‘Soon there will be no more Luxembourg’. Migration crisis rattles Europe’s richest country.

“My grandparents came to work,” said Claire, a 34-year-old woman of Portuguese descent taking a cigarette break outside a clothing store that she manages. “The people who are coming now don’t want to work. They just want to profit from the system,” she said, voicing particular concern about how the pension system will cope with the new arrivals.

‘Soon there will be no more Luxembourg’

Migration crisis rattles Europe’s richest country.

By ZEKE TURNER 9/16/15, 5:30 AM CET Updated 9/16/15, 8:25 AM CET / http://www.politico.eu/article/luxembourg-migration-crisis-eu-asylum-refugees/

LUXEMBOURG — If one place should be able to smoothly weather Europe’s migrant crisis, it is the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

This is the richest country on the Continent and the second richest in the world, behind Qatar. Luxembourg has experience opening its arms to migrants flocking here to work for decades. The national identity switches comfortably among three national languages, suggesting cultural fluidity and openness. Besides, few people fleeing places like Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea would head for Luxembourg in the first place.

But money isn’t everything. Luxembourg’s smallness is hobbling its response to Europe’s migration crisis and there is a fear among locals that its resources and its cultural identity will be swamped.

“The big challenge for us is of course the housing,” said Yves Piron, the director of the Luxembourg Reception and Integration Agency. “So far we refused to put asylum seekers in tents. We always have real homes.”

The Grand Duchy has volunteered to take in about 400 refugees in the next couple of years — a drop in the ocean in the context of the hundreds of thousands of people flowing into Austria and Germany this month, but on a per-capita basis one of the highest intakes in Europe. Pascal Reyntjens at the International Organization of Migration described its efforts as “amazing.”

The country of 550,000 people was already struggling to accommodate migrants from the Balkans. Then the latest wave began arriving from trouble spots like Syria and Eritrea.

Over the past summer, Luxembourg’s housing for asylum-seekers reached capacity. The government has begun to create accommodations in containers for almost 1,000 more people, which should be ready next year. In the meantime, Prime Minister Xavier Bettel has been promoting an initiative for refugees to stay with local volunteer families.

When the EU presents a list of “safe countries” in October, Luxembourg will be able to send home migrants from the Balkans on the grounds that they come from countries that are “safe,” freeing up badly-needed beds for others.

Outnumbered

The hope is that this approach will prevent the kinds of anti-immigrant protests and violence seen in some German towns that host immigrant hostels. Luxembourg has no far-right, anti-immigrant party like France or Germany.

“It doesn’t mean that the risk isn’t there, but we have no Le Pen, no ‘Luxembourg People’s Party,’” said Marie-Christine Wirion, assistant director of the Solidarity and Integration department at the local chapter of Caritas, a Catholic charity that along with the Red Cross is the leading provider of services to asylum-seekers.

However, even she voices the anguish of locals who feel they may be outnumbered in their own country.

“We can’t really speak our mother tongue any more because most people here don’t understand it,” Wirion said, referring to Luxembourgisch, which shares official-language status with French and German. “Especially for older people, that creates a lot of anxiety — they can’t speak with their doctor in their own language — and that anxiety can seem like xenophobia.”

The migrant crisis arrived at a moment when Luxembourg was already struggling with its identity. Political power has shifted after 30 years’ dominance by the Christian Social People’s Party of Jean-Claude Juncker, now the president of the European Commission. His successor Bettel, from the Democratic Party, is the first European leader to have a gay marriage while in office and seems to be pushing the country in directions it doesn’t necessarily want to take.

In a June referendum, Bettel’s proposal to give foreigners the right to vote, currently granted by only a few countries such as Uruguay and New Zealand, was overwhelmingly rejected by 80 percent of voters.

Luxembourg's prime minister Xavier Bettel arrives at a European Union leaders summit in Brussels

Luxembourg PM Xavier Bettel proposed to give foreigners the right to vote (Getty)

With foreigners making up more than 45 percent of residents — the Portuguese alone, who flocked here to work in the mines and steelworks in the 1960s, account for 16.5 percent — Luxembourg risks becoming a European Dubai, a microstate where almost half of residents don’t have the right to vote in national elections.

In addition, more than 160,000 people commute to work here every day from France, Belgium and Germany, meaning Luxembourgers are only the majority in their country when the sun goes down — and just barely.

The migrants who’ve been here longer are some of the most skeptical about the newcomers.

“My grandparents came to work,” said Claire, a 34-year-old woman of Portuguese descent taking a cigarette break outside a clothing store that she manages. “The people who are coming now don’t want to work. They just want to profit from the system,” she said, voicing particular concern about how the pension system will cope with the new arrivals.

Piron, the integration director, worries that Luxembourg’s fabled wealth sends the wrong signals about its benefits system. While housing, food and vouchers for essentials like soap are provided, asylum seekers waiting for a decision on whether or not they can stay in the country get a cash allowance of just €25 per month.

“It might be they have the wrong image of Luxembourg: They know Luxembourg is one of the richest country in the world, but we don’t give very much pocket money,” he said.

The accidental migrants

Molut Haille, an Eritrean who had hoped to reach Britain via Calais but wound up in the Grand Duchy, has no such illusions.

“I advise people not to come to Luxembourg,” he said. “The main thing is that Luxembourg is not for poor people, it’s for rich people. It’s very expensive, as its name says: Lux-embourg, like luxury. The system is very hard.”

“I kill my time learning languages,” he said, admitting that he struggles with French and pointing out that you need to know at least two of the local languages to have any hope of integrating properly.

“They’re apprehensive that very soon there will be no more Luxembourg” — “Jeff,” from Nigeria.

One Nigerian asylum-seeker, who asked to be identified only as “Jeff” so as not to compromise his ongoing application process, is fluent in French after spending more than 10 years lodging so far unsuccessful appeals against an initial ruling that Nigeria was not a sufficiently dangerous country of origin to warrant granting him shelter.

“Most of us found ourselves here by mistake,” said Jeff, who had also hoped to build a new life for himself in London but got stranded in Luxembourg. Despite his own troubles, he commiserates with his host country’s dilemma.

“Everyone comes to their country to take: The Germans come in and work and take money and go, the French take money and go, the Italians are there, the Portuguese are there,” he said. “They’re apprehensive — they’re apprehensive that very soon there will be no more Luxembourg … They want their own identity, which to me is normal.”