European Union: A bitter compromise on migrants
Was it a great day for European unity, or did the EU just sell its soul? asked Josef Kelnberger in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). After a decade of buckpassing and finger-pointing, the 27 countries of the European Union finally agreed last week on a way to share the burden of refugees and asylum seekers: Member countries must either take in some of the thousands of refugees that land each day on Greek and Italian shores or pay up to help process them. That’s a great political victory. But the resulting Pact on Migration and Asylum is also harsh in the extreme. It allows the EU to “lock refugee families—with their children—in camps under prison-like conditions,” to fast-track denials of asylum, and to deport those rejected to a so-called safe third country. Many see it as the EU “building a wall of heartlessness around the continent, brick by brick.” Germany had been holding out for a “more humane solution,” but negotiators simply ran out of time. The pact had to be passed ahead of the European Parliament elections in June, lest voters get the message “Forget the EU, stick with the populists, Brussels has no answers to the burning questions of migration.”
The agreement “closes a deep political rift” between European countries that opened in the refugee crisis of 2015, said Maurizio Ferrera in Corriere della Sera (Italy). That’s when more than
1.3 million asylum seekers—mainly fleeing war-torn Syria and Iraq—overwhelmed European borders and fueled a “wave of xenophobia and Euroskepticism” across the continent. Italy and Greece, the frontline countries, could not cope, and Brussels wanted to distribute the new arrivals among the other member nations.
But Hungary’s Viktor Orban refused, “openly attacking the principle of the supremacy of European law,” and the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks followed suit. The resulting compromise is this new pact, which requires all countries to accept 30,000 migrants a year or pay $21,000 per refugee refused. It comes just in time: Last year, migration spiked again, with more than a million people lodging asylum claims, over 150,000 of them arriving in Italy. Yet in practice, the pact will “do little” to help Italy, said Alessandra Ziniti in La Repubblica (Italy), and may leave us “even worse off.” Since other European countries can refuse resettlements, “the burden of welcoming and managing migrants’ asylum requests remains” on us. And under the new rules, not only must we house and feed these people but we also have to photograph and fingerprint every one of them, even children as young as 6, for the new migrant database.
And all for what? asked Pitt von Bebenburg in Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany). No matter how cruelly Europe treats refugees or how many it rebuffs, they won’t stop coming. “The suffering caused by wars, poverty, environmental destruction, and hopelessness is simply too great.” The only thing that will stop the boats is “to combat the causes” that spur migrants to leave home—the poverty, the wars, the hunger. Any “reduction in development aid is therefore fatal,” and the EU has slashed such aid by nearly $5 billion. The new system is “doomed to fail.”