Europe’s migrant crisis, the continent’s greatest humanitarian disaster since the aftermath of World War II, continues to worsen. The summer began with mass drownings in the Mediterranean and bickering between the European Union and the governments of its member states over who should foot the bill for search and rescue patrols of Europe’s southern coasts. The summer is ending with a series of appalling images that have galvanized public opinion, especially in the northern European states, and forced both national and supranational authorities to act.
On the Greek holiday island of Kos, migrants rioted when the police tried to corral them in a sports stadium. At Calais, migrants stormed a security fence and were repelled from the Channel Tunnel by tear gas. At Neusiedl in Austria, police discovered the bodies of 71 people, asphyxiated in the back of an abandoned truck. In Budapest, thousands of migrants, most of them Syrian, jammed the streets and tunnels around the Keleti train station. When the Hungarian government refused to let them travel onward, some fought their way onto trains, and a small army of desperate, exhausted, and hungry people set off on foot for the Austrian border.
On September 2, as Europeans returned to work after their August vacations, the media displayed the corpse of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach after drowning along with his mother and 5-year-old brother in an illegal crossing from the Turkish resort of Bodrum to Kos. Meanwhile, the Greek island of Lesbos (population 85,000) registered 14,000 migrants on September 8 alone. Coast guards and riot police fought with crowds of migrants who tried to storm a ferry. The government in Athens admitted that Lesbos was “on the verge of an explosion.”
The European public responded to this saga of suffering and desperation with two outbreaks of sentiment. The picture of Alan Kurdi’s tiny body was tweeted with a collective wringing of hands; this action speaks of prurience and vanity. At the same time, crowds of Germans gathered at train stations to greet asylum seekers with clothing, food, and money. This was a decent, humane response to an indecent, inhumane situation.
The same can be said of the official response, though it might be argued that government by sentiment is not always in the national interest. On September 9, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, announced that the EU will take in a total of 160,000 Syrian refugees. The EU was driven to these gestures by German chancellor Angela Merkel. She was driven by public opinion, and that was driven by the media. For the media, August is the slow season and the silly season. The migrants, who happened to be thronging the Mediterranean beaches where politicians and journalists take their vacations, dominated the news.
The crisis, though, will not be solved by media outrage, popular sentiment, tinned goods, or even emulation of the pop star and antipoverty campaigner Bob Geldof, who has offered to house four Syrian families in his various properties. The Syrian civil war has forced more than 4 million Syrians from their homes. Roughly half are in camps in Turkey, where they can claim temporary protected status but cannot claim refugee status. This limbo ensures that, like the parents of Alan Kurdi, displaced Syrians will look beyond Turkey’s borders, to the overland route to Western Europe through Greece and the Balkans. The EU’s response is like sticking a band-aid over a hemorrhage.
Worse, the granting of special status to Syrian refugees is tantamount to giving an incentive to the human traffickers who bring them to Europe. The message will be understood in the ports of Libya and the border towns of Turkey: If the flow of migrants reaches sufficient mass, European governments will turn from the traffickers’ enemies to their ally, and fast-track the lucky unfortunates along the otherwise difficult path to a new life in the EU. The smoother the reception in Europe, the higher the price of the ticket to get there, and the greater the profits of the criminals who run the smuggling networks. And the greater the number of immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, the greater the nationalist backlash. Juncker has said that Brussels will allocate the 160,000 Syrians among the EU states. Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary and leader of the ultra-nationalist Fidesz party, refuses to accept non-Christian immigrants.
Nor is Syria the only source of migrants. The Arab states ringing the Mediterranean basin are collapsing. Most of the states of sub-Saharan Africa already have collapsed. No Arab or African state has a serious plan for rectifying the catastrophes on its doorstep. Saudi Arabia, which shares a border with Syria, accepts only those with a family member already in the kingdom, and has given aid worth just over a quarter of a billion dollars; Britain, by contrast, has allocated more than $1.4 billion since 2012.
It is no longer clear who among the human wave washing into Europe is a “refugee,” claiming sanctuary with a justified fear for his or her life, and who is an “economic migrant.” Not all of the migrants are fleeing war or persecution. Many come in search of opportunity. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, described these migrants as a “side-effect of perhaps the greatest success of our times: the collapse in global poverty.” Never before has the global population been so well fed and prosperous, yet never before have so many people risked all for a better life. Examining five decades of national censuses, the Center for Global Development found that emigration rates rise along with a country’s wealth, and do not drop off until a country has become as wealthy as Albania or Armenia. Calling this trend the “Great Migration,” Nelson advises Europe to abandon the 20th-century solutions of refugee camps and foreign aid, avoid cant and Merkel-style “panic” reactions, and “begin a new conversation.”
That conversation must have two elements. At the national level, European states struggle to integrate their immigrants. The politicians argue that, without immigration, Europe’s populations will age, the tax base will decline, and the welfare state run out of money. The voters are more concerned with the immediate effect of immigration, most of which is concentrated in the major cities: a squeeze on public schools, transport, hospitals, and housing, and simmering conflicts between indigenous and immigrant groups. This summer, the popular mood caused the admission of large numbers of migrants. The beneficiaries of a change in that mood will be Europe’s ultranationalists.
At the supranational level, the EU needs a new system for processing asylum applications. Under the current laws, known as the “Dublin Regulation,” EU states must detain asylum seekers, establish which EU state they first entered, and return them there for fingerprinting and processing. The Dublin system was intended to prevent “asylum shopping” and “asylum orbit,” where migrants initiate multiple applications. This is a serious problem: In a 2012 investigation, Irish police crosschecked 2,000 failed asylum applications with the fingerprint records of the U.K. Border Agency. Of the 2,000, 1,300 were already known to the U.K. agency under a different name, and 600 of them were already on a British list of known “asylum shoppers.” Eighty were Somalis, using false Tanzanian passports.
The “Dublin transfer” deports migrants from Europe’s wealthy northern and western states to their points of entry in the southeastern states. But these states are the least able to fund the detention and processing of migrants. The Greek and Italian economies have yet to recover from the crash of 2008, and their asylum systems have collapsed since the Arab Spring. This summer, the Dublin system stopped working. In June, Hungary, citing an influx of Syrians from the Serbian border, refused to accept any more Dublin transfers from other EU states. In August, Germany exempted Syrians from the Dublin rules. Next, the Czech Republic announced that it would either process Syrians coming from other EU states, or help them move to the state of their preference.
Reality has also undone the EU’s policy towards its neighbors in the Mediterranean basin. In 1995, the EU initiated the Barcelona Process, an attempt to defuse tensions between Europe and its mostly poorer, mostly Muslim neighbors by the development of a free trade zone. The resulting union for the Mediterranean went on to ingest 15 non-EU states before the Arab Spring ended any hope of amity. In 2011, Ahmad Masadeh, the union’s secretary, resigned; he has not been replaced. These days, only the people smugglers conduct free trade between north Africa and the EU.
This inertia, as much as popular outcries, emergency measures, and the promise of a revision of the Dublin system, indicates the scope of the challenge facing the EU, and the scale of the EU’s failure to date. The migrant crisis is a human tragedy and a European problem. If Europe does not correct its course, the migrants will become an EU nightmare.
Dominic Green, the author of Three Empires on the Nile, teaches political science at Boston College.
