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| My Orchids. Phalaenopsis "Solidarity". Photo ET |
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 2nd called for an “emergency
meeting” to deal with the unchecked refugee crisis, to be held ……. on September
15th! 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.
