The conflict in Ukraine will surely dominate discussions in Brussels during the quarterly meeting of the Council of the European Union this week. But a long-deferred discussion of E.U. immigration policy may return to the agenda in the aftermath of a devastating loss of life this month on the Mediterranean Sea. On June 14, a fishing trawler overloaded with migrants and refugees capsized off the coast of Greece, and more than 600 people, including women and children, were lost.
Kevin Appleby is the interim executive director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York. “The tragedy off the coast of Greece shows that Pope Francis was correct in predicting that the Mediterranean would become ‘a vast cemetery’ if the European governments didn’t do more,” Mr. Appleby said. He called the E.U. migration and border control policy that contributed to the deaths in the Mediterranean near the Greek port of Kalamata a prime example of the “globalization of indifference” that Pope Francis has frequently warned against, especially regarding the treatment of migrating people.
Reverse course on Mediterranean search-and-rescue of migrants?
The latest deaths demand, at minimum, a reassessment of the European community’s commitment to search-and-rescue efforts in the Mediterranean, Mr. Appleby said. “I don’t see how they can’t [take this up],” Mr. Appleby said. “It’s all over the news, 600-plus people lost their lives. The Greek Coast Guard had the opportunity to save them and didn’t.”
The latest deaths demand, at minimum, a reassessment of the European community’s commitment to search-and-rescue efforts in the Mediterranean.
The role of the Greek Coast Guard in the tragedy has indeed come under intense international scrutiny. Survivors said the vessel had been under tow by the Coast Guard when it overturned—a charge Coast Guard officials deny. But maritime experts say the Greek Coast Guard should have intervened much sooner, arguing that the overloaded ship was clearly in distress.
In recent years, a coordinated E.U. response to the ongoing migration crisis has broken down, leaving the responsibility to protect migrants in distress to Mediterranean powers like Spain, Italy and Greece. But those nations have significantly reduced their capacity to respond to emergencies at sea while criminalizing private efforts to save or assist migrants in distress.
Mr. Appleby believes a shift in search-and-rescue policies is imminent. In recent years, E.U. policy has tacitly or directly endorsed the idea that the presence of rescue vessels served only to encourage more migrants to risk the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean for a landfall in Italy or Greece.
That policy of deterrence through intentional neglect has not had an impact on migration, Mr. Appleby said, but it has resulted in far more losses among migrants and refugees. The pull to Europe is too strong, regardless of the risk, when migrants are leaving desperate circumstances of conflict or economic hopelessness in countries like Syria, Pakistan or Iraq.
European states may worry about the “magnet effect” that a more humane policy may create, Mr. Appleby said, but the only alternative is that “people die” on dangerous routes “and no one seems to blink an eye over it, unfortunately.”
A policy of deterrence through intentional neglect has not had an impact on migration, but it has resulted in far more losses among migrants and refugees.
“It’s just like what you see at the U.S.-Mexico border—the smugglers adjusting to the interventions or the interdictions that are occurring in the Mediterranean and taking different routes,” he said. “It’s supply and demand. The migrants know where they can get transport; the smugglers organize it, and they know that if they go that route,” however hazardous it is, “they have a better chance of not being sent back.”
Claudia Bonamini, a policy and advocacy coordinator for Jesuit Refugee Service Europe in Brussels, worried that Western states have become complacent to the point of complicity in the harm done to migrating people. Each time a disaster like the capsizing off Greece happens, “evidence emerging shortly after shows that the tragedy could have been avoided,” she said, responding by email to questions from America.
“This was also the case for the shipwreck off Cutro, in Italy, only a few months ago,” Ms. Bonamini said.
Mediterranean coastal powers have scaled back search-and-rescue because, according to current E.U. policy, those states are responsible for the migrants they accept on their territory, Ms. Bonamini said. In response to this most recent disaster at sea, she urged E.U. officials to focus on a coordinated and proactive system of search-and-rescue that includes “a clear plan for what happens after the disembarkation of the people rescued, with a mechanism to share the responsibility for those rescued also beyond the E.U. coastal countries.”
According to “Lethal Disregard,” a scathing report released by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in May, a fatal combination of E.U. migration policies and “pushback” practices by Libyan and Greek coast guard vessels have led to the higher numbers of migrant deaths at sea. More aggressive enforcement policies of continental and coastal European powers have encouraged human traffickers to take longer and more dangerous routes across the central Mediterranean, and migrants and refugees have paid the price for those decisions. More than 27,000 have died or disappeared on the Mediterranean since 2014, according to researchers from the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrant Project.
The pull to Europe is too strong, regardless of the risk, when migrants are leaving desperate circumstances of conflict or economic hopelessness in countries like Syria, Pakistan or Iraq.
“The E.U., its member states and their policies are part of the cause of migrant deaths,” Ms. Bonamini said. “The more deaths, the less they seem to care. A few words of sadness after the event, and a day after they continue discussing the same policies that contributed to the disaster.”
She said this attitude among E.U. politicians and functionaries is in sharp contrast to the perspectives of everyday Europeans encountered by JRS staff in communities across the continent. “The immediate reaction of people, all people, when confronted with people in distress is to help, to show solidarity,” she said. “We have seen it clearly with the response to the Ukrainian displacement; we had seen that earlier during the Syrian crisis.
“Despite the predominant narrative of fear and xenophobia on the rise everywhere in Europe, we still meet many people who are ready to welcome migrants and refugees.”
That assessment bears out also in polling in the United States, which finds strong public support for more generous policies for asylum seekers and refugees, and where a majority consistently supports comprehensive immigration reform that would include more legal pathways into the United States.
Deaths not on the Mediterranean, but U.S. deserts
While all eyes have been focused on the disaster at sea this month, in the Western Hemisphere a less dramatic but persistent toll is taken each week among migrants attempting to make their way from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States. Hundreds of migrants perish each year along jungle trails through the dangerous Darién Gap from Colombia into Panama or in falls from atop La Bestia, a freight train that courses through Mexico. Many others are killed by human traffickers or criminals along the way, and a countless number of migrants succumb to exposure in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest.
The European Union and United States confront a similar problem with the same devastating approach. They attempt to treat a humanitarian crisis as a national security threat.
Jesús de la Torre, a research fellow for the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Tex., argues that the European Union and the United States confront a similar problem with the same devastating approach. They attempt to treat a humanitarian crisis of people seeking safety and asylum as a national security threat, he said, criminalizing migration and even efforts to assist migrating people in distress.
The net result of those policies do not mean fewer people attempting to migrate but only more deaths, according to Mr. de la Torre. He noted that June 27 marked the first anniversary of the deaths of 53 migrants who were discovered smothered in and around a tractor-trailer near Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex.
According to the Missing Migrants Project, more than 7,800 migrants have died or disappeared in the Western Hemisphere since 2014. Mr. de la Torre believes the true toll is much higher. In this part of the world the lonely deaths of individual migrants or small groups of people on mountain passes or desert expanses frequently go undetected.
“When these kinds of tragedies happen,” Mr. de la Torre said, “it’s very easy to blame smugglers, to blame migrants for putting their kids on a boat and trying to come here.
“We [in Western states] try to blame everyone, but at the end of the day, we don’t see that we are responsible for this,” he said, “when we don’t allow people who are in distress or who are in need of seeking asylum to seek asylum in a safe way.”
The migration policies of wealthy states, he said, create the business model for human smugglers ready to risk the lives of migrating people for profit. Safe and legal routes of asylum seeking could end that odious trade, protecting migrants from indebting themselves to organized crime networks and saving lives. “Absolutely no one—no one—would put their children on a boat if they had any other option to arrive safely at [their destination] country,” he said. No one would risk their life if they had “any safer options than that.”
The church supports compassionate migration policy and shared responsibility “that’s fair and reasonable.”
Ms. Bonamini agreed that for the long-term reform of migration policy, it is crucial for the European Union “to create and expand safe and legal pathways for people in need of protection to reach our territory.”
Substantially expanding resettlement programs, investing in systems of humanitarian visas and adopting generous policies for family reunification “are some of the ways that would enable people to avoid those dangerous journeys,” she said.
Mr. Appleby suggested the European community might also consider adapting a new policy that the Biden administration will be experimenting with in the Americas—the creation of regional offices where asylum claims can be made and processed before individuals and families start what could prove a costly and perilous journey. Under current practice those claims can only be accepted at the U.S. border.
Such long-term reforms, for both the European community and the United States, “can be win-wins,” Mr. Appleby said, noting the sharp decline in birth rates throughout the West and low unemployment, particularly in the United States, that can mean many jobs are left begging for good candidates.
“The E.U. needs to break with the taboo of legal migration for the purpose of work,” Ms. Bonamini said. “Our continent is aging and very simply needs [a bigger] workforce. If people had the possibility to legally come to Europe to work, they would pay taxes and contribute to our societies and, through remittances, they would also support their countries of origin.”
She also advises that E.U. policymakers consider the need to create systems of circular migration, “whereby people can more easily come and go back and forth from their home countries to the E.U.”
E.U. negotiators did make progress this month on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, a landmark agreement that proposes a better balance among member states on migrant and refugee resettlement and attempts to streamline asylum processes. But the fate of the agreement when it is taken up in the European Parliament, which must endorse the deal, is far from certain.
Xenophobic trends in Europe make such reforms difficult to achieve, but Mr. Appleby believes tapping into a more nuanced discussion of church teaching about migration might help make more compassionate policies on migration possible. The church teaches that people faced with violence or economic hopelessness have the right to migrate, he said, a position that is sometimes mischaracterized as an endorsement of open borders. He notes that church teaching also acknowledges the rights of states to manage their own borders even as it implores states with the capacity to do so to accept and protect migrating people.
The church supports compassionate migration policy and shared responsibility “that’s fair and reasonable,” he said, “which many countries are not even coming close to, in terms of who they accept and who they could accept.” According to Mr. Appleby, more attention to that aspect of the teaching might allow harried European politicians the “political space” they need to promote more humanitarian policies on the Mediterranean.
