Europe’s migration plan deserves a chance

If EU members balk at accepting their minimum quotas of migrants, then the burden on frontier countries will only increase. Much also depends on the EU having somewhere to send failed asylum seekers.

This first appeared in Bloomberg News:

After years of squabbling, the European Union recently forged a tentative agreement on how to manage the flow of migrants reaching its borders. The deal won’t solve the problem overnight, but it’s still a significant political achievement. European governments now have a shared interest in ensuring that implementation of the policy matches its promise of a fairer and more coherent system.

Some 330,000 migrants sought to enter the EU without authorization in 2022. That’s up from previous years but far less than the more than 1 million the EU saw in 2015. In practical terms, the load should be manageable in a bloc of half a billion people — especially since Europe needs to bring in an estimated 1 million additional workers a year to make up for a declining working-age population.

Yet the failure of member states to settle on a collective approach for dealing with migrant arrivals has undermined European unity and contributed to perceptions that the system is overwhelmed. Frontier countries such as Italy and Greece bear the brunt of the burden. Recurring incidents of migrant deaths at sea (or in overcrowded holding centers) and soaring rates of profiteering from people smugglers have fanned public outrage, aiding the rise of anti-immigrant parties in Germany, France, Sweden and elsewhere.

The new pact attempts to impose more order. In addition to standardizing the way asylum claims are processed, it establishes a “solidarity mechanism” that requires member states, for the first time, to agree either to admit an annual quota of migrants, pay a fee for each asylum seeker they reject or increase support for EU-wide operations for handling arrivals. The new policy would reduce processing times by fast-tracking claims from countries with low asylum approval rates. Expulsions would be mandated within 12 weeks of a claim being rejected; a “crisis regulation” provision would allow countries facing large and sudden refugee influxes to maintain longer detention times.

That member states have been able to reach any consensus on such thorny issues is itself cause for encouragement. The devil, however, will be in the implementation. If EU members balk at accepting their minimum quotas of migrants, then the burden on frontier countries will only increase. Much also depends on the EU having somewhere to send failed asylum seekers. Proposals to return them to their home nations or require that they remain in other countries before they reach Europe’s borders have run into legal trouble, stirred allegations of human-rights violations and proved difficult to enforce. The UK’s vexed Rwanda deportation scheme shows how difficult such plans are in practice.

The pact still needs to win approval by the European Parliament and Council, representing member states. As its details are hammered out, EU leaders should work to allay concerns about migrant rights and ensure the pact enforces real solidarity. Significant new funding is needed to reduce the backlog of asylum claims and improve the infrastructure in border countries so that the new system doesn’t merely lead to increased detentions in substandard conditions. Europe should also widen pathways for legal migration and improve integration efforts, which would help fill labor demands, shrink demand for people smugglers and reduce migrant deaths from dangerous sea crossings.

There are no quick fixes to the challenge of migration for wealthy countries. By combining deterrence measures with a stronger commitment to burden sharing, the EU’s migration and asylum pact offers the glimmers of a constructive path forward. Now it’s up to Europe’s leaders to follow through.