EU leaders will push ahead this week with plans to beef up the bloc’s borders and outsource their support for migrants to countries people leave or cross to get to Europe.
Austria, Hungary, Poland and others are blocking any meaningful attempt to equitably share out refugees arriving in Greece, Italy, Malta or Spain.
That means the work will focus on preventing migrants from entering and deporting those who cannot stay more efficiently.
The EU will hold a two-day summit as bodies were found more frequently than survivors from among the more than 500 people missing after an overcrowded fishing trawler sank recently in the Mediterranean Sea.
“It is horrible, what happened,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels.
The priorities, she said, should be to help the authorities in Tunisia – where people bound for Europe sometimes leave from – to stabilise its economy and better manage migration, and to finalise the long-awaited reform of the EU’s asylum rules, which is unlikely to happen before next year.
Von der Leyen’s reply stood in stark contrast to the actions of a predecessor a decade ago.
Standing near the coffins of scores of drowned migrants, having travelled to the small Italian island of Lampedusa after the deaths of around 300 people in October 2013, then European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso swore that such tragedies “should never happen again”.
In response, the Italian navy set up a search and rescue mission, but it was mothballed a year later as it was seen as encouraging more migrants to come. Fears of creating a “pull factor” have influenced the EU’s actions ever since.
At the summit starting today, EU leaders will discuss Von der Leyen’s plans.
More than 50,300 attempts were made to enter the EU without authorisation from January to May, according to the border and coast guard agency Frontex. It is more than double the number in the same period last year, and the most since 2017.
In a letter to the leaders, Von der Leyen highlighted the need to “limit irregular departures” from Africa and Turkey, to “fight against migrant smuggling” and “work with partner countries” to ensure that people do not leave or transit those countries.
“Alternative legal pathways” should be found to enter the right way, she wrote.
This often means the possibility for people to be resettled in Europe on humanitarian grounds if the UN’s refugee agency recommends it, and when an EU country is ready to take some in.
Under a new budget plan, Turkey would be given an additional €3.5 billion to manage Syrian refugees. That would bring the EU’s total migrant support to the country in recent years to more than €13bn.
Tunisia would receive €105 million and equipment such as patrol boats, radar systems and cameras; Morocco, €152m worth of “migration budget support”; Egypt would get €23m to buy boats, and up to €87m to tighten its borders, notably with Libya, where most migrants leave from.
Von der Leyen noted that Libya received two more EU-funded patrol boats in February, and has “rescued or intercepted” 7562 people trying to leave this year.
In March, a UN fact-finding mission said that crimes against humanity are being committed against migrants in Libya.
It accused the EU of aiding and abetting the abuse of migrants through its policies.
The centrepiece of EU policy is a work in progress: the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. The 27 member countries reached a landmark agreement on part of the asylum reform package earlier this month.
They have aimed to strike a balance between which countries should take responsibility for migrants when they arrive and how much support other member nations should provide. But this is unlikely to satisfy the European Parliament, which must endorse the deal.
Politicians insist that countries must accept mandatory refugee quotas, which could torpedo the plan, and the leaders might complicate matters irretrievably if they fiddle with what has already been agreed on.
