More than three years after Europe’s biggest influx of migrants and refugees since the second world war, tensions between EU member states over how to handle irregular immigration from outside the bloc – mainly from the Middle East and Africa – remain high.
Numbers are sharply down from their 2015-16 peak because of a 2016 EU deal with Turkey, new border fences in the Balkans, and a 2017 bilateral arrangement between Italy and Libya, but have begun creeping up again.
The UNHCR says Spain has welcomed 56,200 irregular migrants arriving by sea so far this year, Greece 28,700 and Italy 22,500. Overland arrivals in Greece have also climbed sharply to 14,000, a three-fold increase on the same period last year.
The underlying factors that have led to more than 1.8 million migrants coming to Europe since 2014 have not gone away; most observers believe it is only a matter of time before the number of arrivals picks up significantly once more.
Everyone agrees Europe needs to urgently overhaul its asylum and immigration rules. At present Spain, Italy and Greece take most of the strain owing to their geographical position on the Mediterranean Sea and the fact that, under EU law, asylum seekers must lodge their applications in the first EU country they enter.
However, no one can agree on what to do: some countries want tougher external border controls, others fairer distribution of new arrivals. Any solution will have to balance the concerns of “frontline” southern states with those of wealthier northern “destination” states, while dealing with the refusal of hardline central and eastern ones (such as Hungary and Poland) to accept any migrants at all.
With anti-immigration sentiment on the rise across the continent, the presence in Italy’s government of the far-right League party of Matteo Salvini, which campaigned on a pledge to send 500,000 irregular migrants home, is making itself felt. The similarly rightwing, populist Freedom party is sharing power in Austria.
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