Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

Integrate migrants through participation
Priority should be given to problems of participation and integration of migrant
groups, whose rates of unemployment in the EU are, on average, twice that of nationals.
In Europe’s ethnically and culturally diverse societies, the welfare state faces a major
challenge in ensuring that immigrants and their children do not fall behind. Economic
exclusion and physical concentration (ghettoization) reinforce educational underperformance,
excessive segregation and self-destructive spirals of marginalization.
Maintain minimum income support
We cannot assume that the measures described above will remedy current and
future welfare deficiencies. Hence, it is impossible to avoid some form of passive
minimum income support. An unchecked rise in income inequality would worsen
citizens’ opportunities, resulting in lost productivity and burgeoning passive income
support costs. It is, therefore, necessary to have an even more tightly woven net below
the welfare net for the truly needy to meet minimum standards of self-reliance. The
key lesson of the Great Depression of the 1930s eventually ushered in Keynesian
demand-side policies and, after a devastating World War, firmly established the need
for some sort of safety net in every major industrial democracy. This lesson to match
social promotion with social protection continues to stand tall.
Reach a globalization compromise
We should take an activist approach to social policy beyond the borders of the
member states of the European Union, not just for the coordination of a timely
global fiscal stimulus and an agreement on financial markets regulation, but also to
establish some minimum levels of protection (without protectionism) for vulnerable
citizens everywhere. In the interests of fairness and political sustainability, we need a
new sort of embedded globalization compromise at the supranational level, something
analogous to the embedded liberalism compromise of the post-war era, with the EU
acting as a unified player. The new embedded globalization compromise should not
only account for issues of fair trade, work and welfare, but also include substantive
agreements on sustainable development, climate change, energy, food and biodiversity.
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