Europe’s grim ideas to curb ‘irregular’ migration

Ukraine’s hell may be ongoing and this summer’s wildfires are a reminder, if anyone still needs it, that the climate emergency is happening. But the concern heading to the top of Europe’s political agenda is “irregular” migration – or perhaps more accurately, political fear of it. The EU’s border agency, Frontex, released new figures on 11 August showing that irregular crossings at the EU’s borders are at their highest in seven years. Numbers attempting to cross the Mediterranean from north Africa to Italy and Greece more than doubled in the first half of 2023. Brace for more muscular talk about stopping boats and tightening borders. The latest numbers and forecasts will undoubtedly incite many mainstream politicians across Europe to show that they can sound as populist as the far right when it comes to refugees and unwanted migrants. Poland’s rightwing prime minister, campaigning for re-election in the autumn, has gone so far as to announce a referendum on migration. Voters will be asked if they are willing to accept “thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa”, a reference to proposed new EU reforms under which incoming refugees would be shared out across the 27 member states. The EU’s new migration and asylum pact was hailed in June as a breakthrough, but the bloc is dealing with resistance to it from the likes of Poland by also outsourcing the migration flow problem to north Africa in exchange for cash. Europe, as Nathalie Tocci argued here in an opinion piece, certainly needs pragmatic solutions but not squalid deals which betray its own values, such as the deal it recently wrapped up with the increasingly authoritarian Tunisian president Kais Saied. The issue is not confined to the EU. In the UK, the government is making it impossible for anyone who arrives by illegal means to even apply for asylum – a measure which has drawn UN condemnation. A plan to house up to 500 refugees on a vast barge (partly to deflect accusations that taxpayers are having to “fork out” for hotels for asylum seekers) is now mired in chaos after the discovery of legionella bacteria on board the vessel. A logjam of thousands of unprocessed asylum applications and the absence of a post-Brexit “returns” deal with the EU are complicating the challenges, as Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, explained on the Guardian Today in Focus podcast mid August. Refugee ships or other grim ideas such as deportations to Rwanda are not, even on their own terms, likely to ever “succeed”. So far this year, some 2,000 people have gone missing in the Mediterranean, presumed dead. Yet, despite mass drownings off the coast of Italy, Greece or in the waters between France and the UK (six people died in the Channel between France and England on Saturday), people keep coming. The Frontex report confirmed that “migratory pressure” on the perilous “central” Mediterranean route is likely to keep rising but blamed a price war between smugglers and “fierce competition among criminal groups”. Some would argue that the migratory spike is much more a symptom of war and chronic political instability from Afghanistan to the Sahel. A military coup in Niger has intensified the chaos in that region. And perhaps, as many campaigners point out, it is the absence of safe and legal European migration routes that is killing people as much as those who sell tickets on doomed vessels.