Last Sunday, February 26, dozens of people drowned off the coast of Calabria. The regret and condemnation of the Italian and European authorities for this new tragedy contradicts their increasingly harsh anti-immigration policies.
The dead and missing in the Mediterranean since 2014 are now more than 26,000. The annual number of victims, which managed to reduce between 2016 and 2020, has not stopped rising since then. Last year there were 2,406, according to the Missing Migrants project. In January and February of this year, 327 people have already lost their lives and everything indicates that the figures for 2022 will be exceeded.
The European Council met in Brussels on February 9. The agenda of the heads of state and government was focused on Ukraine. President Zelensky attended the meeting in person. EU leaders reaffirmed their commitment to defeat Russia. Then they addressed aid to Turkey and Syria for the earthquake, the Kosovo crisis and the energy transition. They also spoke of migration, but only to reiterate that the external borders must be strengthened. In this sense and for the first time, they gave the green light to the financing of billboards with community funds.
As the EU becomes a fortress, the oft-heralded reform of immigration and asylum policy is shelved until after the European elections in June 2024. It seems that no one is capable of winning an election defending a pro-union strategy. immigration.
In the aftermath of the Calabria shipwreck, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called on the 27 to “redouble their efforts” to reform migration policy, even though she knew that nothing would be done for the next year and a half.
This paralysis triggers the dead and does not stop migratory flows. Last year there were 330,000 irregular attempts to enter the EU, the highest number in the last six years. Approximately half went through the Balkan route, the rest through the Mediterranean.
The difference between asylum requests and resolutions has also skyrocketed. The EU acknowledges that there are 920,000 unresolved petitions. It is the highest number since the migration crisis of 2015, when 1.3 million people arrived in Europe, mostly from Syria and Afghanistan.
These two countries remain the predominant origin of those trying to rebuild their lives in the EU. They flee from the war, just like the Ukrainians do, but their reception is very different.
There are eight million Ukrainian refugees. Almost all of them are in EU countries, especially in Poland and Germany. They have received residence and work permits, healthcare and various social benefits. Their children go to school.
Afghans and Syrians must wait for their legal situation to be resolved. The European Asylum Agency recognized in its latest report from November 2022 that it now receives more than 100,000 requests per month. The vast majority are Afghans and Syrians. Requests from Turks, Venezuelans and Colombians are also growing.
On board the wooden schooner that last Sunday collided with a sandbank off the beaches of Crotona (Calabria) and broke in two, there were between 150 and 180 people, maybe even 200, according to the testimony collected among the 80 survivors. The sea has returned 62 corpses. The disappeared can reach the sixties. Almost all the victims were Syrians and Afghans. There were also Turks. The boat had left Izmir four days before.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed “deep pain”. A few days before, however, her government had brought forward a decree in Parliament that makes rescue tasks difficult. NGO ships can no longer do multiple rescues in a row. Now they are required to disembark the migrants after each one. The docking ports, moreover, cannot be the closest to the place of rescue, but rather those in northern Italy, even if the navigation conditions are adverse. Thus they are forced to leave the rescue zones for days.
António Guterres, UN Secretary General, has called for more rescue teams and more safe routes for migrants and refugees. “Anyone in search of a better life deserves to have security and dignity,” he has said.
A Frontex helicopter, the European border and coast guard agency, sighted the migrants’ schooner in Calabria. Two rescue boats tried to help her, but the sea conditions were very bad and they returned to port.
The last year has been very hard for Frontex due to lack of resources and emergency situations. If in 2021, its agents rescued 11,650 people in the Mediterranean, last year there were 53,000.
Matteo Piantedosi, Italy’s interior minister and member of the far-right League, blames the traffickers for the situation. “The problem is the exits,” he says, not the lack of means to rescue those who jump into the sea in very precarious boats.
The European Commission has a proposal to face the drama of migration since September 2020. In addition to better coordinating the surveillance of external borders and speeding up the procedures to return those who do not meet the requirements to be a refugee, it proposes agreements with the countries of origin to order migratory flows.
But this is the strategy that will not be approved before 2024. Not only because it is not electorally profitable, but also because today, more than in 2020, the ultranationalist right, parties like the Italian League, have imposed their anti-immigration views on the most EU governments.
The only thing that the 27 have agreed upon, in addition to financing the exterior billboards, is to increase the filters to access refugee status and obtain more data from each applicant -including fingerprints- to complete their identification and facilitate their location during their stay in The EU.
Barely four kilometers from the European quarter of Brussels, headquarters of the Union’s bodies, is the street of the Palaces. It is a road that connects the Royal Palace with the castle of Laeken in the center of the city. Dozens of Afghan and Syrian refugees live there in tents, cared for by neighbors and various NGOs. Its abandonment, like the shipwreck in Calabria, is the response that the European Union, the same one that defends human rights and liberal democracy, gives to people who are forced to flee their countries because they are at war or are persecuted.
