The new EU migrant pact is a gift to the extreme right because it undermines the UN refugee convention. The universal conventions of human rights and refugees rights are opposed to the extreme right wing world view, in which the world is seen as a conflict between ethnic groups and nations. The undermining of universal rights will most likely not block the extreme right. But it will normalise the extreme right.
It will not be easy to separate the extreme right from the political center right, and this has made the extreme right more accepted. It is often forgotten that the extreme right wants to remove the multicultural society and any form of ethnic, cultural, religious, social or political freedom, freedom to love and any form of diversity.
The European Council on Refugees and Exiles has reported that prominent members of the right-wing extremist Alternative für Deutschland, at a meeting in November 2023, proposed the idea of not only preventing refugees from coming into Europe but also mass deportation of migrants and “non-assimilated” German citizens or so called “remigration”. https://ecre.org/germany-far-right-remigration-meeting-provokes-anger-in-the-streets-chancellor-attributes-decrease-in-irregular-border-crossings-to-stronger-controls-despite-concerns-over-schengen.
France is holding a parliamentary election June 30. and July 7 2024. The Guardian reports that the French far-right leader Jordan Bardella has unveiled a manifesto that pledges to limit immigration and scrap nationality rights for children born and raised in France by foreign parents. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/24/far-right-national-rally-ready-to-govern-france-jordan-bardella-says-at-manifesto-launch
Marine Le Pens National Rallys party candidate Jordan Bardella has 1,6 million followers on TikTok. Jordan Bardella and the Rassemblement National (RN) have among other claimed that immigrants are prioritised over French nationals in the allocation of social housing. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/15/macron-gamble-marine-le-pen-france-polls-far-right
Many young people in the whole western world can hardly afford to buy or even rent a place to stay because the house prices have risen. But the reasons for this bubble in the housing market is not immigration or refugees. The low interest level has led to an unbalance in the housing market. The demand for houses has been much higher than the supply. There are many reasons for the lack of supply related to the bubble, like the increased cost of land and construction. The lower returns on investments offered by affordable housing compared to market-rate housing, makes developers often prioritise projects with higher profit potential.
The national states in the western hemisphere and their central banks have kept their interests on a near zero level ever since the finance crisis in 2008. Keeping interests on such a low level has made people anticipate very little cost to borrow money. Since the national banks have held the interest low over such a long time, people started to see this low interest as normal. This increased the willingness to pay and increased the demand. The economical bubble furthermore made people expect the house prices would rise even more. Which has also made people willing to pay more and caused increased prices. What also contributed to rise the house prices is that housing attracted commercial investors who the private buyers had to compete with.
“Send refugees out of EU”
As a follow up to the EU migrant pact, it has been proposed, not by the extreme right wing but by European governments, to send asylum seekers to countries outside the EU.
In my more than 10 years of helping refugees in Norway, I saw how difficult it is to get a positive reply to an asylum application even with access to a lawyer and other support, to news media to advocate your case and to communicate with the responsible authorities.
There are many cases where refugees have been more seven years in church asylum in Norway because they are denied political asylum or other refugee status in Norway. It is not hard to predict that it will be considerably more difficult harder for the refugee to claim asylum living in a refugee camp in Albania or other countries. Who will hear their appeals ?
The core principle of the 1951 Convention is “non-refoulement” that asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.
https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/1951-refugee-convention
Many countries like Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary — known as the so-called Visegrad bloc — have long expressed opposition to being forced to become part of an EU-wide solidarity mechanism https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/56515/slovakia-joins-group-of-eu-states-refusing-to-implement-new-migration-pact.
Instead of asking these countries to pull their weight within the European community, The European Union voted through the new migration pact on 10 April 2024. This arrangement offers no mechanism for physically distributing refugees between the EU countries. Instead of taking a refugee, EU countries can pay an indulgence of €20,000 Euro.
It is easy to see that it will be tempting for the northern European countries to pay instead of taking a refugee when one knows, for example, that it costs £51,724 to keep a person in prison for a year in the UK. This has caused most of the refugees to end up in Greece and Italy, which has strained their already weakened economies.
See section 15