again more recently. In the first half of 2024, the EU received 513,000 applications for asylum. This was the same as in the previous year, which was the most since the 2015–2016 refugee crisis. At the end of June 2024, there were 925,000 cases awaiting a first instance decision.

Nationalist rhetoric is no longer confined to the fringes of the political spectrum across the EU. Anti-immigrant sentiment today features dominantly in public debates, after years of populists amplifying cultural anxieties and accusing governments of having lost control of their sovereign borders.

In recent months, nearly a dozen European countries have instituted some form of border restrictions to deter migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Poland last October announced a temporary halt to processing asylum requests from migrants arriving from neighbouring Belarus, invoking a security threat. Germany’s Olaf Scholz instituted border controls last summer to stop undocumented migrants from crossing into Germany. Six other countries, including Italy, France and Austria, have introduced border checks.

Most EU governments have chosen to appease anti-migrant sentiment. A rights-based vision of migration and asylum has become a political vulnerability, replaced with a security approach stressing law and order.

The passage of the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum in May 2024 represents the first major policy agreement in over a decade, intended to accelerate procedures and enhance cooperation and solidarity between member states. It calls for higher walls for “Fortress Europe” and tougher rules for asylum-seeking refugees.

The follow-up October gathering focused on concrete measures to prevent irregular migration, including strengthened control of external borders and reinforced return policies for migrants. EU leaders spent hours discussing migrant processing centres, speedier deportations and “hybrid warfare” by hostile powers using migrants to destabilize EU countries.

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told journalists “there is a desire to work on pragmatic solutions.” In a novel move, she concluded a new partnership with Albania, a non-EU country, under which Italy would send up to 36,000 asylum applicants per year to process their claims externally.

“Mass illegal immigration is a phenomenon no EU member state can handle alone,” Meloni told a joint news conference in Rome with her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, in November 2023.

The Netherlands is mulling a plan that would send rejected asylum seekers to Uganda. “We see that there is a different mood in Europe,” Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof declared at the October conference.

“A great number of Europeans are tired of us helping people from outside who commit crimes,” maintained Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. “It can’t go on like this. Therefore, there is a limit as to how many people we can help.”

“The peoples of Europe have had enough of illegal migration, failed economic policies and the bureaucrats in Brussels,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared. He even recently threatened to send buses of migrants to Brussels

Speaking to reporters after the one-day summit, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said EU leaders had discussed the idea of “developing return hubs outside the European Union” for people with no right to stay.

“If you listen to Orban and Meloni at times and others like Marine Le Pen over the years, the rhetoric has been as harsh and as virulent as what we hear from politicians like Trump in the United States,” maintains Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

So is the lifeboat full? And all this was before Europe faced a new “Trump America.”

 

Donald Trump and the 2024 Jewish Vote

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

How did American Jews vote in the November 5, 2024 presidential election? There’s no simple answer. American Jews are a hard-to-define religious and ethnic group spread across multiple American Census categories, possessing last names from at least a dozen different languages and clustered in places that are often overwhelmingly non-Jewish. It takes a team of demographers and sociologists to determine a plausible American Jewish population figure.

So deciding who qualifies as a Jewish voter is not that easy. Must they feel a sense of belonging to the Jewish people, however defined? Or can they be “simply” Jewish, perhaps with a non-Jewish partner and children not being brought up as Jews? (After all, we have Jews by birth who are “anti-Zionists” and supporters of Palestinian efforts to destroy Israel.) That’s why figures vary widely.

American Jews number less than 2.5 per cent of the total U.S. population. To be sure, Jews vote in much greater percentages (approximately 80 per cent) than the rest of the American public (about 66 per cent). But the Jewish role in American politics goes well beyond the ballot box. In 2016, the Jerusalem Post reported on a study showing that Jews donate 50 per cent of all funding to the Democratic Party and 25 percent of all funding to the Republican Party. For the 2024 election, Forbes revealed that the top 15 donors to the Kamala Harris campaign were all people who identified as Jewish.

For about a century, American Jews, however defined, have been a reliable piece of the Democratic Party base, usually delivering two-thirds or more of their votes to the party’s presidential nominee. Over the last half century, going back to the 1968 election, Jews have favored the Democratic candidate by about 71 to 29 per cent. But in 2024, change was in the air, despite the absurd claims by some people that Donald Trump was an “antisemite.”

It turns out this proved largely baseless, according to the “2024 Jewish Vote Analysis,” a report released on November 20, 2024 by WPA Intelligence, a conservative political consultancy and analytics firm. In examining available exit polling, city and county data, and precinct data, it suggested that Trump’s strongest gains were among “those who live the most Jewish lives and reside in the most Jewish communities.”

Looking at Jewish neighbourhoods and towns, “the trends are stark and unmistakable,” WPA Intelligence stated. “Because Judaism is in some ways a communal religion and observant Judaism requires localized infrastructure, Jews who live in Jewish areas tend to be more religious and engaged. And in these neighborhoods, we see large shifts towards Trump.” Some of the most dramatic swings in the Jewish vote happened in New York. It also identified shifts in heavily Jewish areas of California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey,and Pennsylvania. (California, New Jersey, and New York are where more than 45 per cent of American Jews live.)

“The trend is apparent from Trump’s near-unanimous support among Chassidic and Yeshivish Jews; to his rapid consolidation of the Modern Orthodox vote; to incremental gains even in more liberal Jewish areas such as Oak Park and Upper Manhattan,” the report added. “So, too, is it diverse ethnically and geographically, occurring coast to coast and overrepresenting Persian and ex-Soviet Jewish communities.”

Trump received the “overwhelming” majority of votes in New York City precincts with a Jewish population of at least 25 per cent. His 2024 performance in New York marked a substantial improvement over the 2020 and 2016 elections. 

Trump also enjoyed greater success in heavily Jewish enclaves of deep-blue Democratic cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, according to data compiled by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and the Los Angeles Times, respectively. 

These gains have been confirmed by the Jewish website Tablet. “Who Won the Jewish Vote?” by Armin Rosen, published on November 14, 2024, includes very detailed comparisons of precinct-level numbers from the 2020 and 2024 elections. It indicated that Trump did improve his performance in a range of Jewish neighborhoods across America. “From the yeshivas of Lakewood, New Jersey, to the bagel shops of New York’s Upper West Side; from Persian Los Angeles to Venezuelan Miami; from the Detroit suburbs to the Chabadnik shchuna in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Jewish areas voted in higher percentages for the Republican candidate than they did in 2020.”

Nearly every neighborhood in New York with a notable density of Jewish-specific businesses and institutions, be they Hasidic, Litvish, Syrian, Russian, Bukharan, Conservative, Reform or modern Orthodox, voted heavily Republican or saw a rise in Trump’s performance.

In Brooklyn, the Midwood precincts containing Yeshiva of Flatbush voted 62 per cent for Trump. In Brighton Beach, Brooklyn’s main post-Soviet Jewish enclave, Trump’s support was consistently in the 75-90 per cent range. In Crown Heights, headquarters of the Chabad Hasidic movement, Trump got 62 per cent of the vote this time around, likely on the strength of higher turnout among Chabadniks. Back in 2016, when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, he won 69 per cent of the vote in all of Assembly District 48, which encompasses Borough Park and Midwood (both largely Jewish communities). This year, he won 85 per cent of the vote in the district.

In the Bronx, Trump received 30 per cent of the vote in the precinct containing the Riverdale Jewish Center, and 38 per cent in the precinct with the neighborhood’s Chabad house. In Manhattan, a few of the borough’s lightest-blue Democratic precincts have the Yeshiva University campus at their center, and Trump managed to receive 37 per cent of the vote there. The Upper West Side, a traditional liberal Jewish political and cultural bastion, remained dark blue. But even there it was possible to see a shift.

Ranging a bit further afield, at least one plausible study, a poll taken by the Teach Coalition, an advocacy group founded by the Jewish Orthodox Union, found overall Jewish support for Trump in the New York suburbs at 40 per cent. Nassau County, where Jews make up close to 20 per cent of the population, saw Trump win it by five per cent, while Joe Biden took it by 10 in 2020.

The returns from other major American Jewish population centers tell a similar story, according to Tablet. Over 600,000 Jews live in New Jersey. The modern Orthodox stronghold of Teaneck gave Trump 35 per cent. In fact, he won 70 per cent of the vote in districts where most of the town’s synagogues are located. In Lakewood, where nearly every strain of Orthodox Judaism is represented, “Some of the precinct results are eye-watering,” reports Tablet. There, Kamala Harris got just 11.2 per cent. In one Lakewood precinct, District 27, Trump won all the votes, 366–0, and in another, District 36, he won 560 votes, losing only a single vote.

Trump carried Passaic County, home to a sizable Orthodox Jewish constituency. Jews make up about 25 percent of the county’s population and it has been a Democratic stronghold for decades. Biden took it with 57.5 per cent to Trump’s 41 per cent four years ago. In 2024, Trump won it with 50 per cent to Harris’s 46.5 percent. That’s a 16-point overall swing in Trump’s favor.

Voting data indicates that there was a significant shift among Jewish voters in in the crucial state of Pennsylvania. It was one of the few states without a large Orthodox Jewish population where Trump did especially well with Jewish voters. Harris did win Pennsylvania Jewish voters by seven percentage points, 48-41, according to a survey conducted by the Honan Strategy Group for the Teach Coalition. However, 53 per cent of Jewish voters said they would have pulled the lever for her had Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro been her running mate, while support for Trump would have dropped to 38 per cent. Jewish community leaders claimed that Shapiro was subjected to an ugly, antisemitic campaign that led to him being passed over for the slot.

The Miami area is home to over 500,000 Jews. Aventura is one of the community’s bellwethers, and Trump gained 59.7 per cent this year. An almost identical shift happened in the Miami Beach community of Surfside, where Trump took 61 per cent. Bal Harbour, another Jewish enclave, saw Trump gain 72 per cent.

In Palm Beach County, there are about 175,000 Jews out of a population of 1.5 million, or about 12 per cent. Harris won this county by 0.74 per cent, while Biden won it by 13 per cent in 2020. Trump’s vote climbed nearly seven per cent while hers dropped an equal amount off Biden’s number. Almost exactly the same type of shift happened in Broward County, where Biden got 64 per cent in 2020; the vote shifted 14 per cent toward Trump this year. Jews make up about 10 per cent of the Broward population.

In Los Angeles, where 560,000 Jews live, an article by Louis Keene, “How a Jewish Neighbourhood in Liberal Los Angeles Became a Stronghold for Trump,” published December 10 in the Forward newspaper, provides a detailed picture of the Jewish electorate. The political shift in Pico-Robertson, an Orthodox neighborhood in LA’s Westside, reflects voters “with a change of heart and changing demographics.”

Formerly majority Democratic, in 2024 for the first time, parts of Pico-Robertson turned red. Its two largest precincts swung for Trump, who received about 51 per cent of the votes compared to 44 per cent for Harris. Rabbi Elazar Muskin, who leads Young Israel of Century City, one of the oldest and largest synagogues in the neighbourhood, estimated that up to 90 per cent of his congregation voted for Trump, largely because of Israel.

As Yeshivish and Mizrahi Jews -- those of Middle Eastern or North African heritage -- have established a greater presence in Pico-Robertson, the area has become increasingly defined by a conservative culture and electorate. There is also a booming Persian population, as well as emergent Chabad and other Hasidic Jews.

A poll of Orthodox voters by Nishma Research in September found 93 per cent of Haredi voters supporting Trump; while data on the Persian Jewish community’s politics is harder to come by, community leaders said the numbers are similar.

Elsewhere in LA, the presence of a Chabad house or a synagogue was a reliable predictor of Trump support. For instance, Trump got 40 per cent of the vote in the North Hollywood precinct where Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic and Em Habanim Sephardic are located.

Los Angeles in turn mirrors the general trend in the rest of the country. Michigan is home to 116,000 Jews. West Bloomfield, centre of the Detroit-area Jewish community, went 43.7 per cent for Trump. Illinois’ 319,000 Jews live mainly in Chicago. Trump picked up votes in the Far North Side wards where Orthodox Jewish voters live, especially in the 50th Ward, where his vote increased to 46.85 per cent from 33.77 per cent in 2020.

Of course the Republican vote did not just come from the very religious. Trump also clearly gained among those most committed to Jewish identity, regardless of affiliation or observance, who were driven by concerns over left-wing antisemitism after the October 7 massacre.

Over the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his first term in office. While courting Jewish voters, Trump reminded Jews about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume the efforts to strengthen them. Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and he also moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.

We must lay to rest the nonsense about Trump being antisemitic, lest we are to believe that the more Jewish you are, the more likely it was that you voted for an enemy of the Jewish people. Americans, including Jews, returned the arguably most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern Jewish state to the White House.

 

A Germany in Economic Trouble Feels the Trump Effect

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The leaders of the European Union, meeting in Brussels last October, knew they are in trouble, as parties running on harder anti-immigration measures gain power. The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, acknowledged that this was a major challenge.

The gathering focused on concrete measures to prevent irregular migration, including strengthened control of external borders and reinforced return policies for migrants.

In fact, Germany already is feeling the heat. A new election now looms, with a strengthened Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has gained momentum since the attack on a Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg Dec. 20. Almost 300 people were injured and six lost their lives after a Saudi-born man ploughed a car into crowds of shoppers.

Long considered an extremist fringe group, the AfD now stands to receive 21 per cent of the vote in Germany’s forthcoming Feb. 23 national election, called after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition collapsed in November.

A YouGov poll published Jan. 8 found voters favouring the conservative Christian Democratic Union, at about 29 per cent, while Scholz’s own ruling Social Democrats are running at just 16 per cent, and the Greens are at just 14 percent. Four out of 10 Germans are worried about the political future.

AfD candidates won about 30 per cent of the vote in three east German states that went to the polls last September and the party is now the most popular among Germany’s 18-24-year-olds. The AfD supports tight controls on immigration, tax cuts, and an immediate end to the Ukraine War.

Donald Trump may not yet be in office, but Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and his close adviser, has endorsed the AfD. He believes it is the “last spark of hope” for Germany.

“The traditional parties have failed in Germany,” Musk wrote in an article published Dec. 29 by the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper “Their policies have led to economic stagnation, social unrest, and the erosion of national identity.

“This is not about xenophobia, but about ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization,” he wrote. “It addresses the problems of the moment without the political correctness that often obscures the truth.

“The portrayal of the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong considering that Alice Weidel, the leader of the party, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” he contended.

Musk took his endorsement of the party further on Jan. 9, hosting a live, English-language interview with Weidel, a former investment banker. She has suggested that Germans have become “slaves” to the United States, including aiding America in wars over the last 30 years.

 “I think Alice Weidel is a very reasonable person, and hopefully people can tell just from this conversation. Nothing outrageous is being proposed, just common sense,” he stated afterwards. Voting for the AfD “is simply the sensible move.”

Musk’s intrusion into the election has sparked fury from EU leaders and lawmakers, who have urged Brussels to deploy its full legal might to rein in the billionaire tech magnate.

Musk claimed he had the “right” to address the country’s political climate as he has “made significant investments” in Germany’s technological and industrial sectors. And the German economy is indeed not doing well.

Musk’s “interference” comes amidst reports that the German economy, the EU’s largest, may shrink further this year after a contraction of 0.3 per cent in 2023 and 2024. In December, the German central bank lowered its growth forecast for 2025 to 0.2 per cent from 1.1 per cent forecast in June. 

The German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) has been providing assessments of around 3,300 companies since 2012. According to its recent survey, 40 per cent of industrial companies are currently considering reducing their production in Germany or relocating it abroad due to the energy situation; among industrial companies with more than 500 employees, more than half are now considering this.

“High labour costs, caused by the myriad regulations of a hyperactive administrative state, and among the world’s highest energy prices brought about by its Energiewende (the ongoing energy transition) folly, have led to the nation’s de-industrialisation.”

The German economy is in the midst of the biggest crisis in post-war history, according to a report out of the Handelsblatt Research Institute (HRI). “The pandemic, the energy crisis, and inflation have made Germans poorer on average,” noted Bert Rurup, chief economist at HRI.

There were almost a quarter more corporate bankruptcies in 2024 versus 2023, with 22,400 companies becoming insolvent, the highest number since 2015. The number of consumer bankruptcies increased by 8.5 per cent to just over 72,000 as well. 

In terms of layoffs, manufacturing and construction have been the hardest hit. While the HRI report shows that employment increased slightly to 46.1 million people last year, the group now expects a decline of around 10,000 employed people per month.

The resultant layoffs mean that the unemployment figure could exceed the three million mark for the first time in 10 years this year, according to the Federal Employment Agency, with the crown jewel of German industry, its automative sector, announcing major job cuts. Yet, as Scholz has admitted, 300,000 people came to Germany “irregularly” in 2023.