Eight years after the wave of migration from Syria and Iraq that caused the European asylum system to collapse, the European Union yesterday reached an agreement on the new Migration Pact, which tightens the conditions of access and opens the door to closing migrants with few options to obtain protection in centers located at the border in order to decongest the asylum system and reserve the means for cases that in theory have a better chance of being approved.
Discomfort with the migration situation has given wings to far-right parties across the continent in recent years, and fears that their rhetoric that the EU has lost control will prevail in June’s European Parliament elections of 2024 has served as a powerful incentive to close a deal this week, in time to be ratified before the end of the legislature. With only ten days to go until the end of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the Union, the Government thus adds an important achievement to its list of achievements for the semester, even though the oenages disagree on the effects of the reform and they warn it will lead to more arrests.
The expected white smoke arrived at eight o’clock yesterday morning, when the negotiators of the Council (the Spanish presidency) and the Eurochamber had already been meeting for thirty hours without interruption. “Immigration is a common European challenge and this decision will allow us to manage it together”, celebrated the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who in 2020 presented a global plan based on five legislative proposals to be able to face the challenge, the most “emblematic” proposal of his mandate.
The Spanish presidency has sought a balance between the need for “solidarity” of the states with external borders at the forefront of the migratory phenomenon, and the “responsibility” demanded of them by the countries of the interior, the final destination of many migrants, to curb the secondary movements in the EU.
The Migration Pact tightens the conditions for access to the Community territory through stricter entry controls, which will include the taking of biometric data, also for children older than six years. The aim is to more quickly identify people with little chance of receiving protection. If the country of arrival so foresees, these migrants can be transferred to closed reception centers, so that, if their asylum claims are rejected, they can be deported more quickly.
The deadline for resolving cases is reduced to six months. One of the last hurdles in the negotiation was the repeal in these cases, or in crisis situations, of the special protection provided for in the regulations for minors and families with children. At this point, in the end, the Council’s vision has prevailed over that of the Eurochamber and there will be no special treatment, although an independent supervision mechanism will be put in place to assist these groups.
The principle of the Dublin Regulation whereby the country of arrival must register and process the migrant’s asylum application is, however, complemented by a flexible solidarity mechanism that will apply when a Member State is overwhelmed in in order to distribute migrants among the different EU countries proportionally. The aim is to resettle 30,000 immigrants per year, but governments that do not want to participate in the distribution of immigrants have the alternative of making a financial contribution (20,000 euros per immigrant assigned and rejected).
Mandatory relocation was already attempted in 2016, at the height of the asylum crisis, but Hungary, Poland and other countries refused to accept it, opening a deep rift between Angela Merkel’s Germany and countries of the East which for years turned the debate into a politically toxic issue; hence the lack of progress.
“Mória, Calais, Lampedusa are everything we don’t like. Everything that bears witness to the lack of Europe, the cost of the lack of Europe. For many years, migrants, refugees, islands, local communities and the EU as a whole have suffered for the lack of Europe, for the lack of a comprehensive migration and asylum policy”, declared the vice-president at the press conference of the Commission, Margaritis Schinas, responsible for the original proposal. “In the future, the day-to-day management of migration in Europe will be characterized by efficient procedures and effective solidarity,” he said.
The governments of Germany and Italy, with disparate interests in this dossier, also applauded the agreement, but the verdict of the oenagés is much more negative. “The new European migration pact will repeat the mistakes of the past and exacerbate the consequences. There is a great risk that it will result in a flawed, costly and cruel system that collapses as soon as it is tried to be applied”, criticize in an open letter published this week by 50 oenagés, including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Caritas and Save the Children.
The effects of the reform will take years to see, but the president of the Eurochamber, Roberta Metsola, defended that it sets in motion “a fair system with those who seek protection, firm with those who are not eligible and firm with those who exploit the most vulnerable”. Negative or defeatist speeches about the pact, he criticized, “give a platform to those who don’t want it to work”, such as far-right parties, which reject the pact.
