Are European Refugee Policies a Farce?

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Are European Refugee Policies a Farce?

The other day I came across the surprising headline that Syrian refugees did not want to go to Luxembourg, and that the Greek and Italian governments stopped trying to send them there. The reason is unknown. “Very many refugees are not keen to come to Luxembourg,” confessed Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission and architect of the quota scheme, whose home country is Luxembourg. Actually similar news were reported, where refugees did not want to seek asylum in Denmark, because benefits had been reduced, such as cash payments and conditions for family reunification.

I wondered if such a headline was the result of a pervasive campaign, or good journalism. The headline I found was in “The Times” that has its editorial freedom. Their readership is part conservative, part liberal. Which should vouch for good journalism. So it doesn’t seem to be a pervasive campaign. If it is good journalism, the European leadership has something to hide. Indeed the official representation from this last week promotes the great success of the newly decided policies about quotas, and the mitigating announcements of future repatriations of economic refugees. But in the meantime the European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos accompanied by Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister could witness and can no longer hide that at the moment Europe fails to manage the situation both politically and practically on the ground in Italy and Greece.

How did we get to this farcical result? First, when the good season opened the floods of refugees via Libya and Turkey, Europe, the Commission, and the national capitals were on vacation. Refugees arrived by the thousands on the Greek islands and in Italy. As finally July and August went by, the European leadership (Included are the Commission, the rotating presidency of the EU held for 6 months by Luxembourg, and the European President) on September 2^nd called for an “emergency meeting” to deal with the unchecked refugee crisis, to be held ……. on September 15^th! It takes two weeks to call an emergency meeting in the age of conference calls? In the meantime, public opinion went both ways, hostile or generous. It was fed by officials who were gyrating between both extremes, with policy statements that were very supportive for refugees, just to back-pedal a couple of days later. The fact is that after maneuvering among the different national attitudes of member states towards the crisis, the EU finally decided on a quota list distributing 160,000 refugees among willing countries. The problem is that in the meantime more than 600,000 refugees arrived this year. It appears that generally the refugees are better informed, better decided, as to where to go, as the overwhelmed EU authorities. Hence the incident with refugees refusing to go to Luxembourg. Quoting Breitbart a conservative LAbased News network with a taste for governmental dysfunctions: “The quotas are not so people can go asylum shopping,” one EU diplomat told The Times. “If you say you are escaping war, you can’t refuse to go to Luxembourg. It is making a joke out of the whole quota system.”

It now appears that the pick and choose strategy has led many refugees to consistently long for certain countries, such as Germany, advertised for a moment as the Promised Land. News travel fast among migrants. And that grassroots strategy almost totally ruined the Commission’s official First when according to Breitbart, an exemplary showcase was planned in Italy, where 33 Eritreans were set to be brought from Italy to Sweden. 14 escaped the forced relocation, and so the officials present on the ground, trotted the remaining 19 to an Italian Air Force plane. That detail of cause was kept hidden from the public, as if the public doesn’t have the right to know. It was an embarrassing crowning of several months of indecision, conflicting attitudes, if not incompetence.

As any country, the European Union and certainly the member states included, because there is no political union, have the responsibility to secure their borders. Non-nationals need to carry valid travel documents and in many cases need to apply for a visa. Most of the European Union members have adhered to the Schengen agreement which guarantees free travel for its residents. Foreigners have to apply for a Schengen visa. I happened to be in charge in 1991 of the European Consular group in New York, as New York was one of three test cities for the Schengen system and its proposed rules. The main change coming from that group was to replace the rule that the visa applicant needed to apply at the Consulate of the country where the applicant would stay most of the time, by the rule that it should be the Consulate of the country of the point of entry. The reason was to avoid the inevitable shopping from one country’s Consulate to the other countries’ Consulates to find out which one would be the laxest.

Refugees often have no travel documents, but this existing Schengen agreement should have been the nucleus of a solution for the refugee crisis at its external borders. But the EU has failed to prop up its common customs agency Frontex, and has by default delegated too many of those responsibilities to its member states, who of course have opted for either open shores and borders or a fence. Frontex should have been able to set up triage installations for handling the new arrivals, often without ID papers, and some of them potentially criminals or terrorists. It is certainly bureaucratic, but it doesn’t have to be without compassion, and it also serves to explain the rules. There the EU has failed, and wasn’t even ready. It might get its policies straight when it finally decides on repatriation policies as a complement to the asylum policies in a couple of weeks.