MIGRATION CAN BE an emotionally-charged issue for people – enough that it has a huge, sometimes disproportionate, impact on election campaigns.

In recent years, the migration issue has been at the centre of two seismic political moments in the Western world: the 2016 Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election.

The UK voted to leave the EU in part due to some voters seeing it as an immigration issue, and spent four years tangled in tense negotiations with the EU – not over immigration, but over every sort of relationship there can be between two jurisdictions.

Now, upcoming elections in Germany and France may also be shaped by migration.

But for all the talk about immigration, a quick glance at the figures shows that migrant populations make up a small percentage of EU member states’ overall populations.

Of the EU’s 447 million-strong population, 5% comprises non-EU citizens in 2019. 

This is not the perception among ordinary members of the public, however.

A 2018 study into attitudes towards migrants in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy indicated that the average respondent in all countries thinks the share of immigrants is at least twice as high as it is in reality (perceived as 26% when it’s actually 10%, in Italy’s case, for example).

As the EU’s net migration numbers increase, however (there was a 5% increase in the number of residencies granted by EU member states in 2019), and given the skewed perceptions about immigrants evidenced above, there is a strengthening view that Europe needs to agree on how to handle its influx of migrants searching for a better life. 

Over the coming weeks, the next cycle of The Good Information Project from The Journal will look at migration and the EU, asking what has worked in the bloc’s approach, what hasn’t – and what lessons have been learned in the face of the looming Afghan refugee crisis. 

How Europe has dealt with the crisis so far

Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel – whose tenure has been defined by her approach to the migrant crisis – said in 2018 that Europe’s response to the migrant crisis “could end up determining Europe’s destiny”. 

In 2013, Italy launched an air and sea operation called ‘Mare Nostrum’, which translates as ‘Our Sea’, which aimed to rescue migrants who were risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. The operation ended a year later, after rescuing 150,000 migrants mostly from Africa and the Middle East, and was replaced a similar operation manned by the European Union’s border agency Frontex. 

Ireland’s Defence Forces have sent forces to take part in those rescue missions: in 2015, 200 migrants were rescued from an inflatable boat by the LÉ Eithne, while the LÉ William Butler Yeats vessel rescued 140 migrants from a rubber dinghy in 2017, both off the coast of Libya.

#LÉEITHNE rescued barge in distress 30miles N of Zuwarah, Libya this am, 310 onboard, 39 minors #DefendProtectSupport pic.twitter.com/xat96oYgzw

— Óglaigh na hÉireann (@defenceforces) June 6, 2015

When Lieutenant Commander Ultan Finegan of the LÉ Róisín was asked by The Journal in December 2016 whether such rescue missions encouraged more vulnerable people to make the perilous journey, and in turn put more lives at risk, he said:

They’re going to attempt it anyway. The question is can you sit back and watch people make that journey knowing they’re going to lose their lives?

In 2015, the EU struck a deal with Turkey to stem the flow of migrants travelling to Europe by paying Ankara to allow some migrants to stay in Turkey. This was mostly in response to the influx of people fleeing what would become the civil war in Syria.

The same year, Chancellor Angela Merkel made a decision that would lead Germany to take in more than a million migrants fleeing conflict, mainly from Syria, in a decision that angered some of its EU partners, who were caught off guard by her decision.

Six years on, the EU still doesn’t have a central plan for refugees. After the humanitarian crisis that now faces Afghanistan, the EU may be forced to form one.

At the end of August, European Union ministers held a meeting to discuss how to deal with a possible influx of migrants into the EU, and approved a declaration that included strong support for countries in the region to take in refugees from Afghanistan.

EU nations are eager not to make the same mistake as they did with Syria in 2015, when funding to the nation was cut, and provoked a movement of migrants to Europe.

The scale and urgency of the crisis has put the EU under pressure, and the thrust of how to handle that has been raised repeatedly. 

In October 2019, Fine Gael MEPs were widely criticised after they voted against a resolution before the European Parliament to step up search and rescue for refugees in the Mediterranean.

One Fine Gael MEP Maria Walsh said at the time: “I am the first to shout the loudest for the protection of our citizens, but this report wasn’t good enough.

“The resolution does the opposite by calling for Frontex to share intelligence about its operational activities with every boat in the Mediterranean.

“That would endanger more lives by facilitating, instead of dismantling, the business models of smugglers and human traffickers. We could not support that,” she said.

European Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas told the Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung at the weekend that the EU is better prepared for a migration increase than it was in 2015: “We have the financial means to help Afghanistan’s neighbours; and the policies of the EU states are converging more and more”.

As the world watches the Taliban rule Afghanistan again, what they do next may provoke another migration movement; meanwhile, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia has started erecting a border wall with Belarus, as the number of Middle East migrants travelling over those border lines increase.

Here at home, Ireland has been criticised for its Direct Provision system that houses asylum seekers and refugees, which the current government have pledged to phase out over the next several years.

There have also been increasing focus and questions asked of Ireland’s approach to integrating new migrant communities with old ones, and how the country will deal with its obligations and responsibilities to the people of Afghanistan in the coming months.

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This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.