One Brick Short

There’s a hue and cry for strict controls on immigration. If an immigrant or asylum-seeker commits a crime, they want to ship the sucker back from whence he came.

It’s not some extreme rightist Republican in Texas, however. It’s the pair of opposition parties that garnered many votes in the recent Austrian elections.

It seems there’s a lot of folks upset at immigration, people not speaking the predominate language and sticking to themselves without assimilating. That’s led to cries for a big ol’ fence around the United States and street fights in Great Britain and now election results in Austria.

According to Associated Press reporters Veronika Oleksyn and William J. Kole,  two far-right, anti-immigration parties made big gains in national elections while the governing coalition lost seats in Parliament. Two rightist parties — the Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria — won a combined 29percent in Sunday’s balloting and advocate a stop to immigration and the expulsion of foreigners who commit crimes.
Now the trouble is how to work the two parties into the government, not an easy task in a country where the party gets the vote, not the representatives. Talks, the AP writers say, are expected to begin later this week and could drag on for months.

The right wing nuts don’t particularly get along, but both party leaders say joining forces is something worth talking about to get representation in the government, the writers wrote.

According to the AP, in 1999 the Freedom Party won 27 percent of the vote and was included in the government. Free speech, some of it less than politically correct in Europe, led to months of European Union sanctions over statements seen as anti-Semitic or sympathetic to the labor policies of Adolf Hitler’s. Those policies were not exactly, um, liberal.

Funny how, when economies are booming, we see immigration and cheap labor as a good thing. As our economies shrink, the immigrant becomes The Other does not fit in and is seen as a threat.

It looks like people are people and politicians are politicians, whether American, European or Other.