Europe Tries to Bridge Its Migration Divide

Europe is trying again to resolve its most divisive issue: migration.

After years of bad blood and legal fights, the European Union is edging toward a tough new set of migration and asylum policies, including steps to ease turning people away.

The EU on Sunday secured the first piece of its plan by signing an agreement with Tunisia that promises economic aid and other cooperation in return for Tunisian efforts to crack down on boat crossings and to take back Tunisians illegally entering the bloc.

Migration into Europe and across the Americas has risen sharply since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, prompting renewed efforts to tighten restrictions on inflows. The Biden administration recently unveiled new limits on asylum seekers by declaring that migrants who transited through another country on their way to the U.S. without seeking asylum there would now be ineligible to stay in the U.S. 

Europe’s new approach has been spearheaded by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose antimigration stance helped her sweep to victory in parliamentary elections last year.

Questions remain about whether the EU’s plans will significantly dent the number of people seeking to cross illegally into Europe—and whether the proposals will be fully enacted. Migration groups argue that the EU should reopen safe and legal pathways to the bloc, after a tragedy in June when hundreds of asylum seekers are presumed to have died off the Greek coast after the overcrowded fishing vessel transporting them sank.

The plans still face opposition from Poland and Hungary, which previously sued the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, over an earlier migration proposal. The new plans will also need backing from the European Parliament, which has traditionally opposed efforts to restrict asylum seekers’ rights.

Since the 2015 migration crisis, when over one million asylum seekers, mainly Syrians, fled across the Mediterranean Sea into the bloc, migration has sparked toxic arguments among the 27 EU members. The fights have at times paralyzed decision-making on other policies.

After sealing a deal with Turkey in 2016 that essentially paid Ankara to keep Syrians from entering the bloc, EU member states have repeatedly failed to agree on a comprehensive system to control illegal immigration while complying with international obligations to give shelter to refugees who need protection. For the past few years, they hadn’t even bothered trying.

The volatile politics of migration has shown no signs of abating. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government recently fell over the issue. Antimigration parties are faring well in opinion polls in several EU countries, including Austria, the Netherlands and Spain, and are well-placed to add seats in next year’s European Parliament elections.

EU diplomats nonetheless last month managed to piece together an overwhelming majority agreement on a new approach to the issue, which managed to blend Meloni’s antimigration focus with longstanding demands from some west European capitals for shared EU responsibility for asylum seekers.

The proposal would allow countries to prescreen refugees and process people deemed unlikely to gain entrance through a swift evaluation. It would also give each member state more authority over where a failed asylum seeker could be returned to.

In exchange, the EU would seek to relocate at least 30,000 migrants across the bloc annually. If a country refused to take in asylum seekers, they could instead make a 20,000-euro payment, equivalent to roughly $22,500, for each person they don’t accept.

While the migration deal was being cobbled together, the EU announced that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen would travel with Meloni and Rutte to Tunisia for talks on a migration pact. The trio returned to seal last weekend’s deal. In June, von der Leyen proposed creating a fund of more than $15 billion to finance external partnerships like the Tunisia deal.

At the center of the EU negotiations has been Meloni, whose right-wing government made tackling migration a top foreign-policy priority. Previous antimigrant champions have tended to pick fights with Brussels. She has generally worked with the EU to achieve her goals.

More than 76,000 migrants have arrived by sea to Italy so far this year, equivalent to roughly 77% of registered Mediterranean Sea arrivals to Europe, according to United Nations data. 

The number of arrivals to Europe’s southern shores is nearly twice as high as it was during the first half of last year—and is the highest level since the migration crisis years of 2015.

A big reason for the increased flow of sea arrivals is Tunisia’s political and economic turmoil. Kais Saied, the country’s authoritarian president, has spearheaded a campaign against sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia that has contributed to the instability.

On Monday, Amnesty International criticized the EU’s deal with Tunisia, saying it signaled “EU acceptance of increasingly repressive behavior” by Saied and the Tunisian government. “This makes the European Union complicit in the suffering that will inevitably result,” Amnesty said.

Meloni is showing no sign of regrets. On Sunday, she hailed the Tunisia agreement as a “model” for building new relationships between European and North African countries. In recent weeks, she has been trying to bring Poland and Hungary, two countries with similar right-wing, nationalist political brands, on board.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who have long opposed any mandatory mechanism to share asylum seekers across the continent, came to a Brussels summit last month determined to denounce the deal and the way it was reached—without their backing.

Morawiecki said on his way to the summit that loose migration policies had led to blood being spilled in Europe’s streets. The two men refused to back down over hours of talks that ran late into the night and blocked the summit statement on migration.

A few days later, Meloni headed to Warsaw for talks with Morawiecki. “There is no division between us on this because we have the same, key objective, which isn’t to discuss how to handle illegal migration in Europe, but how to stop it,” she said at a joint press conference with Morawiecki. “We will continue working together to find solutions that are effective for everyone.”

Write to Laurence Norman at [email protected] and Margherita Stancati at [email protected]