Europeans are becoming more intolerant of immigrants and one in five want them sent home, a study released by the European Union racism watchdog showed. The study, based on pan-EU opinion surveys between 1997 and 2003, found a significant increase in support for the view that there were limits to a so-called multicultural society. There was also a significant increase in the minority of people who supported repatriating immigrants, to 20 percent, the study said, without providing the scale of either increase.

While many Arab states, like Egypt, are indeed “pigmentocracies,” many of Egypt’s political elites are descendants of the Turkic Mamluk slave dynasty. Does their slave descent, which many black nationalists deem crucial to African identity, render them bonafide Africans, free of racial guilt? In addition, despite the North African regimes’ insistence on the primacy of Arab identity, the northern tier of the African continent is home to an extraordinary ethnic, linguistic and phenotypical diversity, and one cannot treat North Africa as geographically distinct and detached from a racially unified, indigenous “Black Africa.” The challenge in examining Sudan’s long-running civil war is to understand how, unlike other African civil wars, the conflict came to be “racialized” and not “ethnicized.”

New prospects for a lasting peace in Sudan after two decades of civil war have been overshadowed by the continuing crisis in Darfur. Sudan has been home to the world's worst displacement crisis. The challenges of return in southern Sudan are overwhelming, but have so far received little international attention and support. Two decades of fighting laid waste to huge swathes of Africa's biggest country. IDPs who already tried to return to their areas of origin faced continued attacks and the meagre resources and services available forced many to return to the displaced camps where they lived.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported in March 2005 that "the number of asylum seekers arriving in industrialized countries fell sharply for the third year in a row in 2004, reaching its lowest level for 16 years." Despite the lower numbers, governments of industrialized countries still face public concern that the asylum system is "out of control." How much of the drop in applications comes from a lower demand for asylum and how much from stringent legislation is not clear.