As arrivals soar, Europe’s immigration policy are in disarray

Italian authorities oversaw a significant rescue operation last week when a boat carrying 400 migrants drifted along a dangerous migration route in the central Mediterranean while running out of fuel. This was in response to the reported unwillingness of Maltese authorities to collect people on board.

Before arriving on Italian shores on Wednesday, passengers’ cries for help were unanswered for nearly a week. They were joined by 800 refugees who had been stuck on another ship for more than ten days.

Witnesses claimed that after climbing ashore, many of the migrants collapsed to the ground, terribly thirsty, and covered with vomit from the choppy waters. Life jackets were not widely worn.

Local NGOs, such as the German group Sea-Watch International, claimed they frequently informed Maltese authorities to the boat but they were disregarded.

According to Sea-Watch, Malta would choose to bear the great danger of 400 people dying than to provide for them directly.

According to the Malta Independent, the Armed Forces of Malta (AFM) informed local media that nobody on board the ship requested a rescue. When CNN contacted them for comment, they did not answer.

The incident, however, was only the latest spat between EU nations, bringing new attention to the bloc’s inability to agree on who should take in an influx of migrant arrivals, which critics claim is just causing more suffering and death.

When the people in the first two boats eventually made it to land, two more vessels, each carrying about 450 people, had been seen at sea. Again, Sea-Watch International notified Maltese and Italian officials, it told CNN, but neither nation quickly initiated a rescue effort.

Due to conflict, global inequity, and the climate disaster, the number of undocumented migrants arriving on European shores by sea has increased dramatically so far this year.

According to the most recent statistics from the UNHCR, more than 36,000 migrants entered the Mediterranean region of Europe between January and March of this year, more than double the number compared to the same period in 2022. It is the biggest number since the refugee crisis, which peaked in 2015 and persisted into the early months of 2016, when more than a million migrants arrived on the coasts of Europe and caused EU solidarity to disintegrate into squabbles and border mayhem.

According to the UN, more than 98% of those arriving so far this year have done so by sea compared to 2% by land, the highest percentage since 2016. The UN data also reveals that an estimated 522 migrants have lost their lives or disappeared while traveling, illustrating the dearth of safe and authorized routes open to refugees and asylum seekers.

The University of Birmingham in central England’s Jenny Phillimore is a professor of migration and superdiversity. “People flee because they have to get away from these very difficult situations at home,” she said.

“Why do they enter the boats and take such risks? They have no other option because there are no safe and legal routes.

Refusal to cooperate

Tens of thousands of migrants take perilous journeys to Europe every year in search of safety and better economic opportunities as they leave war, persecution, and poverty.

However, the absence of safe and authorized migration routes for refugees and asylum seekers can have fatal repercussions.

As they attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Italy in March, at least 28 migrants perished when their boats capsized off the coast of Tunisia. The previous month, a wooden boat transporting migrants from Turkey capsized off the southern Italian region of Calabria, killing at least 93 people.

Four people lost their lives in the English Channel, one of the busiest shipping channels in the world, in December after a tiny boat reported to be carrying migrants sank farther north.

The necessity to employ resources to save passengers on board migrant boats that are frequently overloaded and unsuited for the journey can result in European countries transferring responsibilities since authorities “don’t want people landing on their shores,” noted Phillimore.

“Compared to countries in northern Europe, Italy has long been one of the nations that has had a higher share of arrivals across the Mediterranean. Although the EU Commission has attempted to implement shares and quotas, it hasn’t really been successful, she said.

The state of emergency was declared by Italy’s government on Tuesday as a result of the migrant boat arrivals. Even if they are from nations that are eligible for asylum status, those on the ships are still regarded as migrants. Until the drawn-out procedure is finished, they are not recognized as refugees.

Giorgia Meloni, the populist and right-wing prime minister of Italy, is planning to introduce new legislation this month that will tighten regulations and involve compulsory repatriation of migrants who do not fit the criteria for refugee status. Migrants who don’t match those requirements are currently given a notice to leave the country, but expulsion is rarely enforced unless they are stopped by police authorities.

Given the significant backing from opposition legislators and the EU, as well as Meloni’s sizable majority in parliament, the revisions are likely to be approved. Italy has requested assistance from its EU allies in processing, repatriating, and housing migrants who meet the criteria for refugee status under UNHCR protocols.

“Not doing their share”

Humanitarian organizations have criticized politicians in other parts of Europe for suggesting measures to close borders in an effort to relieve pressure on wealthy nations with overburdened systems for dealing with unauthorized migrants.

Recent criticism of the UK government’s “cruel” and unrealistic proposals to accommodate refugees in abandoned military camps and barges rather than hotels came from opposition politicians and human rights activists.

As a result of a proposed unlawful migration measure that would send refugees and asylum seekers who arrive in the United Kingdom by boat either to Rwanda or their place of origin, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government was accused of breaking international law.

74,751 applications for asylum were submitted in the UK in 2022, according to the UK government. According to the Home Office, the overall number of persons awaiting an asylum decision more than quadrupled between 2020 and 2022, rising from about 70,000 to 166,300. The UK immigration system, according to critics, has been neglected and is ineffective.

“The bill would prevent a large group of extremely vulnerable refugees from relying on human rights protections, by leaving it up to the Home Secretary to decide who should be protected and who should be deported – and excluding the courts almost entirely,” said Adam Wagner, a renowned human rights lawyer, to CNN in March.

Asylum applications totaled 77,195 in Italy last year, according to the Italian Interior Ministry. 52,625 of applicants were reviewed, and 53% of those were turned down for asylum. Those who are turned down can appeal the decision, but the majority elude capture.

According to the French Interior Ministry, of the 137,046 asylum claims that were registered in France in 2022, 56,179 were approved. According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees in Germany, 244,132 applications for asylum were submitted in 2022. Some of the approved applications included backlog requests from the previous year, with 72.3% of those being granted.

According to the European Union Agency for Asylum, there were 37,300 asylum claims submitted in Greece, which is roughly a third more than in 2021. 30,886 of them underwent examination, and of those, 19,243 received approval while 11,643 received a denial.

An earlier story that almost 100 migrants had been stripped of their clothing at the Greek-Turkish border was denounced by UNHCR. Greece completed constructing a 40 kilometer (25 mile) wall along its border with Turkey in 2021 after worries that the Taliban’s capture of Afghanistan may result in a surge in asylum seekers.

In the middle of the 2010s, when millions of refugees and migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq crossed into Europe, Greece was at the epicenter of the continent’s migrant crisis. Since then, it has adopted a rigid position and rejected requests from Turkey and international organizations to let additional people pass its borders.

The countries that have fueled geopolitical disparities and created the kinds of crises people are fleeing are, without a doubt, responsible for the solution to this crisis. also have a duty, and the Global North are not doing their part, according to Phillimore.

The Global North has more wealth, but it is also taking many fewer people.

“Preserving human life”

Researchers claim that a “political deadlock” has resulted from European leaders’ inability to coordinate a cogent response to growing migrant arrivals and move asylum seekers throughout the continent.

Record numbers of individuals left their homes and attempted to cross to Europe during the migrant crisis in 2015 as a result of a confluence of political events, including the advent of ISIS, the Syrian civil war, and instability in Afghanistan throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.

According to UNHCR, 1,000,573 migrants traveled by sea to Europe that year via the Mediterranean, with about 4,000 people possibly drowning.

The majority of refugees who entered the EU via Libya. At the time, according to Luca Barana, a research fellow at Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) and coordinator of the T20 Italy Task Force on Migration, the EU had established a new arrangement in the Mediterranean based on “cooperation with the Libyan authorities.”

Following the end of the civil war in Libya, Tunisia has taken over as the new entry point to Europe. However, while an agreement exists between Italy and Tunisia, there isn’t a comparable EU-wide accord. Due to “growing adversity and discrimination against Sub-Saharan migrants residing in Tunisia,” Barana stated, the number of people leaving Tunisia has also increased.

Instead of pursuing a “cooperative” strategy with Tunisia, “the European Union is investing in enhancing border control infrastructure and increasing the number of returns and readmission,” according to Barana.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), it is “deeply alarming” that EU nations are attempting to back out of agreements to save refugees and asylum seekers who are stranded at sea.

According to a representative of the international NGO, “it is deeply alarming and disappointing that EU countries are trying to abdicate to their duties to rescue people in distress at sea under international law at a time when more people are being forced by conflict and human rights violations to undertake hazardous journeys across the Mediterranean to seek safety in Europe.”

UN human rights spokesperson Liz Throssell has also urged an end to laws that permit abuses of migrants’ human rights. “UN Human Rights has also repeatedly condemned the impounding of vessels and the criminalization of those who provide assistance and other advocates for migrant rights that prevent or obstruct humanitarian search and rescue efforts.”

After making an effort to save migrant boats that were stranded at sea, several NGO employees encountered legal obstacles. Human rights organizations and the European Parliament strongly denounced a prosecution of 24 rescue workers in Greece in January after they were detained in 2018 while trying to help refugees who were caught in a dinghy after leaving Turkey.

According to Daniele Fiorentino, a professor of political science at Roma Tre University in Rome, Italy, the EU’s policy surrounding migrant boat arrivals in the area should emphasize the lives of refugees.

The tragedy, he said, “is the result of a weakness or ineffectiveness in the decision-making process both in Italy and in Europe,” he told CNN. “Maybe today the situation is less critical than in 2015,” he added.

Who is in charge of overseeing the rescue effort and making decisions regarding those who are stranded at sea? Authorities, as well as all of us, should always keep in mind that preserving lives is the primary concern at hand in this situation.