FINLAND, with its baffling language and culture of reserve, is not an easy place for outsiders to penetrate. For Nura Farah, the breakthrough came via the dissected brains of dead cows. Ms Farah, who arrived with her mother in 1993 as a teenager seeking asylum from Somalia’s civil war, spent eight years dreaming of a better life in London while she was taunted at school and bore racist abuse on the streets. But in 2001, working as a lab technician in Helsinki, she found herself charged with testing cow tissue for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease. The work was fulfilling, her colleagues encouraging, and she moved on to bigger challenges. She took on Finnish citizenship, gave birth to a son and last year became the first Somali Finn to publish a novel.
Finland is a long way from the migrant trouble that has erupted across Europe this summer. But as a country with little history of immigration that has had to integrate an unfamiliar minority, its experience resonates. Most EU countries will soon start receiving asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece, the main entry-points for illegal migrants. Many residents, particularly in Europe’s eastern half, resent this intrusion. Yet Europe’s migrant crisis has seemingly outgrown national responses.
Not since the second world war has the continent faced refugee flows of such complexity and scale. Smugglers are exploiting the political vacuum in Libya to transport Africans across the Mediterranean to Italy. Refugees from Syria’s civil war clamber into rubber dinghies at Turkish ports to reach Greek islands. Then they traverse the continent by the thousand, causing havoc at borders and leaving officials to choose between haplessness and brutality. Migrants who have endured the savagery of the Islamic State or the caprice of Eritrea’s police state find themselves tear-gassed by Macedonian police or evading the clutches of French security guards.
The raw numbers
Around 270,000 illegal migrants have reached Europe’s shores so far this year, more than in the whole of 2014, itself a record year. These numbers should be manageable in a continent of 500m; but asylum-seekers’ preferences for certain parts of Europe over others create pinch points at borders and tensions between governments. Some have resorted to security measures to keep migrants out; others speed their passage to the next state. What such responses share is a wish to pass the problem on. The current crisis is testing, and fracturing, that approach.
European Union officials in Brussels are searching for a common migration policy. Their first success, after 800 would-be migrants drowned off the Libyan coast in April, was to persuade Europe’s leaders to triple Operation Triton, a border-surveillance mission that operates south of Italy. Tens of thousands of migrants have been picked up since then; 4,400 on one day, August 22nd. After a shocking beginning to the year the death rate has plummeted.
But migrants are adjusting their routes. The big change this year is the number entering Greece via short sea hops from Turkey. Syrians in particular have been put off the Italian route by the chaos in Libya and the dangers of the sea. The Greek government, which has other things on its mind (see article), needs help processing the arrivals and wants many to settle elsewhere. In May the European Commission proposed relocating 40,000 asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU countries (Britain, Denmark and Ireland have opt-outs from such matters), with national quotas determined by a formula incorporating population, GDP, unemployment and previous asylum bids and resettlements. But opposition from eastern Europeans and Spain squashed the plan.
Instead, most countries have volunteered to accept a certain number of relocated asylum-seekers, amounting to 32,256 over the next two years; the EU hopes to reach 40,000 by the end of the year. As with the original plan, eligibility is limited to migrants arriving in Italy and Greece from mid-April who hail from countries with asylum acceptance rates in Europe of over 75%: for now that means Syria, Eritrea and perhaps Iraq. The programme may be operational in October, though logistical problems could delay the start in Greece. Less controversially, European countries, working with the UN refugee agency, will resettle 22,504 people from outside Europe who already have refugee status. Most will probably be Syrians currently languishing in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.
These numbers are puny next to the scale of the problem: almost 50,000 asylum-seekers reached Greece in July alone. Some 4m Syrians have fled their homeland, not to mention the Sudanese, Somalis and others in camps in Africa who are also candidates for resettlement—or may decide to try their luck at the border. Yet by EU standards, this is progress: the Triton expansion and the relocation plan erode the notion that asylum-seekers are the sole responsibility of the country they reach first.
Europe has coped with emergencies before. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s generated vast refugee flows that Germany and others were able to manage. After the Vietnam war France accepted around 100,000 boat people. Yet today many central and eastern European countries balk at calls to accept even a few hundred migrants. Some argue, plausibly, that new arrivals will simply up sticks as soon as they are relocated, exploiting the passport-free Schengen area to rejoin family in Sweden or find work in Germany. Poland’s government, facing re-election in October, is torn between a Europe demanding solidarity and a sceptical electorate; 70% oppose taking in asylum-seekers from Africa or the Middle East.
Some have more atavistic concerns. Slovakia wants Christian refugees only. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, portrays his country as a doughty defender of European values in the face of an invasion by people from “different civilisational roots” and the “intellectual derangement” of liberals who want to let them in. His government is building a fence along the border with Serbia to keep out the wretches traipsing up from Greece and Macedonia. Ban-the-burqa debates have sprung up in the three Baltic states (combined population 6.2m), which together will accept 725 refugees.
Finland is a long way from the migrant trouble that has erupted across Europe this summer. But as a country with little history of immigration that has had to integrate an unfamiliar minority, its experience resonates. Most EU countries will soon start receiving asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece, the main entry-points for illegal migrants. Many residents, particularly in Europe’s eastern half, resent this intrusion. Yet Europe’s migrant crisis has seemingly outgrown national responses.
Not since the second world war has the continent faced refugee flows of such complexity and scale. Smugglers are exploiting the political vacuum in Libya to transport Africans across the Mediterranean to Italy. Refugees from Syria’s civil war clamber into rubber dinghies at Turkish ports to reach Greek islands. Then they traverse the continent by the thousand, causing havoc at borders and leaving officials to choose between haplessness and brutality. Migrants who have endured the savagery of the Islamic State or the caprice of Eritrea’s police state find themselves tear-gassed by Macedonian police or evading the clutches of French security guards.
The raw numbers
Around 270,000 illegal migrants have reached Europe’s shores so far this year, more than in the whole of 2014, itself a record year. These numbers should be manageable in a continent of 500m; but asylum-seekers’ preferences for certain parts of Europe over others create pinch points at borders and tensions between governments. Some have resorted to security measures to keep migrants out; others speed their passage to the next state. What such responses share is a wish to pass the problem on. The current crisis is testing, and fracturing, that approach.
European Union officials in Brussels are searching for a common migration policy. Their first success, after 800 would-be migrants drowned off the Libyan coast in April, was to persuade Europe’s leaders to triple Operation Triton, a border-surveillance mission that operates south of Italy. Tens of thousands of migrants have been picked up since then; 4,400 on one day, August 22nd. After a shocking beginning to the year the death rate has plummeted.
But migrants are adjusting their routes. The big change this year is the number entering Greece via short sea hops from Turkey. Syrians in particular have been put off the Italian route by the chaos in Libya and the dangers of the sea. The Greek government, which has other things on its mind (see article), needs help processing the arrivals and wants many to settle elsewhere. In May the European Commission proposed relocating 40,000 asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU countries (Britain, Denmark and Ireland have opt-outs from such matters), with national quotas determined by a formula incorporating population, GDP, unemployment and previous asylum bids and resettlements. But opposition from eastern Europeans and Spain squashed the plan.
Instead, most countries have volunteered to accept a certain number of relocated asylum-seekers, amounting to 32,256 over the next two years; the EU hopes to reach 40,000 by the end of the year. As with the original plan, eligibility is limited to migrants arriving in Italy and Greece from mid-April who hail from countries with asylum acceptance rates in Europe of over 75%: for now that means Syria, Eritrea and perhaps Iraq. The programme may be operational in October, though logistical problems could delay the start in Greece. Less controversially, European countries, working with the UN refugee agency, will resettle 22,504 people from outside Europe who already have refugee status. Most will probably be Syrians currently languishing in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.
These numbers are puny next to the scale of the problem: almost 50,000 asylum-seekers reached Greece in July alone. Some 4m Syrians have fled their homeland, not to mention the Sudanese, Somalis and others in camps in Africa who are also candidates for resettlement—or may decide to try their luck at the border. Yet by EU standards, this is progress: the Triton expansion and the relocation plan erode the notion that asylum-seekers are the sole responsibility of the country they reach first.
Europe has coped with emergencies before. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s generated vast refugee flows that Germany and others were able to manage. After the Vietnam war France accepted around 100,000 boat people. Yet today many central and eastern European countries balk at calls to accept even a few hundred migrants. Some argue, plausibly, that new arrivals will simply up sticks as soon as they are relocated, exploiting the passport-free Schengen area to rejoin family in Sweden or find work in Germany. Poland’s government, facing re-election in October, is torn between a Europe demanding solidarity and a sceptical electorate; 70% oppose taking in asylum-seekers from Africa or the Middle East.
Some have more atavistic concerns. Slovakia wants Christian refugees only. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, portrays his country as a doughty defender of European values in the face of an invasion by people from “different civilisational roots” and the “intellectual derangement” of liberals who want to let them in. His government is building a fence along the border with Serbia to keep out the wretches traipsing up from Greece and Macedonia. Ban-the-burqa debates have sprung up in the three Baltic states (combined population 6.2m), which together will accept 725 refugees.
What is this utopia you live in sir? The fact that countries are on the hook now is providing the fuel for neocons. Increasing the weight of an european countries responsibility actually works in favor of the neocon, always has and always will.
from Kofi Annan, highly recommend reading