The Paper reporter Yu Xiaoxuan
The EU has finally done a task that is almost impossible for it: a migration agreement.
On February 21, 2023, local time, 44.5 miles from Lampedusa, Italy, a mother and her 7-month-old baby await rescue at the bow of a dangerous boat. Image of this article People's Visual infographic
On June 8, local time, 21 EU countries voted in Luxembourg to approve what it called a "historic" preliminary agreement to develop a response mechanism for the thorny problem of refugee asylum and apportionment for years. If the agreement is finally adopted after consultation with the European Parliament, it could change the whole picture of European immigration policy.
The priority of the agreement is to promote the sharing of asylum seekers among EU countries and to help host some refugees arriving at EU border countries, mainly Greece and Italy. Under the agreement, countries that refuse to host are required to contribute to an EU-administered fund at a cost of €20,000 per asylum-seeker.
In addition, the EU will allow member states to detain refugees outside their borders when processing asylum claims, so that refugees can be quickly repatriated if they reject their claims. The processing period for asylum applications cannot exceed 6 months. Member States have the right to refuse asylum if they consider that the asylum-seeker may pose a threat to his or her safety or public order.
However, in this process, confrontation and variables are inevitable. Germany, currently governed by the left, regretted that the deal had not gone further, with German Foreign Minister Baerbock, a Green-turned-Green, criticising that some countries had voted against it as meaning that "the EU common asylum policy based on solidarity is dead, while those who want to build border walls have been given a pass".
Poland and Hungary, where anti-immigrant sentiment is strong, both voted against the agreement. Polish government spokesman Peter Müller said on June 11 that Poland will block the immigration and asylum agreement passed by the European Union on the 8th and try to create a coalition of opponents in the European Parliament. At the same time, as Baerbock said, the pace of blocking the entry of migrants in some Eastern European countries has not stopped, especially in the face of the "hot potato" thrown by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko - the country's visa exemption for citizens from 73 Middle Eastern, African and Latin American countries, Poland and Lithuania are rushing to build a wall.
All this bodes well for the problem of illegal immigration that will continue to plague Europe.
On November 7, 2022, local time, in the port of Catania, Sicily, Italy, refugees held banners on deck for help.
Reform of dystocia
EU migration reform talks began in 2016 when faced with a refugee crisis but stalled when EU countries were unable to agree on key issues. The number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe has temporarily declined due to restrictions on the coronavirus pandemic, but this difficult reform has also been put on the EU agenda as restrictions have been lifted and the number of asylum seekers has surged.
"It's been almost three years since I came up with this proposal." EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ilfa Johnson said before the talks: "It's a marathon and we may have a hundred meters left." ”
Media reports suggest that the negotiations did not go well, with support and opposition in parallel. In particular, ten countries, led by Italy, initially joined forces to block the passage of the agreement, dragging negotiations into the night. While the EU only needs a simple majority vote to pass the agreement, Italy's support is crucial because the country receives the largest number of asylum seekers in the EU.
"Politically, we can't move forward without Italy. Italy is an EU country that symbolizes immigration. This view was shared by several EU diplomats interviewed by the political news website Politico, who spoke on condition of anonymity. An agreement without Italy is not worth drafting, but implementing it exactly according to Italy's ideas will kick everyone out of the agreement. ”
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedossi revealed that the last point of Italy's reluctance to "let go" lies in the proposed procedure for returning those whose asylum requests have been denied. According to the discussions, rejected asylum seekers will be returned to a "safe third country", while Italy's attempt to expand the scope of a "safe state" as much as possible has been opposed by member states such as Germany.
A draft document seen by Politico states that there must be some "connection" between rejected asylum seekers and a "safe third country", and that migrants must "stay" or "settle" in the country, or have family members living in the country. But in the final text, individual countries are free to decide whether a third country meets these requirements, which also means that countries like Tunisia will be the target of asylum seekers' repatriation, as Turkey did a few years ago. It was this concession that allowed Italy to finally "give the green light" to the agreement 11 hours after the negotiations began.
When the European refugee crisis erupted in 2016, Brussels paid 6 billion euros to make Turkey a "buffer state" for 3.6 million Syrian refugees by signing a refugee resettlement agreement, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been threatening to "tear up" the agreement. Now, through the lobbying of Italian Prime Minister Melloni, Tunisia, which has become a "hot transit point" for asylum seekers, seems to be about to become the next Turkey.
On June 11, three days after EU asylum reform negotiations, Meloni, together with European Commission President von der Leyen and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Ruit, appeared in the office of Tunisian President Said in the office. During their visit, the trio announced that the European Union was considering lending Tunisia more than $1 billion to help it weather its fiscal crisis and deal with migration.
In a last-minute concession to Italy, EU countries finally decided that the money they paid to deny asylum seekers would go into an EU fund to finance "projects" that have not yet been defined. Clearly, this has been interpreted as a way of providing funds to "third countries" such as Tunisia.
The haze of the Alps
Just as the key meeting of EU interior ministers was being convened, French Interior Minister D'Artmanen, who was "on fire in the backyard", hastily left the venue. On June 8, in Annesi, a lakeside town at the foot of the southeastern French Alps, several toddlers frolicked with their families in the sun when the frenzied violence of a 31-year-old Syrian man who had been granted refugee status in Sweden shocked the country.
On June 8, 2023, local time, in the Annecy area of Haute-Savoie, France, a man stabbed several people near a park, and law enforcement officers stood guard on duty.
The antisocial knife attack injured four children between the ages of 22 months and 3 and two elderly people, including a British and Dutchman. According to witnesses, the knife-wielding man ran wildly, apparently randomly targeted, until he was shot by police on the shores of Lake Annecy and subdued. Le Figaro reported that the man had sent an asylum application to the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra) last November, which was rejected.
According to several French media reports, the man can be clearly heard shouting "In the name of Jesus Christ" during the attack in the video taken by onlookers. According to Bonné Matisse, the prosecutor in charge of the case, the knife attack was not investigated as a terrorist attack, but the police were in contact with the counterterrorism unit. Bonnet Mattis revealed that he tested negative for alcohol and drugs against the attacker and that he has refused to answer questions from judges and police after his arrest.
The attack stirred considerable sentiment across France's political spectrum, with conservative and far-right once again targeting the suspect's identity as a refugee. They called for the attack to be a wake-up call for France's immigration system. "Mass uncontrolled migration only brings death. Instead of lamenting such crimes every time, let's put the brakes on mass migration. Right-wing Republican Congressman Olivier Marray wrote on Twitter.
Reuters quoted EU data to report that in 2022, the proportion of first asylum applications in France ranked second in the EU, accounting for 16% of the total number of EU countries, second only to Germany's 25%. A report by the French Senate showed that only 7% of all failed asylum applications in the second half of 2022 were issued with deportation orders.
Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Alliance, took the radio show to call for France to "regain sovereignty" over immigration, saying the French constitution should override EU rules on these issues.
This stance of overturning EU rules, once marginalized in French political circles, has begun to move into the mainstream. Republicans laid out their stance on the new immigration law last month, proposing to violate EU rules when "essential interests of the nation are at stake." Subsequent polls showed that about 70 percent of French people supported the idea.
For Macron's government, such a proposal is clearly not advisable at a time when it is trying to maintain EU unity and show leadership. It was against this backdrop that the Ministry of Internal Affairs Dalmanen had to leave the historic negotiations in Luxembourg and fly to Annesi. The fruits of the EU immigration negotiations have unsurprisingly been criticized by the French right. Le Pen said asking countries unwilling to accept refugee quotas to pay money to countries accepting excess refugees amounted to a "fine".
"First-class refugees" vs. "second-class refugees"?
The tragedy in Annecy also gives countries that voted against the EU's new asylum deal a stronger reason.
On June 11, Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki assured voters at a rally that "as long as our Law and Justice Party (PiS) is in power, illegal immigrants will not be allowed to come to Poland without our will, without our permission, without our knowledge." He noted that the EU's new agreement is to "force Poland and other member states to accept migrants."
"For us, the most important thing is the safety of Polish families, the safety of Polish women and the safety of Polish children." Morawiecki cited as a warning the example of "countries that host hundreds of thousands of migrants," including France, Italy and Sweden.
"The influx of migrants has turned parts of cities such as Paris, Marseille, Rome and Stockholm completely into no-go zones full of burning tires and cars, and even locals are afraid to enter." "This is the reality in many European cities, and that's why we won't allow such a policy," he said. ”
However, in a turn of words, Morawiecki showed unconditional sympathy for refugees from the "fraternal country" Ukraine. "Poland has shown a real welcome to real migrants." He accused the EU of ignoring Poland's efforts, "We get almost nothing from the EU, we only get about 50 to 60 euros for each [Ukrainian refugee] we accept, while at the same time they demand that we pay more than 20,000 euros for each migrant who refuses." ”
The semantic orientation of "genuine immigration" and "illegal immigration" in Morawiecki's discourse is very clear, and Poland has always opposed more Muslim immigrants from foreign cultural backgrounds.
In fact, after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the European Union launched the Temporary Protection Directive for the first time, allowing Ukrainians to move freely throughout the EU, giving them the right to live and work within the EU instantly, and providing them with social benefits such as housing and health care. It also means that Ukrainian refugees can obtain temporary residence status without going through complicated asylum procedures.
On March 7, 2022, local time, at the Promachonas border post on the border between Greece and Bulgaria, Ukrainian refugees arrived in the local area and went to the refugee reception center.
While Ukrainians are warmly welcomed by the EU, refugees from other conflict zones struggle to qualify for asylum. Some advocacy groups supporting the integration of migrants have criticized this double standard of treatment of "first-class refugees" and "second-class refugees."
"The current legal situation allows civil society, as well as the Ukrainian community, to provide refugees in Ukraine with a lot of help during their arrival." TARRICK ALAWAS, SPOKESMAN FOR REFUGEE POLICY AT GERMAN NGO PRO ASYL, TOLD FRENCH MEDIA OUTLET EUROACTIV THAT "THIS HAS NOT YET BEEN ACHIEVED IN ALL OTHER GROUPS – BE IT AFGHANS OR SYRIANS." ”
On June 4, 2023, local time, in Apolda, Germany, firefighters are extinguishing a fire in a refugee shelter. A body was found after the fire.
Under Germany's asylum policy, upon arrival in Germany, refugees and asylum seekers from other third countries outside Ukraine are transferred to "refugee reception centres", often outside large cities, with little contact with local society and no choice of which area they end up in. Living with other refugees, they have little contact with native speakers and are unable to acquire language skills as quickly as Ukrainians.
"This affects people from all other countries of origin except Ukraine." Aravas criticized the government's lack of political will, "It is not the Ukrainian people who are to blame, but the politicians who do not have the will to treat refugees equally." ”
Editor of this issue Zou Shan