PARIS — If Europe’s mainstream leaders don’t own the migration issue, the Continent’s populists will.
Sadly, that’s exactly what’s happening. Deadlocked on reforming the EU’s dysfunctional asylum policies, most mainstream centrist leaders are ducking the one big pan-European issue ahead of May’s European Parliament election.
Those that are talking about migration are busy trying to sound as tough as far-right migrant-bashers like Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and France’s Marine Le Pen.
There’s only one winner at that game — especially since European parliamentary elections attract protest voters bent on giving the establishment a kicking, while apathetic moderates tend to stay home.
For now, the main narrative being promoted by mainstream politicians is that the migration crisis is over: Move along, nothing to see here.
“The antis have had the debate to themselves, while pro-Europeans have turned their heads away” — Enrico Letta, former Italian prime minister
As statistically accurate as that may be, it is politically unconvincing. By refusing to engage on an issue voters care deeply about, Europe’s leaders are letting populists set the course of the conversation through fear-mongering and racist dog-whistles.
“The antis have had the debate to themselves, while pro-Europeans have turned their heads away,” says former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, president of the Jacques Delors Institute.
To be sure, in absolute numbers, the challenge is clearly abating. The number of irregular migrants entering the Union fell to 150,000 in 2018, the lowest for five years, from a peak of one million in 2015, according to Frontex, the EU’s border management agency.
A 2016 deal with Turkey to crack down on people smugglers and prevent refugees and economic migrants pouring across the Aegean Sea to Greece has held, despite Turkish charges that Brussels has not kept its side of the bargain on visas or accession negotiations.
The number of migrants crossing into Europe has dropped from its 2015 peak | Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
EU and NATO maritime patrols and Italian cooperation with Libyan coastguards had already reduced the flow of migrants across the central Mediterranean before Salvini grabbed the headlines by turning away relief boats and naval vessels carrying migrants rescued at sea. The International Organization for Migration says his policy has increased the death rate.
It has also contributed to a doubling of the number of migrants crossing from Morocco to Spain to 57,000 last year. Many make their way to France, where arrivals have risen and expulsions fallen, putting pressure on President Emmanuel Macron, the populists’ chosen liberal enemy.
Voters see the handling of the migration crisis as a European failure. Some, especially in Germany, Sweden, Italy and Greece, are angry that the rest of Europe has refused to show solidarity and share the burden.
Others, notably in Central Europe, are furious that the EU tried to force their countries to admit thousands of refugees, as if it were handing down fish quotas.
The EU’s image has been badly dented by the perceived loss of control at its external borders and the specter of member countries imposing tit-for-tat border controls inside the EU’s Schengen open-border zone.
Mainstream EU governments are also guilty of hypocrisy. Pretending migration isn’t an issue doesn’t address the concerns of worried voters. Nor does it benefit the migrants themselves, who aren’t expelled or formally accepted, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.
“There will be a migrant crisis every week until the election because it’s in their interest” — Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative
“A very low proportion of rejected asylum seekers are actually deported, so we are creating our own hidden underclass without access to housing and health care,” said Giles Merritt, chairman of the Friends of Europe think tank, who is creating a “migration myth-busting” website.
This has created fertile ground for the Salvinis and the Orbáns to make political hay by claiming to be defending “Christian Europe” against a supposed “Islamic invasion.”
To seize control of the narrative, mainstream leaders like Macron need to put forward a clear policy that combines better border control and faster processing of asylum claims with a system for legal labor migration and vocational training.
The populists don’t want a European solution to the migration issue. They want to keep it front and center throughout the election campaign and use it as a stick with which to beat Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose welcome of nearly 1 million refugees and migrants in 2015 they depict as the original sin.
“There will be a migrant crisis every week until the election because it’s in their interest,” said Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative think tank, which put forward the original proposals that led to the EU-Turkey agreement. “The pro-European parties shouldn’t believe they can ignore the topic.”
Knaus wants a coalition of concerned countries, including Germany and France, to work together on a new asylum system, bypassing governments such as Hungary and Poland if they don’t want to cooperate.
French President Emmanuel Macron is the chosen target for European populists | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
The system would allow for rapid but fair processing of asylum applications based on best practice in countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and non-EU Switzerland. Claimants would be given legal aid at reception centers in the countries of arrival and automatically allowed one appeal.
There would be jointly organized repatriation of rejected asylum seekers under arrangements with countries of origin in return for agreements to allow quotas of legal migrants and offers of scholarships and job training for nationals of those states.
Willing European governments should appoint a senior figure to negotiate deals on their behalf with states such as Senegal, Nigeria and Guinea rather than relying on big amorphous summits with the African Union or the Arab League in which the EU pretends it wants to deliver more development aid and the partners pretend they are willing to take back rejected migrants.
Knaus believes such talks could yield their first results before the European election if an envoy starts now.
One of the major reasons migrants risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean and request asylum is that legal labor migration has virtually dried up in the last decade.
Experts see the development of legal channels for recruiting workers in Africa as key to long-term management of asylum and immigration, not least because many EU countries are already facing labor shortages as their populations shrink and age.
Visitors receive information at the stand of a local job training center at a jobs fair for refugees in Berlin | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Poland, for example, has issued hundreds of thousands of work permits to Ukrainians to fill the jobs of more than 1 million Poles who moved west to work after Warsaw joined the EU. Many more Ukrainians work in the country illegally.
In a study for the Jacques Delors Institute, former Delors adviser Jerome Vignon advocates setting five-year EU targets for legal migrants to receive short-term work permits according to required skills.
He too argues that a coalition of perhaps a dozen core EU countries should share the processing of asylum applications and mutually recognize each others’ decisions. He also wants the embryonic European border and coast guard turned into a federal agency along the lines of the European Central Bank, incorporating national border surveillance forces.
If the EU cannot agree on a common system for legal migration, it may be more realistic for the Union to support bilateral projects between individual member countries or groups and third countries, said Camino Mortera-Martinez and Beth Oppenheim of the Center for European Reform.
“Europe needs migrants, and migration is inevitable,” is how they recently put it.
That’s another reason EU leaders can’t afford to leave the issue to the populists.
Paul Taylor, contributing editor at POLITICO, writes the Europe At Large column.