Europe’s forgotten refugee crisis by Camino Mortera-Martinez
The EU is far from having solved the problems that led to the refugee crisis. It needs to make its asylum system work and do more to send irregular migrants back. In 2015 and 2016, the refugee crisis and the closure of borders within the Schengen passportfree zone dominated European headlines and even threatened to topple Angela Merkel. After the UK decided to leave the EU and Donald Trump unexpectedly won the US presidential election, attention shifted to other issues. But has Europe at last managed to sort out the refugee crisis? Or have we simply forgotten about it? Official figures seem to suggest that the EU is getting on top of the situation: in March 2016, 36,675 irregular migrants came to the EU by sea; in the same month of 2017, only 13,378 people attempted the crossing. First-time asylum applications have decreased sharply in some member-states, including Austria, Belgium or Sweden. But a closer look at migration numbers tells a different story. As of May 2017, almost 50,000 asylum seekers remain stranded in Greece’s refugee camps. While total sea arrivals in the EU have decreased, more migrants than a year ago are trying to reach Italy by crossing the sea from Libya. EU member-states have only relocated 11.5 per cent of the 160,000 asylum seekers they promised to take from Italy and Greece in May 2015. Europeans may no longer wake up every
morning to breaking news of Europe’s unsolved refugee crisis, but nobody should be under the illusion that the problems of the last two years have vanished. EU officials are working on two issues in particular. The first is the EU’s asylum and refugee scheme (the ‘Dublin system’), which the EU has been trying to fix almost since the scheme’s inception. Its main principle is that the country that an asylum-seeker arrives in first is responsible for processing the application for refuge. Such an arrangement was always bound to create problems. Almost from the beginning, southern European countries complained that they could not cope, while their Western and Northern European counterparts fretted that the lack of proper infrastructure at Europe’s southern borders left them carrying most of the responsibility for welcoming and integrating refugees. The accession of 12 new memberstates with little experience of handling nonEuropean refugees, and the fallout of the Syrian and Libyan wars, have made matters worse. The EU must reform its asylum system to secure the long-term future of the Schengen agreement. And the EU should try to find a solution which works for all its member-states.