Economic migration: Up with this we should not have to put — maybe!

The situation in Sudan was the lead story in The Economist edition of 31 August. The publication made the case that the catastrophe there is the world’s problem, not an isolated local tragedy.

What has triggered the catastrophe is the civil war which began in April last year when the army and an auxiliary paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell out. The Economist believes the ensuing conflict has a strong claim to be the biggest and most destructive in the world today. With significant conflicts continuing in the Middle East and Ukraine, that is a big statement.

But The Economist puts numbers on the scale of it.

Perhaps 150,000 people have died since fighting began last year and more than 10m have fled their homes. Millions could perish in the world’s worst famine for at least 40 years. These are reasons enough to care about the conflict. But the collapse of Sudan, at the intersection of Africa and the Middle East, with seven fragile neighbours and some 800km of coast on the turbulent Red Sea, has alarming geopolitical consequences, too.

The Economist details the stark experience of one victim of the violence:

… Husna Abdul Qader, a mother of five who has been forced to relocate three times in 16 months. She fled Khartoum when the RSF and the army first came to blows, narrowly escaping a volley of bullets aimed at the bus driving her out of the city. Drone strikes in the eastern town of Gedaref, where she spent much of the past year, then pushed her south to Sennar, her family’s home state. Then, in early July, RSF fighters tore through her village on motorbikes, prompting Ms Abdul Qader to move again. She arrived two weeks later in Port Sudan on the Red Sea, carrying nothing but her slippers. All her other possessions had been either abandoned or stolen.

And it outlines the already actual and likely future ripple effects.

The “seven fragile neighbours” account for 21% of Africa’s land mass and 280 million people. They include Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia and Libya. None of them currently bulwarks of prosperity or stability, they face destabilising flows of refugees, guns and mercenaries.

Beyond Africa, expect a new refugee shock in Europe, to follow those after wars in Syria and Libya, at a time when migration is an incendiary issue in France, Germany and elsewhere. Already 60% of people in camps in Calais, on the south side of the English Channel, are Sudanese.

Ten days earlier, Ireland’s former Tánaiste (deputy Prime Minister), Michael McDowell was the author of an opinion column in The Irish Times presented under the headline:

Ireland is in no position to accept 25,000 homeless migrants claiming asylum every year

Mr. McDowell has a thundering magisterial style that dares the reader to disagree at their peril rather than attempts to persuade the same reader of the reasonableness of his case. The opening sentence is a good illustration.

Anyone who thinks that the issue of immigration is going to disappear politically and be eclipsed by other issues such as housing, climate change and taxation is, I regret to say, mistaken.

I wonder if he really does regret to say this, but we will let that lie.

One can easily forget that Mr. McDowell was a Minister in government for five years from June 2002 including the last nine months as Tánaiste. So, he was a prominent member of the government orchestra to whose jazzy music we all allegedly partied through the heyday of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era. His judgement is not infallible. To borrow from Cromwell: it might behove him well occasionally to think it possible he might be wrong.

According to Mr. McDowell, the heart of the migration problem is that the state’s hands are somewhat tied in dealing with asylum applicants because the state is constitutionally bound by the EU treaties to abide by the provisions of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms to the extent decided by the EU Court of Justice. However, the asylum convention provisions were never intended to deal with economic migration of the scale and order that Europe is now experiencing.

The problem is that the EU has proven entirely incompetent in distinguishing effectively between asylum seeking, where it assumed competence, and economic migration into the union, where member states remain sovereign in theory…

It is simply unsustainable to impose convention duties on EU member states to accord refugee or international rights of entry to anyone who presents at the borders or within the State asserting that they are entitled to asylum status. This is especially so when the entitlement extends to temporary State-provided rights of residence, welfare, legal assistance and lengthy administrative and judicial processes, including a right to work after six months.

So, what must be done?

Deep-seated confusion between asylum seeking and economic migration needs to be addressed politically. It cannot be addressed simply at national level. It must be addressed at EU level by honest interaction and debate among the member states of the union.

That sounds like a good answer but only superficially — something equivalent to the view that wherever an international crisis sprouts up, the UN should intervene and “sort it out”. Mr. McDowell does not share with us how he believes the EU should sort this one out other than by applying liberal doses of “honest interaction and debate”.

He might also have conceded in the interests of balance that, while the EU migration pact has yet to take effect and will not provide total control over migration flows, it will tighten border controls and facilitate accelerated returns of rejected asylum applicants.

Neither does Mr. McDowell tell us how to distinguish among asylum applicants between those who are genuine and those who are “only” economic migrants. But he does give a hint.

A recent letter-writer to this paper pointed out that in May the State received 2,000 asylum applications. That is close to the “new normal” predicted by Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman of annual asylum seeking between 20,000 and 30,000. That rate of asylum seeking per capita of population, he pointed out, is the highest in the EU. It must be viewed also in the light of Minister for Justice Helen McEntee’s claim that 80 per cent of asylum seekers were travelling through or resident in the UK at some point.

It seems fair to read the last sentence as implying that asylum applicants who arrive in Ireland from another “safe” country are “shopping” for something more than straightforward refuge and therefore, prima facie, are not genuine asylum seekers. That is certainly a plausible view — but a dubious basis for a principled policy let alone one that might command consensus within the EU.

If it were a necessary condition for being granted asylum at all that an applicant must have travelled directly from an unsafe zone of strife and must apply for asylum in the first “safe” country in which he or she arrives, the burden of admitting asylum seekers would fall mainly on a small number of southern EU member states and Ireland, being on its western geographical periphery, would be largely exempt.

But the main weakness of Mr. McDowell’s case is its reliance on blustery and unconstructive ambiguity around the word “accept”. Mr. McDowell writes:

… it is by no means idle to acknowledge the obvious, glaring truth that Ireland is in no position in the middle of a massive housing shortage to add to that crisis by accepting 25,000 homeless migrants claiming asylum every year who are legally entitled to State-provided shelter.

“Accepting” here admits of two meanings. One is immediate admission of asylum seekers to the country in the default expectation that their application for asylum will be successful. The other is that admission is provisional and temporary pending adjudication of the application which should be as swift as it is rigorous — but in the recognition that black and white decisions are not always easy. If she were to wash up on our shores, should Ms. Abdul Qader qualify as a refugee or be disqualified as “just” an economic migrant?

When volumes were lower and immigration was not the political hot potato it has become, the timescale for processing applications and enforcing the departure from the state of asylum seekers whose applications were denied was leisurely — at best. The fire of grumpy public opinion demanding more efficiency if not necessarily toughness is close enough to the government’ feet now to motivate the upping of its game that it claims to have underway now.

Moreover, in the absence of an ability to conjure “own front door” bricks and mortar accommodation out of thin air, the government can safely live with any criticism is getting over its loosening of the definition of what counts as adequate temporary shelter to include tented villages while applications are being processed.

The government is muddling through, chasing and may or may not be catching up with an evolving problem, predictable only in the broad terms of being more likely to grow than to diminish — so long as there are conflicts like the one in Sudan.

Mr. McDowell presents two theses.

First, the present situation is uncomfortable and unsatisfactory. We know that.

Second, the EU should deal with it. But how?

Wittingly or unwittingly, he allows a third thesis to hang unspoken in the ether, that people arriving here and presenting for asylum should simply be turned around and sent back to from whence they came. If that is what he really thinks is an acceptable answer, he should say so directly and justify it.