European policymakers must find a solution that goes deeper than fences and barbed wire.
With parliamentary elections fast approaching, the EU leadership wants its constituents to believe that the refugee crisis that has been roiling the European Union for the past four years is essentially over. In the shadow of America’s vociferous tug-of-war over its own border, European countries have quietly cracked down on migration from the Middle East and North Africa. September 2015, when thousands of Germans volunteered to welcome the arriving refugees, seems eons away. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, EU member states have built over 1,000 kilometers of border walls, with seven countries erecting new barriers within the past three years.
In those three years, the European consensus on migration has continuously shifted to the right. The debate over migration proved a decisive factor in the 2016 Brexit referendum as well as in subsequent elections that brought to power right-wing coalitions in Austria and Italy. For fear of being labelled naïve or out of touch with popular opinion, the left has largely abandoned the issue of migration, allowing Europe’s rising right-wing populists to monopolize the topic. However, now more than ever, European policymakers have to find a sustainable solution to the issue of migration that goes deeper than fences and barbed wire.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Despite still staggering death rates, European authorities are making the passage of refugees ever more dangerous. Although refugee numbers to Europe have declined starkly, over 2,000 people died en route to Europe in 2018. For many, the dangerous Mediterranean route from Libya to Italy is the only option given that the “Balkan route” that went by land from Greece to Central Europe has effectively been closed to refugees. However, neighboring European countries continue to close down remaining loopholes allowing passage into Europe. Italy’s far-right government has closed all of its ports to refugees, returned refugee boats to Libya, and warned NGOs against engaging in life-saving operations. EU policy is increasingly catering to its most vociferous members. Only recently, the European Union ended the naval rescue missions associated with Operation Sophia.
While Italy has spent millions training, equipping, and funding the Libyan coast guard, it turns a blind eye to what happens once the boats return to Libya. There, refugees are often detained in inhumane conditions without access to medical care, the outside world, and any legal means of challenging their imprisonment. With little regard to the human rights fallout, the European Union attempts to keep potential migrants in their homes by making aid to source countries conditional on stringent migration controls. As a consequence, migrants have almost no legal means of applying for asylum in Europe. Currently, 90 percent of recognized refugees, people with a legitimate claim to asylum even according to the European Union’s restrictive laws, have to make their way to Europe illegally.
More Not Less
Immigration skeptics, under the guise of humanitarian concerns, claim that cracking down on refugee rights reduces incentives for migration and thus prevents dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean. However, this argument presents a false dichotomy. The European Union can facilitate a safe and effective way for those deserving of asylum to get to Europe by dramatically increasing humanitarian and work-related visas for immigrants. Currently, over 35 percent of short stay visa applications are denied for migrants from conflict-ridden countries such as Syria or Iraq; the European Union has yet to institute a EU Humanitarian Visa program.
To this end, the European Union must not only uphold the refugee rights enshrined in the Refugee Convention but also provide some work opportunities to “economic migrants” in search of a better life. For one thing, the Convention’s categorical distinction between political and economic migrants denies asylum to refugees fleeing widespread violence or environmental disasters.
In addition, Europe desperately needs high levels of immigration to ensure economic growth. According to the Bank for International Settlements, for example, Germany’s pension plan will collapse without sufficient immigration. Immigrants tend to work for longer hours and lower wages, are less likely to commit crimes, and are more likely to start businesses. Also, as Satish Wasti argued in a recent article for the Harvard Political Review, emigration actually promotes human capital accumulation and improved governance in source countries while reducing transactions costs in bilateral trade.
Against the Current
In today’s anti-immigrant environment, those calling for increasing rather than reducing immigration are quickly dismissed as naïve idealists at best and as lackeys of a sinister elite at worst. The tide of populist anger in response to the European Union’s opening in 2015 has swept anti-immigrant coalitions into power in Italy or Austria and empowered authoritarian governments in Hungary and Poland. A 2017 poll conducted by Chatham House in ten European countries revealed that majorities of 71 percent in Poland, 65 percent in Austria, 53 percent in Germany, and 51 percent in Italy support banning all migration from majority-Muslim countries, while, on average, only 20 percent were opposed.
Policymakers have to walk a fine line. On the one hand, they have to converse with their constituents and find ways to address the underlying economic problems and identity crises fueling widespread xenophobia. However, in the last few years, European center and center-left parties have been so scared of alienating parts of their populace that opinions considered outrageous previously have seeped into the political mainstream. Most importantly, opportunism must not trump principles. If refugees have a basic human right to asylum in Europe, then that claim must outweigh the resistance of immigration opponents.
In truth, the anti-immigrant wave in Europe is carried by an undercurrent of largely unfounded cultural rather than economic anxieties. Immigration skeptics have been quick to point to the failure of European countries in integrating Turkish and North African migrants in the past, evidenced by the ghettos of Brussels, the banlieues of Paris, and the hotspots of Berlin. Yet this failure resulted largely from ill-designed national policies; countries like Germany or France never attempted to truly integrate migrants viewed only as temporary guest workers.
This time around, Europe can do better. Humanitarian and work-related visas would reduce the costs of border enforcement and uphold freedom of movement within the European Union without questionable externalization policies that lead to the arbitrary and indefinite detainment of innocent refugees. Implementing such policies would fulfill Europe’s ethical obligations while fueling economic growth and ensuring long-term financial stability. Making the case for increased European integration in a 2018 speech in Berlin, French president Emmanuel Macron warned that the world is standing at a crossroads. With the United States relinquishing its role as a defender of refugee and human rights, it is on Europe’s leaders to take charge in addressing the refugee crisis unravelling in its backyard.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Patrick Hendry