While the EU has managed to truly integrate its policy-making in some areas, migration remains too divisive.
BRUSSELS—
Both
are reminders that migration remains among the European Union's
toughest issues, one that divides the bloc even as humanitarian
disasters claim lives by the thousands just outside its borders.
Almost no EU country has shown a
desire to significantly increase its intake of Syrian refugees. Sweden,
the only EU state to have promised Syrians permanent residence, has recently sought help from other EU nations, pressured by the economic and political costs of the influx of refugees.
Meanwhile,
countries along Europe's Mediterranean and southeastern borders have
been trying to get other nations to bear more of the cost of managing
and protecting refugees, but with little success.
Some
435,000 people applied for asylum in the EU last year, a 36% jump on
2012. Syrians topped the list and almost three times as many Eritreans
tried to escape their country as the year before, according to Eurostat,
the EU statistics service.
One out of 10 refugees applied for asylum in
Germany, the most populous EU country.
Migrants face vastly different conditions depending on where they end up in the EU.
Spain
and Greece take on thousands of illegal migrants each year and
governments there say they are doing their best on limited budgets to
accommodate them.
But the two countries have also taken steps to fortify
their borders.
Spain announced earlier
this year that it would earmark an extra €2.3 million ($3.2 million) to
increase security at Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish enclaves in
Morocco.
In February, Spanish police admitted using rubber bullets to
shoot at African migrants trying to swim to Ceuta, and police have also
pushed back migrants from a fence that surrounds Melilla, to the dismay
of EU institutions and human-rights organizations.
Greece erected a 10-kilometer-long
wall along its northern border with Turkey to deter undocumented
migrants from crossing into its territory.
Dozens of refugees—mainly
Syrians—have drowned on their way to Greece just in the past few weeks.
Meanwhile,
Bulgaria has struggled to accommodate the thousands of Syrian refugees
arriving there and the situation has threatened to cause a political
crisis.
The government received emergency aid from the EU, but
human-rights organizations describe the conditions for asylum seekers as
squalid.
The European Commission, the
EU's executive arm, has been trying to rally national EU governments to
commit more funds to manage migration and to take on more refugees.
But
it has stopped short of calling the situation a crisis, or of defining
what constitutes one.
Because of that,
the EU hasn't activated its refugee-crisis program, which was created
when the bloc opened its doors to thousands fleeing the wars in the
Balkans in the 1990s and hasn't been used since.
Instead,
following the Oct. 3 Lampedusa shipwreck the commission convened a task
force to look at immediate steps that could be taken to ensure fewer
people drown trying to get from North Africa to Europe.
European
and African leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday said they'd do more
to manage migration but didn't spell out exactly what.
European
Council President
Herman Van Rompuy
has said leaders will discuss how to reform the EU immigration
system at their meeting in Brussels in June, but several EU officials
say no more than pledges to act, rather than a concrete plan of action,
should be expected.
"We commit to
undertaking concrete actions to respond to challenges of migration and
mobility at the appropriate level in a spirit of partnership, shared
responsibility and cooperation,"
EU and African leaders said in a joint
declaration at the end of their two-day meeting here.
To
some observers who saw the EU-Africa summit as a prime opportunity to
present a concrete plan, the declaration was a disappointment.
"The
EU, in cooperation with Africa, must radically shake up its approach
and wake up to the need for real action over words in order to protect
people and save lives,"
Nicolas Beger, a director at Amnesty
International in Brussels, said in an email.
"More search and rescue is
needed, safer routes must be created, and the outsourcing of European
migration control policies to non-EU countries must end."
While
the EU has managed to truly integrate its policy-making and rules in
some areas like competition policy, migration remains too divisive.
Poorer
countries, especially those along the bloc's borders, want the richer
ones to accept a system that distributes migrants across the bloc.
They
also want much more EU help in guarding their borders. Richer states
largely reject these ideas.
The
dysfunctions of the current arrangement mean that migrants end up paying
smugglers to travel illegally across the EU to reach countries where
they are most likely to get jobs and have good prospects for asylum.
The
policy vacuum created as countries struggle to agree leads to profits
for the smugglers, trouble for the migrants and disgruntlement in both
richer and poorer EU states.
Still,
given how divisive migration has become in national politics across
Europe, it's hard to see how EU member states can set aside their
differences to reach a new compromise that works better, or less badly,
for all.
—Laurence Norman
contributed to this article.
