Is the EU’s Immigration Policy Destined to Fail?
“People who come because they think that Europe is a prosperous continent, even when they are not hired by companies…must be escorted back, that’s the rule,” said French President Francois Hollande, speaking at a joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel at the end of May, adding that introducing a migrant quota system in Europe in the form of the European Commission proposal was completely out of the question.
Hungary’s view is similar. Addressing a plenary session of the European Parliament at the end of May, Prime Minister Orbán laid out the government’s position on immigration: Political asylum seekers should be given asylum but illegal immigrants, those simply posing as asylum seekers should be stopped at the border, sent home, and the tools of smugglers used to help illegal border crossings should be destroyed.
Later this month, heads of EU member states will vote on the European Commission’s proposal to set up quotas on how many people — asylum seekers — each member state should accept each year. President Hollande, voicing his government’s opposition to the quota system, pointed to its fundamental flaw. “Asylum is a right, attributed according to international criteria,” he said. “That is why the number of its beneficiaries cannot be subject to quotas, one is an asylum seeker or not.”
Prime Minister Orbán also considers the proposal dangerous because it sends the wrong message, encouraging illegal immigrants to try to slip into the pre-set “quota” by exploiting the asylum system. “It brings the problem [of illegal immigration] to Europe,” the prime minister said, “but instead, we should keep this problem out of the EU. We should make them understand that they cannot come, don’t even start to leave.”
Hollande and Orbán are not the only ones against the proposal. Germany urges corrections to the plan. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and Spain are among the others who feel Brussels is on the wrong track.
Between 2012 and 2014, the number of people crossing Hungary’s borders illegally to claim asylum increased 20-fold to 43 thousand. As of today, less than half way through the year, the number for 2015 is nearing 53 thousand.
Last weekend alone, the border patrol caught 1,527 people violating the border. The majority of the people who have crossed in the last several months have come from safe countries, places not hit by humanitarian crisis or major conflict — not from the kinds of circumstances that create bona fide asylum seekers — and they have come as so-called “dry foot” immigrants across Hungary’s southern border.
Most of these illegal immigrants are well aware that Hungarian authorities, obliged since 2012 to obey EU regulations on the matter, do not have the right to detain the immigrants until their asylum request has been evaluated and a decision taken. In the meantime, having successfully crossed to the European Schengen Area and free to move about as they wish, these immigrants typically leave to the West, typically within three days.
If these illegal immigrants are caught without papers in another EU member state, the rules say that they can then be sent back to the country where they were first registered in the EU. Speaking at a press conference last weekend, Fidesz Vice President Lajos Kósa noted that German authorities alone ruled in 14 thousand cases that immigrants should be sent back to Hungary, where, again, we do not have the right to detain them.
Hungary, the first EU member state to do so, is carrying out a national consultation on immigration until the end of the month to ask citizens their views on the issue. The government has come under attack for the content of the consultation questionnaire and for a recent billboard campaign addressing the issue. But all this commotion obscures the real issue.
As of this week, 400,000 voters have completed and returned the questionnaire, and 80 percent of them urge the government to step up the struggle against these ineffective rules and do something to curb this wave of illegal immigrants. That voter sentiment is understandable.
Unfortunately, Hungary’s hands are tied at the moment. EU regulations do not allow us to stop the illegal immigrants from leaving, yet other regulations allow other EU member states to send these immigrants back to Hungary, eventually making them our problem again. The Commission’s quota proposal might seem like a good idea that could take some of the pressure off of countries like Hungary on the EU border, but it is not. The proposal legitimizes something that is illegal: an illegal border crossing and abuse of the right of asylum.
No wonder that so many EU leaders oppose the Commission’s proposal. If the EU cannot address the problem on the EU level or give border protection rights back to the member states, it is destined to fail. We’ll see the outcome of the Council meeting later this month, but signs are not promising, and the problem is getting bigger as we speak.
