European Socialists Suddenly Realize Open Border Policies Makes People Hate Them
Europe’s socialist leaders are avoiding the topic of illegal immigration as they struggle to compete with conservative populism across the continent.
The Party of European Socialists (PES), Europe’s second-largest political group, is hosting a three-day summit in Amsterdam beginning Thursday to energize activists as elections play out in various European countries. However, the leftist coalition will barely be addressing the issue of mass immigration, despite it being a top concern among European leaders.
“Migrants are increasingly criminalized and used as a scapegoat for social and economic hardships and to justify discriminatory policies,” states the one and only reference to the subject in the PES’ final declaration of the congress, first obtained by Politico. A Social Policy program, to be approved on Friday, also states the need to guarantee “the protection of migrants, asylum seekers and undocumented people.”
Immigration is not mentioned in an outline establishing the group’s priorities and talking points, and there is no scheduled debate for the issue, according to Politico.
Europe experienced an illegal immigration crisis in the mid-2010s when civil war in Syria and other international conflicts caused massive refugee flows, with more than one million illegal migrants landing on the continent in 2015. (Read more from “European Socialists Suddenly Realize Open Border Policies Makes People Hate Them” HERE)
