Insight
The Commission’s ‘new migration pact’: Handle with care by Camino Mortera-Martinez and Luigi Scazzieri 26 October 2020
The European Commission’s new migration plans are more likely to succeed than previous attempts at reforming the system. But they over-rely on the goodwill of both international partners and EU member-states. After years of impasse, the European Commission unveiled its plans for overhauling the EU’s migration and asylum system on September 23rd. The New Pact on Migration and Asylum is a complex mix of proposals for policies and legislation, with diverging levels of ambition. With a package that ranges from an attempt to solve disputes over refugee quotas to improving legal pathways to Europe, the Commission wants to end years of migration policy mishaps. Migration was arguably one of the most toxic dossiers during Jean-Claude Juncker’s 2014-19 mandate. His Commission tried, and failed, to get member-states behind a much needed reform of the Union’s migration policy, after over a million people came irregularly to the EU in 2015. President Ursula von der Leyen is determined not to make the same mistake. Von der Leyen’s pact is just the beginning of a long process. National governments and the European Parliament need to work out which of the plan’s elements they agree with, and, most importantly, which ones they will be able to sell to voters. These include suggestions for dealing with asylum seekers once they arrive at the EU’s borders; plans to work with countries of origin and transit to stop people from coming in the first place; and arrangements for returning those who fail to obtain asylum. One of the EU’s biggest problems at the peak of the 2015-16 migration crisis was that frontline countries could not deal with the overwhelming number of asylum seekers arriving at their borders. Many of them moved on without filing an asylum claim, hoping to reach their final destinations in northern European countries like Germany and Sweden. Once the Balkan route shut and this was no longer possible, those left in Greece ended up in makeshift, crammed camps. Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, Malta’s failure to process asylum seekers as they arrived was the result of both a dysfunctional European system and their own deficiencies. The EU’s Dublin Regulation mostly requires the country that asylum seekers enter first to examine applications. And national authorities, particularly in Greece, were ill-equipped to handle massive flows of people. CER INSIGHT: The Commission’s ‘new migration pact’: Handle with care 26 October 2020
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