EU grapples with reform as migrant entries surge
Eight years after facing a refugee crisis in 2015, the European Union is still struggling with how to reform its asylum system — just as migrant entries are once again rising.
Reaching consensus among the bloc’s 27 nations has become more complicated with the growing influence of the far-right in the politics of several member states.
The issue, kicked along the road for years, will be on the agenda of a Thursday meeting of EU interior ministers, with a focus on how to speed up the process of returning undocumented migrants to their country of origin in cases where their asylum bid fails.
Sweden, the current holder of the EU presidency, will host the meeting. The Scandinavian country, among the more generous in terms of giving asylum before 2015-2016, has since October had a coalition government reliant on a nationalist far-right party, the Sweden Democrats (SD).
That alliance “is really stepping up the restrictive approach” introduced under the previous Swedish government, an expert at Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies, Bernd Parusel, said. The aim, he said, is to reduce all immigration, not only asylum, and Stockholm would not back “any deal or any compromise that would increase the number of people arriving in Sweden to apply for asylum”. A spokesman for the SD, lawmaker Ludvig
Aspling, confirmed that “we don’t want any mandatory relocation of migrants,” as has been mooted under EU plans to reform the system. The area the Swedish EU presidency is expected to focus on is increasing the number of irregular migrants sent back to their countries of origin.
Currently, only around 20 per cent of those denied asylum in the EU are sent home.
Some aspects of the proposed EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, set out by the European Commission in 2020, have made progress, notably on expanded use of EURODAC, a bloc-wide database of fingerprints taken from irregular migrants and asylum-seekers.