The influx of asylum-seekers migrants from Africa and troubled Syria into Europe is giving Europen nations some nightmares. Eupean governments are divided on how best to manage the crisis.
Two days ago, about 40 people drowned off the coast of Libya after a vessel carrying 140 people deflated, causing panic on board. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said the victims include Nigerians, Somalis and Sudanese.
The death toll for migrants from Nigeria and other African countries drowned in Mediterranean Sea since the beginning of this year is already worse than the death toll for Titanic catastrophe.
More than 1500 people have died in its waters since January, comparing with 96 for the same period of time in 2014.
A record 50,000 migrants hit Greek shores in July alone. They were ferried from inundated islands to the mainland by a government already floundering in financial crisis and keen to whisk them north into Macedonia, whence they enter Serbia and then Hungary.
Hungary said it had recorded 165,000 entering so far this year. Countless others may have crossed its borders without registering.
Determined to stem the tide, Hungary is building a 3.5-metre (11.5-foot) high fence along its border with Serbia.
At the weekend, the Budapest parliament adopted measures the government says will effectively seal the frontier to migrants as of 15 September.
But, Austria and Germany threw open their borders at the weekend to thousands of exhausted migrants from the east, transported to the frontier by a right-wing Hungarian government that had tried to stop them but was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people.
Left to walk the last yards into Austria, rain-soaked migrants, many of them refugees from Syria’s civil war, were whisked by train and shuttle bus, first to Vienna, and then on by train, to Munich and other cities in Germany.
By early evening on Saturday, about 6,000 had arrived in Munich and nearly 2,000 more were expected on two trains due after midnight, said Christoph Hillenbrand, head of the Upper Bavaria regional administration.
Last Thursday, Germany and France ordered the European commission to come up with a new “permanent” and binding regime for spreading the refugee load around all of the 28 countries in the union. British Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May want nothing to do with the scheme and have absented themselves from the policymaking, carping from the sidelines.
Last Friday, the prime ministers of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic told Paris and Berlin to get stuffed, arguing that west European-style multi-culturalism is nothing but trouble and that they have no intention of repeating the same mistakes.
The commission has already done what Berlin is demanding. On Wednesday, its President, Jean-Claude Juncker, will unveil proposals obliging at least 22 countries with a combined population of almost 400 million to absorb 160,000 people from Italy, Greece and Hungary, which are struggling with influxes from the Middle East and Africa.
The all-powerful busybodies of Brussels are relatively impotent when it comes to immigration.
The seven countries of central Europe and the Baltic are being asked to take fewer than 30,000. It should not be a problem for big international cities such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest. But the east Europeans is retreating into parochialism, digging into their national bunkers while nursing resentment at what they perceive to be German bullying.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is the cheerleader of the “Europe is useless” chorus, but Robert Fico, the Slovakian Premier, and President Milos Zeman in Prague are not far behind. Ewa Kopacz, the Prime Minister of Poland, sounds more moderate, but she looks likely to lose an election next month to the nationalist right. Her hands are tied.
When Europe’s leaders last met to grapple with the crisis, in June, they argued until 3.30am and dispersed without agreement, bringing Matteo Renzi, the Italian Prime Minister, to lament: “If this is Europe, you can keep it.”
Things have worsened considerably since then. Governments are floundering, pirouetting on policy in response to front-page pictures of tragedy on a Turkish beach, engaging in a blame game which, coming on top of five years of division over Greece and the euro, is exposing major divisions.
If the euro proved to be a fair-weather currency whose structures and rules buckled and nearly collapsed in a storm, the same is now evident on immigration. The system is flimsy, not fit for purpose in an emergency.
There is no “European” immigration policy or regime. There is a mish-mash of national policies, a patchwork of systems and criteria which are contradictory, incoherent, fragmented. Italy is very far way from Finland, not only geographically, but when it comes to immigration and asylum. France and Germany have quite different historical approaches to integrating newcomers. Sweden and Denmark are neighbours with a close shared history, but their immigration policies are chalk and cheese.
National governments guard these prerogatives jealously. “Europe” in the form of the European Union (EU) authorities in Brussels has minimal say over policy-making. Almost all power here lies with heads of national governments and interior ministries.
Yet, in this crisis, Brussels-bashing has become routine, the cheap and easy option for shameless national leaders acting unilaterally, blocking every suggestion that comes out of Brussels and then blaming it for the ensuing chaos.
Orbán proved the point in Brussels last week. “Europe” had failed, its leaders had irresponsibly created this mess, their response was “madness”. He has put up a razor-wire fence on the border with Serbia and announced he was fast-tracking legislation to establish a zero-immigration regime within 10 days, with the army deployed on the border.
Brussels cannot stop him because these powers are national. If need be, he said, he would put up another fence on the border with Croatia, a barrier between two EU countries. On Friday, Brussels shrugged and said it did not like this, but could not do anything about it.
Cameron responded to growing international and domestic pressure for Britain to take more refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts by saying that the United Kingdom (UK) will fulfill its moral responsibilities.
In a marked shift of tone, as Europe’s human rights watchdog criticised Britain for failing to offer shelter, Cameron spoke of how moved he was by the picture of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy, whose body was washed up on a Turkish beach.
Speaking at a Hitachi train plant in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, the prime minister said: “Anyone who saw those pictures overnight could not help but be moved and, as a father, I felt deeply moved by the sight of that young boy on a beach in Turkey. Britain is a moral nation and we will fulfill our moral responsibilities.
“We are taking thousands of people, and we will take thousands of people.” his remarks stopped short, however, of a specific commitment to take more refugees. Cameron said he will keep the issue under review, a stance that gives Whitehall time to work out a scheme with the Home Office, local councils and international agencies.
Cameron said Britain had already stepped up to meet the challenge of the refugee crisis facing Europe by assisting in the rescue mission in the Mediterranean, spending 0.7 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on international aid and donating money to fund Syrian refugee camps in the Middle East.
He insisted, however, that taking more refugees was not the only answer to the problem. “We need a comprehensive solution, a new government in Libya, we need to deal with the problems in Syria.
“I would say the people responsible for these terrible scenes we see, the people most responsible, are President Assad in Syria and the butchers of Isil (Islamic State) and the criminal gangs that are running this terrible trade in people. And we have to be as tough on them at the same time.”
The Btritish prime minister’s intervention came as he faced growing domestic and international pressure, including from within his own party, to start to take the numbers already being taken elsewhere in Europe.
The Scottish first Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, accused him of adopting a “walk on by on the other side” approach after he said on Wednesday that the UK would not take any extra refugees.
Harriet Harman, the interim Labour leader, has called on Cameron to convene an emergency meeting of Cobra cabinet committee to coordinate the government response.
The Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, stepped up her criticism of his refusal to accept more than a few hundred refugees. “It is shameful, utterly shameful, that our prime minister is just turning his back,” she said.
“My problem with the prime minister’s response is that he only wants to talk about the things that he will do to help far away, but he won’t actually do anything here at home. We have a responsibility to act.”
London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, became the most senior Conservative to call for more action, saying it was Britain’s moral responsibility to take those fleeing persecution. But he said the UK must not become a magnet or pole of attraction for “economic migrants”.
Johnson said it was time to look harder at resolving the Syrian problem. “No one would say non-intervention is working,” he said.
The chancellor, George Osborne, speaking during a factory visit in Sunderland, said: “There is no person who would not be very shocked by that picture – and I was very distressed when I saw it myself this morning – of that poor boy lying dead on the beach.
“We know there is not a simple answer to this crisis. What you need to do is first of all tackle Isis (Islamic State) and the criminal gangs who killed that boy.”
In a letter to Cameron, Harman urged him to adopt a four-point plan to help more refugees. She urged him to:
•Agree now that Britain will take more refugees, both directly from Syria and from the southern European countries where most refugees have arrived.
•Convene an urgent meeting of EU leaders next week to agree a process for resolving the immediate refugee crisis on Europe’s borders.
•Convene an urgent meeting of Cobra so that a cross-government plan can be agreed and implemented. This was now a problem spanning beyond the Home Office, affecting transport, small business, tourism and local communities, she said.
•Bring together a summit of local authority leaders to agree a framework on what more can be done locally to support refugees and asylum seekers.
She added: “We are all proud of Britain’s historical role of offering a sanctuary to those fleeing conflict and persecution. We are an outward-facing, generous-hearted nation, not one that turns inward and shirks its responsibilities. I know you will not want to be the prime minister of a government that fails to offer sanctuary while our neighbours are stepping up to respond.”
