Why Europe can’t solve its mass migration problem
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Loading... - Remi Cartier
- 04 May 2023
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The EU has failed to form a coherent policy to deal with the issue amid an arc of human misery
They keep coming — and keep dying.
Just two weeks ago, another 55 migrants trying to reach Europe drowned off the coast of Libya when their rubber dinghy sank. Two days earlier, 33 people died in four different capsizes near the Italian island of Lampedusa. A few days before that, dozens of bodies washed up on a beach near Tripoli. Each of these men, women or children could have told a tale of unimaginable sorrow.
The running tally of migrant drownings for the year was 661 at the time of this writing, according to the International Organization for Migration. That makes about 20,000 such deaths since 2014. And this number only counts fatalities on the central Mediterranean route from Africa to the European Union, not the refugees who perished on the Aegean or other passages.
If there’s more dying, it’s because there’s more migrating again. Illegal entries into the EU, by land or sea, were up 64% in 2022 over the previous year, to the highest number since the refugee crisis of 2016. Formal asylum requests grew by 50%, with about 1 million applications filed. Not counted in those numbers are the millions of Ukrainians who fled the Russian invasion and now live in the EU under so-called temporary protection.
The EU is at a loss. It doesn’t want so many people to come, but also doesn’t know how to stop them or what to do with them once they reach European shores. Italy now has a prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who ran as a far-right populist on anti-migrant rhetoric. She tries to make it as hard as possible for dinghies — or even rescue ships — to ferry refugees to Italy. But she can’t break the law and wants to avoid even more egregious humanitarian disasters. Read More…
