An MEP criticizes journalists’ framing of migration issues but misses an opportunity to address the substance of inhumane right-wing policies.
Last week, asylum and migration was the topic of Euronews’s “Brussels my love” round-up of European Parliamentary affairs, following a debate during the plenary in Strasbourg. Among the panel of guests was German Green MEP Sergey Lagodinsky.
In his comments, Lagodinsky took the programme to task for its framing of the topic in its opening package. Starting from a report around the Hungarian government’s populist response to irregular arrivals, it then opened a broader discussion around whether or not “multiculturalism has failed”. Lagodinsky objected to this conflation, arguing that the discussion on the security implications of illegal migration has nothing to do with multiculturalism, in terms of the diversity that exists within European societies. He described the amalgamation of the two as a “poisonous populist cocktail”. In the programme’s defence, the presenter referred to the Swedish government’s proposal to offer migrants financial compensation to leave the country. In other words, she confirmed that this particular framing was derived from the policies of a right-wing government.
Lagodinsky’s intervention was a useful lesson in how to push back against problematic narratives rather than simply accepting them. His answer to a subsequent question, however, illustrated a trap that progressive voices all too often fall into. Slovenian Conservative MEP Matej Tonin argued that the EU should adopt the “Australian model” of immigration – systematically deporting those arriving irregularly on its soil, and barring them from ever being able to claim asylum, regardless of circumstances. In response, Lagodinsky pointed out that the EU, unlike Australia, is not an island.
In doing so, he missed an opportunity to address the fundamental problems with this approach – which, beyond its inhumanity, plainly violates the established human right to seek asylum and ignores the absence of accessible safe routes for refugees. Seeking to rebut the argument on the grounds of practicality, or in this case geography, legitimises its underlying assumptions. In a debate with the far-right polemicist-turned-politician Eric Zemmour ahead of the 2022 elections, left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon made the same error, when he sought to dismiss Zemmour’s proposals to deport migrants en masse from France, on the grounds that they were practically unfeasible. These two cautionary tales demonstrate how, in a context in which the media appear to be increasingly adopting right-wing narratives on issues, particularly migration, even progressive voices are liable to contribute to the normalisation of these narratives.
Image from European Parliament Flickr, CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2024– Source: EP.
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