LONDON -- When Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party joined Austria's coalition government this year, the nations of the European Union were united in their condemnation.
Now, European governments are discovering that Haider's brand of xenophobia sells."There are a lot of countries whose policies look a lot like Austria's," said David Boratav of the London-based European Council on Refugees and Exiles. "We face a trend of increased racism and xenophobia in Europe. You can't single out one country. Legislation in the U.K. and Austria is very comparable."
Just months ago, before the Freedom Party joined Austria's government, EU nations took pains to distance themselves from Haider's nakedly anti-immigrant stance.
"If Joerg Haider and his party are admitted into the Austrian government, that country will not belong to that European family which hails tolerance, human rights and a struggle against xenophobia," said Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson, echoing his colleagues' outraged statements.
But, like the Freedom Party, right-wing parties across the continent have made gains at the polls by exploiting the fear of a rising tide of immigrants and refugees. Governments, on the right and the left, have responded by toughening their rhetoric and tightening their borders. And some of the steps came before Haider's party joined Austria's government in February.
In Britain, the opposition Conservative Party has accused the government of making the country a "soft touch" for refugees and has called for asylum-seekers to be put in detention centers.
The Labor Party government, for its part, has introduced a series of strict new policies, including issuing vouchers instead of cash to asylum-seekers.
Home Secretary Jack Straw signaled his government's hard-line stance by spending time this month watching immigration officers intercept a group of stowaways who arrived in the southeast port of Dover in the back of a truck. Under regulations introduced last month, the driver could be fined $3,200 for each stowaway.
Britain's get-tough attitude is being replicated across the continent.
In January, Belgium temporarily reinstated border controls to halt the flow of illegal migrants, and it suspended a visa-free travel agreement with Slovakia after a wave of asylum applications from Gypsies.
In Switzerland, which has the highest per capita rate of asylum-seekers in Europe and where about 20 percent of the population is foreign-born, the far-right Swiss People's Party took 22 percent of the vote in elections last October. Months earlier, 71 percent of the electorate voted to tighten asylum procedures.
Several EU countries -- including Britain -- have put some of their asylum-seekers in detention, a move refugee groups say contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.
Many Europeans would counter that the actions are necessary because their countries are being swamped by refugees. But the number of asylum-seekers is nowhere near the highs reached during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s.
In February of this year, 27,032 asylum applications were lodged in the 15 EU countries, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees -- a slight decrease from the 27,800 recorded in January. In 1999, monthly totals ranged from a low of about 22,500 to a high of about 32,000.
In 1989, the EU received 282,860 asylum applications. In 1992, the number had jumped to 667,700. By 1998, it was back down to 291,220 and the next year it was just under 350,000.
The number of illegal immigrants who do not seek asylum is higher, and harder to quantify. But anti-immigrant mood has little to do with size of a country's immigrant community.
In Finland, which has the lowest percentage of foreign residents of any EU country, the government wants to further restrict an already strict policy that saw this year's immigration quota set at 700.
At a summit in the Finnish city of Tampere last October, EU leaders agreed to create an "area of freedom, security and justice" by developing coordinated policies to fight trafficking in human beings and organized crime, alongside a streamlined refugee policy that respects human rights.
At the time, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata warned the EU leaders not to go too far.
"My plea is to ensure that policies and practices designed to control irregular immigration do not jeopardize the rights of refugees and asylum-seekers," she said.