Europe’s human fault lines
IDEOLOGICAL FISSURES LAID BARE OVER MIGRANTS
The kitchen is a rusty metal grill resting on two bricks. The lavatory is a patch of waste ground nearby. Just a few hundred yards from Rome’s futuristic-looking Tiburtina railway station, about 300 refugees and migrants live in a squalid encampment of tents and shanty structures made of scavenged timber and sheets of plastic.
Known as the Baobab Centre, this old car park is one of the main nodes in the underground migration networks that have sprung up across Europe.
Baobab hosts the final trickle of a wave of migration from Africa and the Middle East that swept northwards through Europe in 2015, setting off a political chain-reaction whose consequences for European unity are only now fully being realized.
The chaos of 2015 led to deep East-West splits, as Hungary and Poland rejected Brussels-imposed resettlement quotas and responded to calls for EU solidarity with metal fences to protect their borders.
These long-standing ideological fissures have deepened, reawakening the hardright in Germany and Austria and — most seriously of all for Europe — installing a populist anti-immigrant government in Rome.
In three short years, the migration crisis has set off a domino effect that left Angela Merkel, the continent’s main advocate of liberalism, weakened at home and the voices of Euroskeptic populism in the ascendant.
For as long as these were confined to the “usual suspects” — Britain, Hungary and Poland — the EU could to some extent rationalize the dissent.
But the transformation of Italy, a founder member, changed all that.
Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, the anti-immigrant party that rules Italy in coalition, surged to power in a country that has absorbed 600,000 migrants from the other side of the Mediterranean in the past two years. Around 75,000 came through the volunteer-run Baobab Centre.
Somali Cumar Abdirahman Jamac, 30, said. “This is no life. I’m strong, I want to work, but our (temporary protection) permits don’t allow it. The only things that are left are to beg or to steal, and I don’t want to steal.”
Within days of taking office, Salvini, Italy’s interior minister, launched an unprecedented crackdown on migration from Libya. He closed Italy’s ports to the NGO vessels that had for years rescued people at sea, and said the days of Italy acting as “Europe’s refugee camp” were at an end. “The party is over, the music has changed,” he said, winning popularity in Italy but sending shock waves in Europe.
Resistance to what some call unauthorized migration but others call the right of people to flee war, persecution and poverty, has spawned a plethora of populist movements and exposed deep political and cultural divisions within Europe. Hungary, Slovakia and Poland are bitterly opposed to taking in migrants, while Spain, Italy and Greece say they are unfairly shouldering the burden.
In 2015, Europe’s Western liberal powers took the unprecedented step of using a majority vote to overrule the (as they saw them) recalcitrant eastern states and force them to accept migrant resettlement quotas.
Hungary, Poland and the so-called Visegrad states never accepted the quotas. Instead, populist leaders like Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Hungary’s Viktor Orban used them as a stick of dynamite to whip up anti-migrant sentiment and deliver huge election victories.
By then, the rebellion had spread. Austria elected a coalition including the farright Freedom Party, Merkel was under assault from her Bavarian sister party and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and Rome fell too. In the north, countries such as Germany and Austria have reluctantly accepted the problem must be contained, although the fight over the Dublin Regulation, which says migrants to Europe must stay in the country they arrive in, remains unresolved.
Critics say Europe’s migration model — if it ever existed — is broken. While thousands drowned, those who made it to Europe remained either jobless or were exploited for their labour.
The EU responded with messy, ad hoc solutions, doing legally and morally questionable deals with Turkey and Libya to stem the flow. To the relief of governments — and the despair of humanitarian organizations — the problem was outsourced.
“The deals with Turkey and Libya can be said to be working,” said Jeff Crisp, a migration expert and a research associate at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. “But Europe has sold its soul.”
Securing Europe’s borders means finding a way to stop the arrivals and in the long term a way to stop people trying to flee in the first place.
At a summit in Malta in 2015 the continent’s leaders set up the US$4 billion Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, intended to discourage migrants from heading to Libya. But there’s a shorter term goal: to encourage the hundreds of thousands of migrants already there to return home.
A “voluntary repatriation” scheme is being run in tandem with the International Organization for Migration, a UN body. Those who accept repatriation get a free flight back and the offer of job training. In Nigeria, 3,000 have returned, and planeloads arrive almost every week, says Solomon Okoduwa, an adviser to a task force in one of the main hubs for illegal migration.
“These people have often been exploited, humiliated and beaten up in Libya,” said Okoduwa. “They are usually glad to return home.”
But job-training offers may not be enough. Those who dreamt of making their fortunes in Europe may find it hard to settle with farming a plot of land in the same neighbourhood they yearned to leave in the first place.
Some argue the numbers of migrants and refugees who make it to Europe are manageable. Around 61,500 have arrived so far this year — half that of 2017, and a trickle compared with the million who came in 2015.
Andrea Costa, a co-ordinator for volunteers at the Baobab Centre, said the numbers need to be put into perspective.
“In the last few years around two million migrants have arrived. But the EU has a population of 550 million. It’s nothing. It’s not a crisis, it’s not an emergency and it’s not an invasion... we should see migration as an opportunity, not as a threat.”
In a report, Beyond Fortress Europe, Oxfam called for safe and regular pathways for refugees and migrants. But in the current climate it would take a brave leader indeed to put such a policy to voters.
Pumping aid and investment into poor countries in Africa and Asia could create jobs and dissuade people from leaving. But it will take generations, and in the meantime war, poverty, persecution and climate change will continue to force people to migrate.
Said Costa: “They may not find a welcome in Europe, but after all they have been through, it’s paradise.”