Immigrants and asylum seekers have never felt comfortable in the European Union. But, Sarah Wildman reports, when Kosovar teenager Arigona Zogaj recently recorded YouTube plea to let her family stay in Austria, Europeans began to rethink some of their immigration policies.
"Arigona changed things," [reporter Gunther] Mueller said in Café Prueckel, which sits on a square named for a famously anti-Semitic and anti-immigration late-19th /early-20th century Viennese mayor, Dr. Karl Lueger. "A lot of politicians said, 'Oh it's so inhuman! And we should make a change, and make a new law saying that all asylum seekers here in Austria for more than five years should have the right to stay anyway.' The public opinion was very, very pro Arigona. Even Kronen Zeitung [the large right-wing daily paper], which is normally against asylum seekers, said, 'We have to show pity.' And the political parties really made a wicked game," Mueller said, taking a drag on his cigarette. Austria's ruling coalition, he said, the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, strengthened the migration law three or four years ago to ensure all asylum seekers -- whether they were in the country one year or 15 years -- would face deportation. "The prime minister said, 'Oh Arigona can't stay? It's inhuman! It's cruel! But he was the one who decided the law, so [he] is a kind of hypocrite." Yet Arigona, as much as she has become a symbol for the faceless deported, actually represents the more humane side of asylum seekers' nightmares in Austria. Her family remained in detention only a few evenings. And while they are currently forcibly separated, they are technically "free." Her fate is, as yet, undecided. Mueller is convinced politicians' hands are tied and the goodwill soon run out. If they let her stay, they will face a barrage of similar requests from much less attractive migrants.
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
