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EUROPEAN UNION
Around 36 percent fewer migrants attempted to cross into the European Union in the first seven months of the year – a total of around 113,000 people. Despite the drop, however, as EUobserver explained, migrants continue to “preoccupy” European leaders.
Specifically, many of those leaders are considering removing migrants to third countries where the migrants can apply for asylum and wait – rather than facing the political problem of allowing the migrants to live in their countries temporarily.
Defenders of this approach view it as fostering domestic peace while critics label it as abandoning international commitments to help people legitimately in need.
Prime Minister Dick Schoof of the recently installed hard-right Dutch government announced measures last month to crack down on migration, including reintroducing border checks rather than letting anyone in if they come in from other EU members like Belgium or Germany, the Associated Press reported.
A centerpiece of the changes is Schoof’s proposal to send rejected African asylum seekers to Uganda, added Reuters. “It is a serious plan, but a lot still needs to be worked out,” the prime minister said.
Schoof’s plans are no longer so far-fetched anymore. The EU, for example, paid Tunisia more than $160 million to block and house migrants seeking to journey to Europe. Now the bloc can’t claw back the cash after allegations have surfaced that Tunisian officials have been abusing migrants and violating their human rights, explained the Guardian.
Italy has already sent migrants to Albania for processing, the New York Times wrote. Only men were on the first ship out. Under the plan, Italian authorities allow children, pregnant women and others deemed as vulnerable to remain in Italy as they apply for asylum. Albanian leaders have rejected other European countries’ requests to take their migrants, too.
Still, the plan faced early failure when Italian judges ordered the first 16 males sent over to be returned to Italy, ruling that two were vulnerable, two were underage and the rest could not be safely returned to their home countries of Egypt and Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, a British plan to send migrants to Rwanda faltered, even though the tabloid Daily Mail thought the idea would have worked if officials of the then-governing Conservative Party had handled it more astutely. Indeed, the Labour Party government now in power in the United Kingdom is paying $8.4 million to Saint Helena, a British overseas territory, to house migrants from another British colony, the Chagos Islands, that the UK is now planning to give back to Mauritius, reported the Independent.
The measures are a far cry from a decade ago when about 1.2 million refugees, many of them from Syria, began entering the EU to claim asylum, often welcomed by European countries such as Germany. Instead, these new policies show how Europe has taken a sharp turn against migration that reflects deep unease in the public’s mind about outsiders, the Brookings Institution found. For many European leaders, that means tightening policies, especially in the wake of far-right party successes.
“Over the years, asylum seekers have become convenient scapegoats for disillusioned and frustrated Europeans who have seen their societies change and economies tumble because of successive external shocks, from climate change and a global health crisis to rapid technological change and a disruption of Europe’s decades-old security order,” the think tank wrote. “In this time of great uncertainty, a rights-based vision of migration and asylum has become a perceived political vulnerability, replaced with a security approach stressing law and order.”
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