The
Schengen Area.
The Agreement signed on 14 June 1985 on a boat on the Moselle near the small
town of Schengen (Luxembourg), by five of the ten states that formed the
European Community at that time, effectively abolished passport controls and
any other border control among the signatories thus treating the area as a
single country. The Agreement was supplemented by the Schengen Convention of
1990, establishing a common visa policy. Initially the Schengen Area was
separate from EU structures, as at that time the initiative lacked general
consensus, but its rules and procedures were incorporated into European Union
law by the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, coming into effect in 1999. The five
initial signatories (the three Benelux countries, France and Germany), were
gradually followed by another 17, thus encompassing all EU member states except
Ireland and the UK that opted out, and four others – Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus
and Romania – who wish to join and are obliged to join eventually but are not
yet deemed to be ready. All four EFTA member states – Iceland, Liechtenstein,
Norway and Switzerland – are also associated members of the Schengen Area although
they are not members of the EU. In addition, three European microstates –
Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican City – are considered de facto participants. Today the Schengen Area has a population of
over 400 million people.
Net
gains. The creation of the Schengen Area was - in principle –
an excellent decision. The effective elimination of internal borders within the
Area generated considerable savings in terms of travel time and convenience for
passengers, expenditure on custom officials and equipment, higher speed and
lower cost of commodity transport. A recent study by Germany's
Bertelsmann Foundation estimates the cost of the possible breakdown of the
Schengen area at between €470bn and €1.4 trillion over the next decade,
(roughly 10% of the 28-members EU bloc GDP) due to an increase in import prices
of between 1% and 3%. Germany would lose between €77bn and €235bn and France
between €85.5bn and €244bn under the two scenarios. The breakdown of the Schengen
Area would also inflict a heavy burden on other countries, with a combined loss
for the United States and China over the next decade estimated by the same
study at between €91bn and €280bn. The European Commission estimated that the
permanent reintroduction of border controls would cost between €5bn and €18bn a
year because of lower tourism and transport delays. These estimates perhaps may
be slightly exaggerated, but there can be no doubt that in the current, long
and severe depression of the European economy, the impact of a Schengen
breakdown, even if partial, would worsen significantly the growth prospects of
the Union, with global reverberations.
Migrations. In the half-century 1960-2010 the ratio of the population working in countries different from that of their birth over the world population (corrected for the displacements which occurred at the end of World War II in 1945) was relatively stable around 3%, though with a clear tendency to accelerate that was much more marked for South-North migrations (see the figure below, where the value of that ratio in 1960 is taken as equal to 1).
Source: Docquier, Frédéric and Joel Machado (2015), “Revenu, Population
et Flux Migratoires au 21ème siècle: Un défi sociétal pour l’Europe” in
Studia Oeconomica Posnaniensia, October 2014.
In subsequent
years the acceleration continued. In 2015 migrants entering Europe mostly from
the Middle East and Africa turned into a veritable flood – the largest flows to
take place since 1945 – that put the Schengen arrangements to a most severe
test: EU states received 1.3 million asylum applications, especially from
Syria. On 24 August 2015 Angela Merkel announced that all Syrian asylum-seekers
were welcome to remain in Germany regardless of which EU country they had first
entered. She adopted this “open door” policy unilaterally, without EU
agreement, after consultation solely with the Austrian Chancellor Werner
Faymann; subsequently there were signs of intended policy reversal but
tightening up was only slight (for instance preventing relatives joining
migrants for at least a year) thus provoking an intensification of the inflow because
of the migrants’ expectation of harder times; a recent poll found that 81% of
the German population thought that the government had lost control over
migration policy. The Bertelsmann Stiftung estimates that by mid-February 2016
an even larger number of Syrians alone had found their way into Jordan
(640,000), Lebanon (over 1 million) and Turkey (2.6 million); Pakistan and Iran
have taken several hundred thousand migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq
respectively. In 2015 migrants crossing the sea from Turkey to Greece increased
20 times with respect to 2014. Last November the EU granted €3bn to Turkey as
an inducement to hold migrants there at least temporarily, but three months
later 2,000 migrants still cross daily into Europe: in order to take back
non-Syrians the Turks are negotiating for more aid and other benefits such as
visa-free travel to Europe, which in turn would generate a significant inflow
of Turkish Kurd asylum seekers into Europe. Arrivals in Italy decreased
slightly in the same period, from 170,000 to 154,000, which still represent a very
large intake. For an up to date survey see Breugel,
12 February, and The Economist, interactive
graphics, 6 February.
In
May 2015 Branko Milanovic wrote a post in Social
Europe, “Five reasons why migration into Europe is a problem with no
solution”: 1) deep-seated and permanent factors such as political chaos in the
Middle East and extraordinarily huge and increasing income gaps between Europe
and Africa, with sub-Saharan population poised to increase almost by six times by 2100; 2)
lack of an immigration tradition in Europe; 3) European political blunders due
to a combination of incompetence and arrogance, such as overthrowing Gaddafi,
the ultimatum to the previous Ukrainian government, and the handling of the
Greek crisis; 4) the increasing influence of right-wing, populist
anti-immigration parties in several European countries, even when they are not
in government; 5) the total lack of strategies, policies and ideas at the
European level, while the crisis calls for a multilateral solution involving
co-ordination among member-states and with African countries and the European
recognition that an influx from Africa is dictated by demographic and economic
gaps: “Unfortunately, neither of these two conditions is close to being
satisfied. So the problem, among permanent political improvisation, will
continue to worsen” – he wrote prophetically. (In a post in the same series
last January Branko stressed the economic positives
and negatives of migrations; see also his forthcoming book Global Inequality - A New Approach for the
Age of Globalization, Belknap Press).
The Schengen Area rules
include provisions for temporary border controls to be re-established in case
of urgency, for up to 2 and 6 months, and for outright suspension for up to 2
years in the case of threats to public order. Since the 2015 summer temporary
measures have been already implemented unilaterally by several countries.
Hungary closed its borders with Serbia, Romania and Croatia, allowing its army
to use rubber bullets, tear gas and barbed wire against migrants. In November
Slovenia started building its own fence along the Croatian border; its
Parliament recently approved the deployment of the country’s army to manage the
migrants’ flow at its borders. An increasing numbers of migrants have been
cutting through these barriers to enter the EU.
Warren Richardson, Hope for a New Life. A man slides a child under barbed wire at the
border between Serbia and Hungary at Röszke, Hungary, 28 August 2015. (World Press Photo)
Sergey
Ponomarev, Russia, The New York Times, The European migration crisis: Refugees
arrive by boat near the village of Skala on the Lesbos Island, Greece, 16 November
2015 (World Press Photo)
The closing of Schengen internal borders has
accelerated since the
beginning of 2016. In Denmark the government extended passport checks on the
German border for the third time, with Sweden keeping similar checks for
travellers arriving from Denmark. France is in the process of closing down the
so-called “Jungle” migrant camp at Calais, whose estimated 5,500 residents were
waiting to smuggle themselves to the UK on ferries, or through the Chunnel in trucks,
trains or even on foot; the closure was violently resisted. Belgium
reintroduced border controls on its frontier with France, hiring 290
extra-police officers to try and stop the Calais migrants from moving to its
coastline. Austria has built a wall at its frontier with Slovenia; in under two
months in 2016 it received 101,000 migrants compared with 4,000 in the same
period last year, and has introduced a cap of 80 asylum applications per
day. Borders have been tightened between
the Republic of Macedonia and Greece, allowing Syrians and Iraqis through but
barring Afghans, who then were banned also by Croatia. Towards the end of
February over 22,000 migrants were stranded in Greece and were expected by the
Greek Migration Minister and Vice-premier to treble by the end of March; the UN
estimates their number to be increasing even faster, at the rate of 3,600 per
day. The Greek border with Macedonia has been nearly sealed off, threatening to
turn Greece into a giant refugee camp – a “warehouse of souls” (Tsipras).
The
EU is planning to provide Greece with €700mn over 3 years (of which 300mn in
2016 for emergency assistance to migrants); reasonable proposals to trade off
migrant assistance for Greek debt cancellation have been rejected as a moral
hazard risk. On 24 February in Vienna ten eastern European countries – with the
much resented exclusion of Germany, Greece and Italy – agreed on tightening up
their own border controls with a view to stop the Western Balkan route into
Europe, which of course will shift the flow back to the Mediterranean route
into Italy. On 29 February at the Macedonian-Greek border “crowds of migrants
were beaten back from storming a fence with a salvo of tear gas” (FT, 1 March).
The current migration assault is even more serious than the Euro crisis, as
Angela Merkel recently acknowledged.
Last November Jean
Asselborn, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister, declared that Europeans
had “only
a few months” to save the Schengen system. On 21 February Thomas de
Maizière, Germany's Interior Minister, stated that EU member states must agree
a common approach to tackle migrations “within two weeks”
if they wanted to avoid the system’s complete collapse. On 4 March the European
Commission unveiled a plan, Back to Schengen, “to
lift all remaining border controls by December 2016, so as to return to a
normally functioning Schengen Area before the end of the year”. The options
considered involve sharing out asylum seekers across the EU on a quota basis
regardless of where they first arrived, either as a general procedure or only if
a country is overwhelmed by a sudden influx. The IX Report on European Security
reveals that a poll conducted in early 2016 among 1000 respondents each in Italy,
Spain, France and Germany gives a majority of over 75% in favour of the
reintroduction of border controls either unconditionally (56% in Italy) or in
special circumstances (Repubblica, 7
March).
The
Schengen crisis should not take anybody by surprise. The writing has been on the
wall for a long time. The introduction of the Euro as a common currency had
equally been an excellent idea, which however failed because it was premature before political, fiscal and banking
integration; incomplete due to the
ECB lacking powers as Lender of Last Resort to the EU and the member states;
and because the Eurozone was subject to increasing divergence in the member states’ fundamentals. The
Euro crisis was also made worse by austerity policies perversely enforced by
the German-led European authorities. Precisely the same kind of criticisms
apply to free internal travel within the Schengen Area: premature, incomplete
and made worse by country divergence and recessionary austerity. On the impact
of austerity on migrations and convergence see Michelle Baddeley, "Convergence, Divergence and Migration in an
Age of Austerity", Seminar paper, Cambridge 2016:
“…(T)he ability for host societies and economies to
adapt will be constrained by limits on government spending. Infrastructure
investment is needed in the very short‐term, including emergency infrastructure to
support the immediate consequences of migration e.g. within refugee and migrant
camps. Infrastructure investment will also be essential in the medium to long
term to ensure that growing migrant populations have proper access to social
infrastructure including housing, schools, hospitals and other medical
services. Without this investment, the prospects for growing inequality, deprivation
and socio-political unrest are likely to be severe – exacerbating divergences
at many levels: between the global South and North, between Northern and
Southern parts of the EU, and within countries depending on how different
regions’ populations are affected by migration and/or how much access they have
to public finance for infrastructure investment.”
Three
considerations are in order:
1.Free
internal travel requires strong external controls. Just
like a Free Trade Area requires a common external tariff barrier, free internal
travel obviously requires a common external border, with a common Coast Guard,
border guards and if necessary a common Army, all provided and paid for
centrally. The Schengen external borders, on the contrary, are delegated to national,
fragmented, uneven and inadequate controls (in spite of the rudimentary Frontex
agency and the recent intervention of NATO ships patrolling the Aegean Sea).
Moreover existing controls do not include brutal repression, and this
humanitarian restraint is more labour-intensive. Shooting trespassers on sight,
as East German guards protecting GDR borders used to do with attempted exits, is
not yet reached but arrest and imprisonment in Hungary (and the extra-Schengen
UK) have been, as well as the use of tear gas and rubber bullets elsewhere.
Schengen external borders
are a sieve that allows through indiscriminately legitimate refugees, escaping
directly from persecution and war, and economic migrants, i.e. those refugees
who had already reached a safe country, or other migrants who are simply
seeking to improve their standard of living. The difference between refugees
and economic migrants (both classed here as migrants) is elusive, as even
refugees will tend to move towards countries with higher employment
opportunities and/or income, thus abandoning their “first safe country” status.
This difference is fundamental: refugees are protected by UN regulation on
reaching their first safe haven, the others are still subject to national
endorsement and control. And even if a policy of completely open doors was
adopted towards economic migrants, the speed
of the migratory inflow would still have to be subject to national control.
In fact the capacity to absorb immigrants into any given territory is limited
at any time by short term available resources, by the country’s capacity to
integrate immigrants and, as well, by their own willingness and preparedness to
be integrated.
Whether or not immigration
brings net benefits to the host country is a controversial matter. On balance
it probably does in the long term, but the case of very fast, concentrated mass
migration should be considered in its own terms. The possibility cannot be
neglected of a mixed distributional impact on workers and firms through greater
competition in labour markets, both in the short and long term; of significant
additional investment cost in new infrastructures, and - at least in the short
term - welfare costs, making immigration a public investment competing with alternative
forms of public expenditure. Immigration brings possible cultural enrichment
but also possible cultural impoverishment, as well as potential cultural,
political, ethnic and religious conflict – even leaving aside the possibility,
not entirely implausible, of migration being a vehicle of health contagion and
terrorist infiltration. These drawbacks have to be set against the benefit of
rejuvenation of an ageing host population, which is associated with mass
immigration.
Whatever the true net costs
and benefits of immigration, the increasing electoral success of right-wing, populist,
anti-immigration parties in most of the developed world signals unambiguously
the widespread perception – right or wrong – that the current level and/or rate
of immigration are excessive: from Matteo Salvini’s Lega to Nigel Farage’s UKIP,
from Jimmie Åkesson’s Swedish Democrats to Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, from
the German Alternative für Deutschland to Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz or Jaroslaw
Kaczynski’s PiS, Heinz-Christian Strache’s FPO, Milos Freeman’s Civil Rights
Party, Marine Le Pen’s Front National, the Finnish and Norwegian anti-immigration
parties, as well as shifts in more standard political parties (see the anti-immigration
stance of Boris Johnson, mayor of London and David Cameron’s probable
successor). In the US the latest polls show that immigration is fourth or lower on public concerns: the anti-immigration vote is overwhelmed by the
economy, anti-Elite feelings and security issues, although Donald Trump’s large-scale
wall-building and deportation plans may have something to do with his unexpectedly
strong bid for the US Presidency.
When existing external
borders are not in a position to identify and register all migrants, to
distinguish between refugees reaching their first safe haven (which the 1990 Dublin
Convention rules, stricter than the UN rules, regard as the first EU country)
and all other migrants, it is unavoidable that each Schengen member state will
need to reintroduce effective border controls, including visas and passport
checks.
The identification of
immigrants has been likened to the marking of prisoners in Nazi concentration
camps, but the comparison is improper, even if identification required the use
of force. Identification is essential to verify both the right to residence and
entitlement to benefits.
The almost 4,000 migrants
that drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, the high monetary cost (steeply
rising with the spreading of border controls and obstacles) and exposure to
violence and other personal risks of migration make the desperate predicament
of economic migrants – running away from famine, destitution, drought, environmental
and cultural disasters – very close to that of refugees running away from
persecution and war. But the difference is still there: refugees have a
sacrosanct right to asylum sanctioned by the United Nations, while all others
by migrating place themselves at the mercy of their countries of arrival: economic
migrants can be refused entry or be repatriated.
Both
rejection and forced repatriation are unpleasant and brutal, but an
indiscriminate open doors policy would amount to the pretense that the world in
which we live, dominated by private property and territory-based democracy,
is instead a non-existing utopia of global democracy and universal communism,
though limited to the collectivization of social capital. No wonder such a
contradictory utopia was never proposed or theorized by anyone. In the world as
we know it international solidarity is necessarily a discretionary concession
by those who can afford generosity, which can only be exercised collectively if
backed by a majority; it is not an automatic right of those who need international
solidarity.
Moreover a policy of
indiscriminate open doors to all immigrants, while reducing international
inequality across countries will increase internal inequality within
countries because of the greater competition in
the labour market in the host countries and the impoverishment of the emitting countries, thus leading to a possible and perhaps probable greater
global inequality. (The case for repatriation is developed conclusively by
Alberto Chilosi, “On the economics and politics of unrestricted immigration”, The Political Quarterly, 73-4, pp. 431–435, October 2002).
All immigrants, whether or
not they can be classed as refugees, should be protected from the risks of
their journey, in spite of such risks being to some extent the result of their
own actions, just as cancer patients are entitled to treatment even if they are
smokers (though some may disagree). Preferably the cost of protecting them
should be a charge on all Schengen countries, as it is now for the EU Frontex
operations, but even if such cost was born by a single country’s taxpayers as
in the case of Italy’s Mare Nostrum scheme it would still be desirable.
The trouble is that repatriation
is costly, and should be financed by the Schengen countries as it is part of
the cost of abolishing internal borders; it requires the agreement of the
country of origin or of the first safe country reached, which may be unknown or
might no longer exist or might not honour such an agreement (e.g. Pakistan). Moreover
it is doubtful whether “pushbacks”, whereby asylum seekers are returned to a
country without their application having had a fair hearing, are consistent
with both the Geneva Conventions and the EU asylum code. But the fact that repatriation
will not always be possible is no reason for not attempting it at least in some
cases, if nothing else pour encourager
les autres. Refugees are in a
different position because with the settlement of conflict in their own
countries they should return home.
On 27 January Sweden – that
last year received 163,000 asylum applications, the highest number per capita
in Europe – announced a plan to repatriate 80,000 migrants (subsequently
reduced to 60,000 then left undetermined) “over many years”, using aircraft chartered for
the purpose, but the plan is still on paper. In the same week 308 economic
migrants were sent back by bus from Greece to Turkey; however Turkey will not
accept more unless Europe takes more Syrians off their hands – a vicious circle.
Rejection looks like a more viable option: in his current visit of the Western
Balkans ahead of the EU-Turkey summit Donald Tusk, on 2 March in Zagreb, said
that “Member states should refuse entry to third-country nationals who do not
meet the necessary conditions or who, although they were able to do so earlier,
did not apply for asylum.” (European Council communique’ 3 March). However, the
concentration of rejected economic migrants in border camps is bound to create
other problems, while the prospect of future rejections can only speed up
current migration flows.
2.Free
internal travel requires the convergence of living standards within the area (including
welfare provisions). Not unnaturally foot-lose migrants who do not
have stronger ties (of language, religion, relatives, friends) to a particular
country will tend to choose their ultimate destination on the basis of their
perception of maximum improvement in their living standard resulting from migration.
Employment prospects are likely to be paramount, indeed traditional migration
theory (exemplified by the Harris-Todaro model, AER 1970, 60-1) relates the
incentive to migrate to wage differences between the home and destination
countries weighed by their respective probability of employment (taken as 1 minus the unemployment rate), to which of
course one should add the net improvement in welfare benefits. Potential
immigrants may well tend to overestimate their perceived income improvement
prospects, as they seem to imagine themselves and their children gainfully
employed at top salaries; this is one of the factors encouraging migrations
beyond reason. When expected income gains diverge across potential
destinations, the more attractive countries naturally will tend to be
disproportionately vulnerable to migratory inflows. Hence the incentive for
destination countries to raise national barriers, and/or discriminate in welfare
benefits against immigrants, or dismantle the welfare state tout court for both nationals and
immigrants. Even James Meade – a liberal and enlightened economist who proposed
a generous generalised basic income – in order to prevent opportunistic immigration
recommended that immigrants should be treated by the principle of reciprocity,
i.e. enjoy the same benefits, if any, that our nationals might be granted in
the migrants’ country of origin. (It has been objected that such a rule might
be applied to countries of the same level of development, such as North-North
and perhaps South-South, but not to South-North migrations).
The UK is a case in point.
Relatively generous benefits granted to immigrants from other EU countries,
including social housing, national health entitlements and payments to
relatives resident abroad, have led to Cameron attempting to negotiate
“emergency brakes” with the EU, subjecting benefits to time restrictions
(excluding immigrants for the first four years residence), or to resident
family members (possibly restricting family re-joining). Cameron succeeded in
negotiating with the EU these kinds of restrictions only for future and not for
existing immigrants, which therefore strengthened the conservative government
resolve to reduce welfare benefits all round. Meanwhile non-European immigrants
to the UK are subjected to a minimum income to be reached within the first 5
years of residence (which has just been raised from £21,000 to £35,000 from
next April), under penalty of expulsion after one additional year. New rules will
make UK landlords responsible for checking the documents of their tenants,
making it harder to find accommodation not only for unauthorized immigrants but
also for the 60% UK citizens who do not possess a passport.
3.Any
attempt at a fair re-distribution of immigrants among countries requires the
re-establishment of national borders. Last July EU Interior
Ministers - outvoting Romania, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics strongly opposed to the scheme - imposed a plan to relocate 40,000 migrants (24,000 from Italy and 16,000 from Greece) across
the EU. In September an additional 120,000 relocations (16,600 from Italy, 54,400 from Greece and 54,000 from Hungary) were added, raising the
total to 160,000 in two years, of which 54,000 were postponed to the following year (FT, 25 September 2015). Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister,
announced a referendum
on whether the country should be forced to resettle refugees, on the ground
that “Introducing resettlement quotas for migrants without the support of the
people is an abuse of power”; he is unlikely to lose that referendum. On 28
February Pope Francis advocated “an equitable re-distribution of the burden of
migrants” (thus accepting that immigration is a burden). However, such kind of a re-location is
futile, not to say idiotic, for under Schengen completely free and unrestricted
internal travel any immigrant re-located to a country other than his/her
preferred destination can at any time, and eventually will, just go there.
Indeed we could argue that even the relocation of migrants within a given
country might have to be subjected, in order to be done efficiently, to the
introduction of internal passports and
controls of the kind prevailing in the Soviet Union until 1991, in order to
stop immigrants from settling in the capital city and in other metropolitan
areas that are already overcrowded and congested and to divert them instead to
less developed areas with an abundance of cheap underutilised housing and land.
On 29 February Angela Merkel
said it loud and clear: “Migrants may not pick and choose where they are to be
settled” (Daily Telegraph, 1 March). She referred to their choice of country,
but Germany is indeed unusual in imposing constraints on where migrants can
live, both in order to prevent the formation of ghettos in big cities and to
direct immigrant flows to the underpopulated regions of the former GDR where
there is plentiful social housing and a shortage of young workers. Such a
policy had been introduced in the 1990s at the time of a large influx of ethnic
Germans from the former Soviet Union and Romania. Immigrants have their welfare
benefits cut if they move away from their assigned locations. In the UK
immigrants who claim social housing and some other benefits are offered it only
in the northern rust belt towns.
This kind of restrictions
seem necessary to the smoother absorption of immigrants, but paradoxically the
European Court of Justice, ruling on a complaint by two Syrians about their German
residence requirements, at the end of February 2016 decided that EU rules “preclude”
them even if they are aimed at “achieving an appropriate distribution of the
burden connected with the benefits”, though it also said that people granted
subsidiary protection could be subject to a residence condition “for the
purpose of promoting their integration”. Nevertheless German ministers are
preparing a law which would expand the existing residence restrictions to
refugees whose asylum requests have been approved, in spite of objections from
refugee associations (FT,
1 March).
Disintegration?
At present the EU is being subjected to four
centrifugal forces (see Munchau,
FT 28 February. and Javier Lopez, “Europe
in Multiple Organ Failure”): a North-South divide over border controls;
another North-South divide about austerity and the Euro; an East-West divide
over migrant re-location; and the uncertain implications of Brexit with
possible contagion effects on other member states.
It is difficult to disagree
with Oxford political scientist Jan Zielonka (Is the EU doomed? Global Futures, Polity Press, London, 2014) when
he argues that “Sadly… at present the EU does not facilitate integration, but
impedes it”… “The European Union was widely regarded as the most successful
modern integration project, but it has turned into an embarrassment”… “No
wonder so many citizens lost trust in the EU, and that the process of
disintegration is gathering pace.” But Zielonka’s expectation that “A weakening
of the EU and its member states will strengthen other political actors such as
cities, regions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)” is utterly
unconvincing: the solution or even the alleviation of both the Euro crisis and
the migration crisis cannot rely on a network of de-centralised power centres
but will require a deep degree of centralised initiative and commitment to
greater integration. See “A Plan for Europe’s Refugees”, The
Economist 6 February:
“Creating a
well-regulated system requires three steps. The first is to curb the “push
factors” that encourage people to risk the crossing, by beefing up aid to
refugees, particularly to the victims of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq,
including the huge number who have fled to neighbouring countries such as
Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. The second is to review asylum claims while
refugees are still in centres in the Middle East or in the “hotspots” (mainly
in Greece and Italy), where they go when they first arrive in the EU. The third
element is to insist that asylum-seekers stay put until their applications are
processed, rather than jumping on a train to Germany.” Unfortunately, “All
these steps are fraught with difficulty.”
Prospects might become
clearer soon, after the next EU-Turkey summit (7-8 March), the German regional
elections (13 March) regarded as a test of Merkel’s immigration policies, and
the EU Summit on migration (18-19 March).
There seems to be, however,
a constitutional conflict between European and international rules about
treaties, revealed by the recent agreement reached by the UK and all the other
member states about the special terms negotiated by Cameron for the UK. That
Agreement is said to have been deposited within the UN and is therefore subject
to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, which operates on rules
different from those of the European Court of Justice competent to enforce the
European Treaties. Downing Street has claimed that the EU-UK agreement is
legally binding and enforceable, but it is not clear whether any country who
did not like it might seek to challenge it in the International Court of
Justice. A constitutional crisis of this kind is the last thing that Europe
needs today.
Note: I thank Carmen de la Camara, Marilena Giannetti, Tonino Lettieri, Ruggero Paladini and Fabio Sdogati for useful comments on an earlier draft of this post. However they should not be held responsible for any errors or omissions, nor deemed necessarily to agree with any of the propositions put forward here.
UPDATE
The EU-Turkey summit of 7-8
March led to a draft deal whereby Turkey would take back immigrants coming from
Greece unless they successfully applied for asylum there, while the EU would take in one
Syrian refugee for every immigrant sent back. In exchange Turkey would receive
€6bn aid instead of the €3bn already committed but not yet disbursed, accelerate its
progress towards EU accession and obtain visa-free travel to the Schengen Area
for its 75mn citizens.
In the three German regional elections of 13 March Ms Merkel’s
CDU Party retained the possibility of forming coalition governments but lost
ground heavily, while her PSD coalition Party that had backed her immigration
policies performed even worse. The xenophobic right-wing AfD gained record
support.
On 18 March after ten days
negotiations the EU and Turkey reached a compromise deal that commanded
unanimous support, effective from 20 March. Greece obtained 4000 new personnel to process asylum
applications. There would be no collective pushbacks, but starting on 4 April Turkey (that received 2.7 million migrants to date) would take back
applicants who did not qualify for asylum in Greece, while the EU would take
from Turkey “one for one” as many Syrians up to a ceiling of 72,000. In exchange Turkey would
receive €6bn instead of the anticipated €3bn, of which 3bn up front and 3bn at
the end of the year; the process of EU accession would be tentatively reopened
and EU visa-free travel for Turkish citizens would be granted from next June.
The Greek government’s migration spokesman Giorgos Kyritsis declared that implementation of the deal would require more than 24 hours; Turkey will not take back migrants before 4 April anyway. The 4,000 officials, translators, judges and security guards promised by the EU still have to arrive; eight ships with a capacity of 300-400 passengers each need to be provided by Frontex, together with 30 buses. Thousands of migrants (mostly Syrian, but also Iraqis and Afghans) have continued to arrive in Greece in spite of the agreement. Greece is still relocating migrants from its islands to temporary refugee camps on the mainland. From 4 April a number of failed asylum-seekers (750 in
the first week, mostly North Africans, Afghans and Pakistanis) from Greek
detention centres will board a vessel chartered by Frontex and be taken to
Turkey. In return Germany will take an equivalent number from Turkish refugee camps.
These deportations might be illegal and have sparked violent protests but will
accelerate in April.
There were still strong objections from humanitarian groups,
on the ground that the deal violated international law on the treatment of
refugees; Turkey is expected to conform its regulations to international
standards, but refused to accept a formal commitment to that effect. European reaction has ranged from welcoming “closed borders” to condemning the “shameful deal”. Wolfgang Munchau, FT 21 March: “The deal with Turkey is as sordid as anything I have seen in modern European politics… The EU not only sold its soul that day, it actually negotiated a pretty lousy deal.” On 22 March the UN refugee agency announced the suspension
of its involvement at all closed centres on the Greek islands, on the ground
that so-called “hotspots” for the reception and registration of migrants had turned
into “detention facilities” in violation of UN regulations. On 23 March Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Rescue Committee also scaled back their activities in the Greek
centres. Following terrorist attacks in Brussels Poland now declared
that it can now no longer honour the previous government’s commitment to take a
quota of 7,000 refugees out of the 120.000 to be resettled across the EU. In the week following the EU-Turkey deal migration inflows to Greece were reduced drastically, though this might be due to adverse whether conditions in the Aegean.
In the last seven months, Hungary’s courts have held 2,189
trials for border crimes (including on 18 March a blind woman and a man
confined to a wheelchair accused of interfering with Hungarian borders last
November, FT
22 March) leading to an exceptionally high rate of convictions of 99 per
cent. Hungarian judges have chosen expulsions and long entry bans from Schengen
countries over prison sentences. On 22 March Frontex was reported saying that
it was trying to recruit 150 policemen and 50 officials to be deployed on Greek
borders, i.e. it had not succeeded yet.
The
Greek-Macedonian border will remain closed, blocking the Balkan route to
Northern Europe, leaving tens of thousands migrants stranded in Greece for some
time, including Syrians who thought they had been invited by Angela Merkel to
come and stay in Germany. It is not clear how the 72,000 asylum seekers would
be distributed among member states; once that ceiling is reached the
arrangement will be "reviewed", though Central-Eastern EU members are
committed to stop at that ceiling.
The closure of the Balkan route will induce desperate migrants and their smugglers to switch to different and more dangerous routes to Europe, via the Black Sea through Ukraine, via Albania and the Adriatic to Italy, via the South Mediterranean to Italy and Spain (the last two routes having continued to be used especially from Lybia; in the first three months of 2016 immigrants arriving in Italy from the Mediterranean route have doubled). France, Switzerland and Slovenia would then be bound to reintroduce border controls, thus cutting off Italy and possibly Spain from the Schengen area; Austria is already closing the Italian border at Brennero. Liberalisation of travel for Turks would lead to an additional inflow of Turkish Kurds. According to a German think-tank refugee flows this year will
amount to an estimated range of 1.8m-6.4m (the higher figure being a worst-case
scenario including large numbers from Northern Africa).
Incidentally, on the costs and benefits of mass immigration with special reference to the UK, see R.E. Rowthorn’s excellent Report, 2015.
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