EU long-term challenges on immigration and refugees (Part 2 of 3)

There are wars, rumors of wars, and major instability in the Greater Middle East. This has produced millions of refugees headed toward Europe.

Austria’s then Foreign Minister and current Chancellor Sebastian “Basti” Kurz claimed to have solved the 2015-16 acute phase of the refugee flow that xenophobic politicians (including him) successfully exploited by “closing the Balkan route”. At best, Basti’s “Balkan route” negotiations played a small supplementary role next to Angela Merkel’s negotiations with Turkey: Deutsche Welle provides description and analysis of that deal, which is still in effect: The EU-Turkey refugee agreement: A review 18.03.2018; Barbara Wesel, The EU's grubby and dangerous deal with Turkey 18.03.2016.

As Barbara Wesel rightly describes it, Merkel’s Turkey deal “It effectively outsources the protection and care of the majority of refugees from the Middle East to Turkey.”

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) notes currently on its website (accessed 01/24/2020):

Turkey continues to host the largest number of refugees worldwide, with close to 4.1 million refugees, including 3.7 million Syrians and nearly 400,000 asylum-seekers and refugees of other nationalities. Turkish legislation provides people in need of international protection with a broad range of rights upon registration with the authorities. Some protection gaps are nonetheless observed in the implementation of the legal framework, largely due to the scale of the refugee response.

The main challenges remain the pressure on national resources and the availability of services for refugees and host communities. While state institutions are addressing these challenges, the protracted nature of the refugee situation has drawn public attention to the social impact of the refugees’ presence.

Of course, Middle Eastern countries are already absorbing refugees from conflicts in the region. And Libya in North Africa plays a particular role. Also from UNHCR (accessed 01/24/2020):

In Libya, an estimated 823,000 people need humanitarian assistance, according to the 2018 Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO). Internally displaced people (IDPs), refugees and asylum-seekers are amongst the most vulnerable, with limited or no access to basic commodities and essential services. Political instability and violent clashes have generated ongoing displacement and created a very challenging operational environment for UNHCR. It is expected that the protection environment in Libya will remain restricted and will likely deteriorate even further.

UNHCR estimates that 4,500 people are detained in Libya, out of whom 2,500 are of concern to UNHCR. The condition of refugees and migrants in detention remains of grave concern and identifying solutions for the most vulnerable is a key priority in 2020. In addition, there are over 300,000 IDPs, of whom 128,000 have been newly displaced since clashes restarted in Tripoli in April 2019, and there are more than 447,000 IDP returnees. While high-level negotiations are underway to end conflict and encourage a resumption of the peace process, UNHCR is prepared to respond to humanitarian needs in 2020.

During Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, Libya was certainly no model of enlightened governance or a country where human rights were scrupulously protected. But it had absorbed and employed large numbers of African refugees fleeing military conflicts or disastrous economic conditions in their own countries.

But when civil war broke out and the US, Britain, and France intervened militarily to overthrow Gaddafi’s government, that function was radically reduced. And so more of the refugees that Libya could previously absorb head toward Europe, often in dangerous sea journeys in rickety vessels. There are refugee camps in Libya, set up partially in collaboration with EU countries, and they have been poorly managed, i.e., serious neglect and crimes including rape and some people being literally sold into slavery.

The Libya and Turkey aspects of the issue have converged even more lately with Turkey’s military intervention in the ongoing civil war and the international negotiations seeking a ceasefire in which Turkey is now necessarily a key participant. (Daniel Brössler, Erdoğan ist eine zentrale Figur im Libyen-Drama geworden Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.01.2020)

Turkey justified its recent invasion of northern Syria as necessary to repatriate some of the Syrian refugees they were hosting. But Turkey used that as an excuse for “ethnic cleansing” of Kurds out of that region. But the 2016 Merkel-Erdoğan refugee agreement limits the EU’s ability to challenge military misadventures by Turkey in Syria or Libya because Turkey can credibly threaten to release large refugee flows into the EU. (Turkey lashes out at EU over refugee deal ahead of Merkel visit Deutsche Welle 23.01.2020)

Also: Erdogan fordert von EU mehr Unterstützung für Flüchtlinge Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 24.01.2020:

In 2016, Merkel negotiated a refugee deal with Turkey to prevent migrants from continuing their journey to the EU. Erdogan had repeatedly threatened in the past to cancel the agreement.

Im Zentrum des Flüchtlingsdeals der EU mit der Türkei steht ein Tauschhandel: Die EU darf alle Migranten, die illegal auf die griechischen Inseln übergesetzt haben und kein Asyl erhalten, in die Türkei zurückschicken. Im Gegenzug kann für jeden zurückgeschickten Syrer ein anderer Syrer aus der Türkei legal in die EU einreisen. Es wurde zudem vereinbart, dass die EU sechs Milliarden Euro für die Verbesserung der Lebensbedingungen syrischer Flüchtlinge in der Türkei zahlt.

At the heart of the EU's refugee deal with Turkey is a barter deal: the EU is allowed to send back to Turkey all migrants who have illegally transferred to the Greek islands and are not granted asylum. In return, for every Syrian returned, another Syrian from Turkey can legally enter the EU. It was also agreed that the EU would pay €6 billion to improve the living conditions of Syrian refugees in Turkey. [my translation from the German]

And those wars and rumors of wars – and US sanctions paving the way for one with Iran – are generating new refugees headed toward Europe. (Erin Cunningham and Mohammad Mahdi Sultani, Trump’s sanctions on Iran are helping fuel a new refugee crisis - in Turkey Washington Post 01/24/2020).

In other words, a massive increase in refugees coming into the EU comparable to that of 2015-16 can still happen. And likely will. And it’s very difficult to predict that. Erdoğan’s international ambitions, an escalation of the US-Iran conflict, serious economic problems are all things that could make that happen.

It does not appear to me that the EU is any better prepared today to deal effectively with such a recurrence than it was in 2015. They should be. But if anything, the nasty political battles related to immigration and refugees has made an effective collective EU response more difficult. The dominant EU narrative that each member country should promote its own national “competitiveness” also creates an every-country-for-themselves response to disruptions which works against EU cooperation and solidarity.

As mentioned at the start of Part 1, the EU needs an immigration policy based on (1) a positive rather than defensive immigration policy based on the understanding that EU countries all need significant numbers of immigrants for the foreseeable future, larger than the current supply; and, (2) a refugee policy that is based on an allocation of refugees among all EU countries, i.e., giving up the “Dublin system”.

The Dublin system works as follows (EU Commission Factsheet on the The Dublin System n/d; accessed 01/24/2020):

When applying the Dublin rules, the country of arrival is, in most cases, identified as the one responsible for the asylum application.

The vast majority of arrivals are currently registered in just a few Member States (e.g. Greece and Italy), putting the asylum systems of these countries of first entry under immense pressure. This is not a fair distribution of responsibility.

The current system, in other words, puts by far the greatest burden for dealing with the refugee flow out of the Greater Middle East and Libya falls on Greece, Italy, and non-EU member Turkey.

Part 1: https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2020/01/eu-long-term-challenges-on-immigration.html
Part 2: https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2020/02/eu-long-term-challenges-on-immigration.htmlbr />
Part 3: https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2020/02/eu-long-term-challenges-on-immigration_5.html