The European migrant crisis demonstrates why full-blown political union of the 28 EU countries can never be achieved via democracy. It has exposed the fatal flaw at the heart of the European project: most Europeans want to live in nations with a cohesive culture not in a united nations of many conflicting cultures. Paralysed by the crisis – the largest influx of people since the Second World War – the European Union’s leaders are disunited and in disarray. The internationalism of the Euro-elite is wounded – this time terminally, unless the migrant invasion can be stopped – by the nationalism of the majority of European people who are no more and no less tolerant than people anywhere else on the planet. Nearly all, surely, want to save lives, but at the same time think: Europe cannot take in such huge numbers.
The EU’s quota system, agreed in September after months of haggling and imposed by Germany and the European Commission on smaller eastern EU countries to much protest, cannot solve the migrant crisis even if it were to work.
Under the quota agreement, a paltry 160,000 asylum seekers already in the EU are to be divided up, with larger countries such as Germany and France taking higher quotas. The smaller countries such as Hungary have been forced to take quotas too, but migrants do not want to stay in Hungary, not least because of statements by its prime minister Viktor Orbán discouraging Muslim migration just as the country erected border fences and deployed water cannons.
The first serious flaw in Europe’s quota plan, as Orbán’s government has quite rightly pointed out, is that there’s nothing to stop migrants, once dispatched to Hungary from elsewhere in the EU, from getting on the first train to a more appetising destination – one with more financial support on offer – thanks to the EU’s sacrosanct principle of the free movement of people.
But worse, the programme fails totally to address the far bigger problem of the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants already in the EU who may or may not have claimed asylum and the many more about to make the journey. In Italy, the government has lost all trace of 90 per cent of the 180,000 boat people who arrived last year – most of whom were picked up by the Italian navy. The Italian police have not systematically finger printed the new arrivals, nor arrested them and they are housed in welcome centres where only the tiny minority who claim asylum in Italy remain for any length of time. Here, too, welfare money is very hard to get, new arrivals are not allowed to work but receive pocket money. The rest – the vast majority – disappear, many, but not all, hoping to get to France, Germany or Scandinavia, where they aim to claim asylum regardless of rules requiring asylum seekers to register at their point of entry. Virtually none have been deported. As the interior ministry’s immigration mandarin in Rome told the press last week: “We just don’t have the money to repatriate them. The EU must give it to us.”
Meanwhile, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who first stated Germany would accept 800,000 asylum applications this year alone, was forced to backtrack and close the border with Austria when the numbers arriving overwhelmed the reception centres. Merkel has also said that Germany will deport migrants arriving from “safe” countries such as Albania and Kosovo.
Britain, which did not sign up to the Schengen agreement enshrining the principle of free movement, has refused to participate in the EU’s quota programme, although it has agreed to take in 20,000 Syrians from refugee camps near the Syrian border over the next five years.
According to latest UN figures, more than half a million migrants have illegally entered the EU so far this year (387,520 via Greece, most of the rest via Italy), which is already more than double the total in 2014 – itself a record by a long way. The lion’s share came across the Mediterranean from Turkey and Libya in unseaworthy boats for about €1,500 (Dh6,175) per head, paid to traffickers. Misleadingly, the international media give the impression that those on the move are all Syrians, Afghans or Iraqis. Yes – this year, but not last year – they form the majority crossing into Greece but not into Italy where Africans dominate, notably Eritreans and Nigerians.
There are tens of millions living in poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere, determined to achieve a western standard of living if only they could get to Europe illegally. Yet there is no easy way to distinguish between a genuine refugee and an economic migrant. It’s easy to throw away an ID and claim Syrian nationality. Or else, as British journalists have done in Turkey, buy a false Syrian passport and/or driving licence to make such claims.
So the more people saved from drowning at sea, as the EU’s navies have been doing this year in the Mediterranean, and the more people who are welcomed in, the more will follow suit.
At least 10 million Syrians have been displaced by the civil war, but the EU cannot recreate Syria in Europe, nor in the interests of the Syrian people should it. There remain only two real choices for Europe’s leaders: stop people from getting into the people-traffickers’ boats before they are put to sea or provide a ferry service to ship everyone across safely for free.
Nicholas Farrell is a regular contributor to The Spectator and most recently the author of Comrade Mussolini. He lives in Italy.
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