Politicus: Issue of Arab Spring Migrants to Cast Shadow on G-8 Talks

LONDON — When the leaders of the Group of 8 meet next week — among them, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy — one of their official concerns will be supporting attempts to make democracy emerge in some kind of recognizable form from the Arab revolts in countries like Tunisia and Libya.

Unofficially, and perhaps even without public mention at the summit meeting in the French resort town of Deauville, that helping hand also means providing sufficient economic incentive to hold off a wave of Arab migration toward Europe. The potential human flood gets described by the apocalyptically minded as “biblical.”

Of course, no one in Deauville would talk in those terms. But a European diplomat has acknowledged that there is more than a tacit link between sustaining the process of change in North Africa and avoiding a flow of refugees to the four European Union countries (including Italy) that make up the G-8 alongside the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia.

Sounding irritated, António Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has spoken of a “grudging ” response from Europe, described as largely interested in “how to keep out” people trying to seek shelter on the other side of the Mediterranean.

But reality doesn’t sit still. What is changing now is that none of the heads of the four big Western countries at Deauville in 2011 can avoid immigration as a domestic/international political issue that carries with it the emotional vote-getting-or-vote-losing volatility of war or taxes.

For example: Mr. Obama last week traveled to near the Mexican border to insist he’s cracking down hard on illegal immigration. The New York Times wrote that this was the president’s fifth immigration-linked event in the last four weeks.

In parallel, signs are emerging of left-of-center politicians’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of European voters’ concerns about how their lives are affected by the failed integration of many Muslim immigrants.

Here was Ségolène Royal, who ran as the French Socialist Party’s candidate against Mr. Sarkozy in 2007 and seeks its 2012 presidential nomination, saying last week that no one entering France because of the Arab world’s turmoil should think they’re “destined” to remain in the country.

Why? Because Ms. Royal obviously regards that saying “no” on the issue means votes in an eventual party primary. She argues that exceptions must not be made to the principle of rejecting all illegal immigration. This sounds like support for efforts by some European Union member governments to tighten the open border-passage provisions of the community’s internal controls.

To boot, Ms. Royal was reported telling residents of French immigrant neighborhoods, “Stop complaining.”

In Britain, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has a hard-edged take on immigration, fared very well in local elections in England a couple of weeks ago in spite of its austerity budgets and undistinguished economic results.

The prime minister had been attacked on immigration from inside his governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable, one of the party’s cabinet members, chastised Mr. Cameron for his pronouncement of the death of multiculturalism in Britain and his more recent promise to sharply cut non-European immigration.

The cabinet minister accused the prime minister of “inflaming” Islamic extremism in the process. But the voting went badly for the Lib Dems — not the Conservatives.

Mr. Cameron explained he was fighting the idea that “concern about immigration is somehow racist.” Saying nothing, he argued, created room for the real bigots in extremist parties.

He spoke of immigrants who “on occasion” were unwilling to integrate, and who created “discomfort and disjointedness in some neighborhoods.”

That’s a long way from the language of being invaded, swamped or made to feel an alien in your own country. But Mr. Cameron insisted at the same time that it would be “untruthful” and “unfair” not to address a real problem.

A reflexive equation linking concern about immigration with reactionary thinking has been dulled in Europe, but not without embarrassment. In a clumsy attempt to cozy up to its wavering white working-class constituency, the German Social Democratic Party leadership voted last month not to expel Thilo Sarrazin, a party member who wrote a best seller, larded with genetics-based arguments, designating Muslim immigrants as a drag on German society.

Yet for parts of the European left, a serious question exists about a way to move closer to the immigration themes it once rejected as reflecting bigotry.

In France, how could the Socialist Party not consider them in a presidential campaign landscape where both Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, the head of the extreme right National Front, talk tough about immigration’s downsides?

Recent polling by Harris Interactive provides the answer: 76 percent of the French (including 62 percent of left-wing voters) think that immigrants don’t make sufficient effort to integrate into French society. Speaking for the polling group, J.D. Levy told a French reporter that while the events of the Arab Spring were presented positively by the media, “most people were mainly worried” that they would mean “even more potential immigrants.”

A strategy paper on how to win in 2012 drawn up by supporters of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the strongest Socialist Party candidate before his arrest on sexual assault charges in New York, suggests a successful campaign must include a focus on the value of work and the secular character of French society, while emphasizing citizens’ duties — a kind of nudge-nudge message to voters that the party understands their worries about Muslim immigration.

To leap ahead of the nudge and wink stage, Gaullist party sources have told me that Mr. Sarkozy no longer wants to talk of immigrants’ integration but promote their “assimilation.”

That’s always been a loaded word. Currently, it is used by Islamists in Britain to paint Mr. Cameron’s rejection of multiculturalism as an assimilation plan robbing Muslim immigrants of their Islamic identity.

Surely, at Deauville there will be no desire on the part of the summiteers to wade into such a contentious bog.

But there is the real likelihood that the summit meeting plays a role, even unspoken, in accompanying a palpable change in the politics and discussion of immigration and its intensifying impact.

View the original article here

Politicus: Issue of Arab Spring Migrants to Cast Shadow on G-8 Talks

LONDON — When the leaders of the Group of 8 meet next week — among them, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy — one of their official concerns will be supporting attempts to make democracy emerge in some kind of recognizable form from the Arab revolts in countries like Tunisia and Libya.

Unofficially, and perhaps even without public mention at the summit meeting in the French resort town of Deauville, that helping hand also means providing sufficient economic incentive to hold off a wave of Arab migration toward Europe. The potential human flood gets described by the apocalyptically minded as “biblical.”

Of course, no one in Deauville would talk in those terms. But a European diplomat has acknowledged that there is more than a tacit link between sustaining the process of change in North Africa and avoiding a flow of refugees to the four European Union countries (including Italy) that make up the G-8 alongside the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia.

Sounding irritated, António Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has spoken of a “grudging ” response from Europe, described as largely interested in “how to keep out” people trying to seek shelter on the other side of the Mediterranean.

But reality doesn’t sit still. What is changing now is that none of the heads of the four big Western countries at Deauville in 2011 can avoid immigration as a domestic/international political issue that carries with it the emotional vote-getting-or-vote-losing volatility of war or taxes.

For example: Mr. Obama last week traveled to near the Mexican border to insist he’s cracking down hard on illegal immigration. The New York Times wrote that this was the president’s fifth immigration-linked event in the last four weeks.

In parallel, signs are emerging of left-of-center politicians’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of European voters’ concerns about how their lives are affected by the failed integration of many Muslim immigrants.

Here was Ségolène Royal, who ran as the French Socialist Party’s candidate against Mr. Sarkozy in 2007 and seeks its 2012 presidential nomination, saying last week that no one entering France because of the Arab world’s turmoil should think they’re “destined” to remain in the country.

Why? Because Ms. Royal obviously regards that saying “no” on the issue means votes in an eventual party primary. She argues that exceptions must not be made to the principle of rejecting all illegal immigration. This sounds like support for efforts by some European Union member governments to tighten the open border-passage provisions of the community’s internal controls.

To boot, Ms. Royal was reported telling residents of French immigrant neighborhoods, “Stop complaining.”

In Britain, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has a hard-edged take on immigration, fared very well in local elections in England a couple of weeks ago in spite of its austerity budgets and undistinguished economic results.

The prime minister had been attacked on immigration from inside his governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable, one of the party’s cabinet members, chastised Mr. Cameron for his pronouncement of the death of multiculturalism in Britain and his more recent promise to sharply cut non-European immigration.

The cabinet minister accused the prime minister of “inflaming” Islamic extremism in the process. But the voting went badly for the Lib Dems — not the Conservatives.

Mr. Cameron explained he was fighting the idea that “concern about immigration is somehow racist.” Saying nothing, he argued, created room for the real bigots in extremist parties.

He spoke of immigrants who “on occasion” were unwilling to integrate, and who created “discomfort and disjointedness in some neighborhoods.”

That’s a long way from the language of being invaded, swamped or made to feel an alien in your own country. But Mr. Cameron insisted at the same time that it would be “untruthful” and “unfair” not to address a real problem.

A reflexive equation linking concern about immigration with reactionary thinking has been dulled in Europe, but not without embarrassment. In a clumsy attempt to cozy up to its wavering white working-class constituency, the German Social Democratic Party leadership voted last month not to expel Thilo Sarrazin, a party member who wrote a best seller, larded with genetics-based arguments, designating Muslim immigrants as a drag on German society.

Yet for parts of the European left, a serious question exists about a way to move closer to the immigration themes it once rejected as reflecting bigotry.

In France, how could the Socialist Party not consider them in a presidential campaign landscape where both Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, the head of the extreme right National Front, talk tough about immigration’s downsides?

Recent polling by Harris Interactive provides the answer: 76 percent of the French (including 62 percent of left-wing voters) think that immigrants don’t make sufficient effort to integrate into French society. Speaking for the polling group, J.D. Levy told a French reporter that while the events of the Arab Spring were presented positively by the media, “most people were mainly worried” that they would mean “even more potential immigrants.”

A strategy paper on how to win in 2012 drawn up by supporters of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the strongest Socialist Party candidate before his arrest on sexual assault charges in New York, suggests a successful campaign must include a focus on the value of work and the secular character of French society, while emphasizing citizens’ duties — a kind of nudge-nudge message to voters that the party understands their worries about Muslim immigration.

To leap ahead of the nudge and wink stage, Gaullist party sources have told me that Mr. Sarkozy no longer wants to talk of immigrants’ integration but promote their “assimilation.”

That’s always been a loaded word. Currently, it is used by Islamists in Britain to paint Mr. Cameron’s rejection of multiculturalism as an assimilation plan robbing Muslim immigrants of their Islamic identity.

Surely, at Deauville there will be no desire on the part of the summiteers to wade into such a contentious bog.

But there is the real likelihood that the summit meeting plays a role, even unspoken, in accompanying a palpable change in the politics and discussion of immigration and its intensifying impact.

View the original article here

An Ode to Spring, Whenever It Comes

Béatrice de Géa for The New York TimesBASKING Kinga Jutkiewicz, 21, at East River Park in Brooklyn.

ACCORDING to the calendar, it’s been spring for the past five weeks. But you could have fooled me. Since the vernal equinox on March 20, the official start of the season, we’ve had nearly two weeks’ worth of days on which the temperature has not yet reached above 50 degrees. On average, this spring is two and a half degrees colder than usual. And it has rained almost 20 of those days, making the season thus far 27 percent wetter than in most years (not to mention March 24, the day that shall live in infamy, when there was measurable snowfall).

A new category, Spring Fever, highlighting the best places to enjoy the warm weather outside, joins this insider’s guide to what to eat, drink and do in New York from the staff of The New York Times.

LOUNGING An exercise in relaxation on 10th Avenue in Manhattan.?

Still, dotted amid the gloomy days and the dreary ones have been a few bright, balmy afternoons — fool’s gold, or so they’ve seemed. One of those rare warm days had me remembering another like it, when I made my way to a bench by the Hudson River — the winter’s chill barely chased from its wooden slats by the wan early spring rays — and threw myself across a patch of sunlight. There amid the roar of the West Side Highway and a gentle but slightly fetid breeze, I completed the purpose of my crosstown journey: I spent several hours savoring the memory of a kiss and its giver.

As it turned out, my love wasn’t worth the musing, but I remember that afternoon so vividly, it might have been yesterday. When I call to mind that bench, I can even feel the sun on my belly. The love was real, but I was confused about its object. What I was really in love with was spring.

“We do seem to be hardwired to associate warmth with pleasurable sensations,” said David J. Linden, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author of “The Compass of Pleasure,” a book on why certain things feel good. “So when you’re out on a nice day and you’re feeling your skin gently warmed by the sun, you are activating that subset of your cortex that is involved in processing positive emotional responses.”

Come the warm weather, New Yorkers become pleasure seekers; we’re an outdoorsy bunch — at least when the weather’s nice. In the snow-blasted February of 2010, the last year for which data are available, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority tallied nearly 168 million trips on subways and buses combined. In March that year, when the weather broke, we took 37 million more trips outside of our homes.

We’re resourceful sun seekers, and in a city overshadowed by skyscrapers, we have to be. Suburban children may hang out in their friends’ backyards, but the equivalent for native New York teenagers is “stooping” — finding a good, sunny brownstone or other stoop to perch on for the afternoon. When I was growing up, the top-rated stoop was downtown, perpetually staked out by my best friend, Eden, and her classmates at Elisabeth Irwin High School before, after and sometimes during class. That Charlton Street brownstone stood out because the owner would pop up almost daily to chase away the urban Dennis the Menaces, much to their delight. The part of Mr. Wilson was played by Matthew Broderick.

But the stoop of all stoops is the grand, body-dotted staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as much a draw for some as the Temple of Dendur. During my junior year of high school, I spent most of the sleepless night before the spring rite of the SATs on that giant stoop with my friend Jenny, lobbing vocabulary words at each other. We were “recumbent” on the steps, feeling “sesquipedalian,” unafraid of the warm night under the watchful gaze of a phalanx of Fifth Avenue doormen.?

New Yorkers rarely depend on the equinox to decree when our spring begins. We have other ways of measuring the season. In the West Village, spring is here when you spot shivering shoulders under strappy sundresses. In Central Park, it’s when the track around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir gets packed diamond-hard under a tumult of new sneakers. In Brooklyn, springtime is when you can mistake the catwalk of Bedford Avenue for a Ray-Bans photo shoot. And across the five boroughs, it’s when lunchtime for office workers becomes a mad dash for alfresco real estate.

Like the Tree of Heaven in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a species capable of growing out of cement or lacing through sewer grates, New Yorkers find ways toward the sun.? In Morningside Park, the turtles in the pond seem to materialize from thin air to bask. The park, once destined to be a Joni Mitchell lyric — “they paved paradise to put up a parking lot” — and razed for a Columbia University gym until student riots in 1968 quashed the plan, is home to upward of 50 red-eared sliders and other turtles, many of them former pets, that loll under the pond’s waterfall as numerous as cereal flakes in a bowl of milk.?

For the turtles, which, like many New Yorkers, spent the winter in hibernation (“brumation” is the official word), sunshine isn’t a luxury; it powers their metabolic functioning, said Sarah Aucoin, director of the Urban Park Rangers. It also just feels good. “As far as I know, they don’t have seasonal affective disorder,” Ms. Aucoin said, adding, however, “I can’t think it’s all that much fun for them to be buried in mud for four months.”

A patch of parkland in spring is hotter real estate than an apartment in the Dakota. When the clouds first break, Sheep Meadow in Central Park becomes a sea of bodies. So, too, does Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, where people lounge unfazed by the fact that under their picnic panniers are the remains of thousands of Revolutionary War victims, entombed under the hill.

But, frankly, we’ll splay anywhere there is sun, and nothing proves this more than a walk along Broadway. Yes, there are the mayor’s ever-expanding carless zones in Times Square, but the benches installed in the median islands along the avenue predate them. As a college student on the Upper West Side, I used to burrow into my course books on a bench at 114th Street, my hair tossed around by the breeze kicked up by onrushing traffic. I don’t remember ever being disturbed by the noise.

Take a casual stroll through the meatpacking district this time of year and it seems as if half the city kicks up their Manolos at jam-packed sidewalk cafes. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times in 2007, New Yorkers “insist on restaurants with sidewalk cafes, apparently believing that nothing sauces roasted chicken like the exhaust from an M104 bus and there’s no music more relaxing than the eek-eek-eek of a delivery truck in reverse.”

?At the time of that article, there were 900 sidewalk cafes; today there are 1,110 and counting, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs. I’ve taken it a step further: the first day the temperature hit 70 degrees this year, I left the office to have an arugula salad while perched on a fire hydrant. No one looked twice.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 23, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a brownstone owned by Matthew Broderick where teenagers gathered on the front stoop. It was on Charlton Street, not Charles Street. In addition, a slide show that appeared on the home page of NYTimes.com with this article gave a partly incorrect name for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, referring to it as the Brooklyn Botanical garden.