The political impetus to demonstrate a tight grip on national borders will be one of the driving factors in the June elections. Already it shaped the course of last year's elections in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders won votes with a strong stand against migration that tapped into conspiracy theories of a "great replacement".
Contrary to plots cultivated online to generate xenophobia, Belgium's official system to process new arrivals is hardly an open door for an indistinct mass of foreign nationals to charge. In most cases (except for Ukrainian refugees, for whom the system was greatly streamlined), the protocol to gain rights in Belgium is more obstacle course than fast-track.
Things are complicated further by the overlay of municipalities, regions, and the State, which together create a maze of procedures that one suspects must be abstruse by design. Moreover, the interplay between offices makes it difficult to assert authority. This has lately proven problematic in the case of children born in Belgium to Palestinian parents.
Unable to be registered (or born) in their parents' home country, the children are technically stateless and as such would normally receive Belgian nationality. It now transpires that Belgium's Immigration Office has instructed dozens of municipalities to withdraw this nationality – the legality of which has been contested by human rights groups.
With Gaza currently uninhabitable, the case for "stateless" designation could hardly be clearer. But the security of official recognition hasn't been granted to all families from the region, with Belgium even revoking protections that had hitherto been granted. The situation has been called out by lawyers representing the affected families and led some to question whether it isn't part of an underlying effort to create a hostile environment. It wouldn't be the first time.
There will always be a section of society eager to push an anti-migration agenda; how much this sentiment seeps into the mainstream depends largely on how much politicians value this voter base. But it also poses questions about human rights that are created as absolute, introducing conditions and caveats on protections that previously had been unshakeable.
The grey zone which this opens up allows for opposing interpretations of what had before been irrefutable and legal querying on grounds that were placed above this kind of wrangling. And not without the highest reason: the issuance of such rights is often a matter of life and death; bureaucratic inconsistency puts people in an administrative purgatory.
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