As the increasing problem of immigrants grips both the United States and Europe, European nations have begun taking a novel, two-pronged approach to the issue that the U.S. is not likely to consider for several reasons, practicality and cost being among them.
The first approach, proposed by Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, is to actually pay migrants in some cases to leave the country. Already, in the last several years, Germany has absorbed more than one million “illegal” refugees — “illegal” in the sense that they may have committed crimes by crossing international borders without documentation, but once they’re within the confines of Germany, they’re free to apply for asylum and will likely obtain generous financial and relocation assistance from the German government.
To a large extent, this is why Germany remains the number one destination in Europe for migrants in the first place. However, not all of these migrants are peacefully integrating into German society; a certain percentage of them willfully violate German laws and draw objections from native citizens, particularly in rural and far-flung areas of the country where many of them have been forced to resettle.
There have been notable tragedies and missteps along the way of this mass influx of newcomers, most prominently with the terrorist attack at a Berlin market where dozens of innocent shoppers were run down by a Tunisian migrant in a truck who was due to have been deported.
A strong backlash to the chancellor’s virtual “open borders” policy has threatened the political future of Merkel and her political party, and so, the question of how to handle the continued flow of new immigrants remains.
The Merkel government has drawn up a 16-point plan to tackle the problem of what happens to asylum seekers such as the aforementioned Tunisian migrant, who are supposed to leave the country. In 2016, Germany rejected 170,000 claims for asylum, but only about 26,000 asylum seekers were repatriated to their home countries while roughly 55,000 others departed of their own accord, leaving more than 81,000 people unaccounted for.
“We rely heavily on voluntary departures,” Merkel admitted after her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party fell behind the Social Democratic Party (SPD) for the first time in surveys for the nation’s upcoming elections.
The SPD challenger to Merkel, former President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, backs proposals to speed up migrant deportations. When Schulz served in the European Parliament, he strongly backed mandatory migrant quotas.
The EU passed these measures despite several eastern and central European governments objecting to the acceptance of migrants entirely and Germany’s unilateral decision to open its borders to nearly everyone. Polish interior minister Mariusz Blaszczak called Schulz’s stance on quotas “an example of German arrogance” while Schulz termed Poland’s wish to reject refugees “national egotism in its purest form.”
The vice president of the European Commission previously stated that more than 60 percent of refugees arriving in Europe are economic migrants, rather than political ones. One of the action items of the Merkel government’s plan is to create a fund that will pay refugees to withdraw their applications for asylum and leave the country voluntarily; so far, 90 million Euros of taxpayer money has been set aside for this purpose.
U.S. President Donald Trump was quoted as saying he believed that Merkel had made “a catastrophic mistake” by accepting an unlimited number of refugees in the first place. The vice chancellor of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, later admitted in an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine that Merkel had underestimated the difficulty of integrating so many refugees and that Germany was experiencing a kulturkampf, or “cultural struggle,” as a result.
Germany’s experience can be contrasted with that of Italy, which has been swamped with refugees actually landing on its shores (mostly in Sicily) after making the perilous journey from North Africa. Typically, these travelers depart from the war-torn nation of Libya in overcrowded and dangerous fishing vessels and dinghies that were never designed to carry the enormous numbers of people crammed onto every square inch of their exposed space.
Rather than paying migrants to voluntarily depart their country, Italy recently stated it would prefer that refugees not arrive on its shores in the first place, and to that end, the country signed an accord committing it to paying the Libyan Coast Guard 220 million Euros to ensure that North African marine forces catch the watercraft while they’re still in Libyan waters and send the boats back to shore, where migrants will be transferred to refugee camps.
At least some of the money paid to Libya by Italy will come from the European Union. European Council President Donald Tusk has said the accord “should help reduce the number of irregular migrants and save lives at the same time.”
Last year, more than 181,000 refugees made the crossing from Libya to Sicily, and more than 4,500 perished at sea when their boats capsized, leaked or were otherwise lost. Currently, refugees are rescued from the seas by the Italian Coast Guard, and they typically end up at shelters in Italy and elsewhere in Europe where many apply for permanent asylum.
At the European Council, a spokesperson wrote that “one of the priorities expressed at the [recent Maltese immigration] summit by European leaders was to ensure adequate reception capacities and conditions in Libya for migrants” and that European nations “reaffirmed their determination to act in full respect of human rights, international law and European values.” But the current political climate in Libya means that this pledge may be impossible to fulfill, leading to critiques from non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF).
“It’s an illusion to pretend that at the moment there’s a partner [in Libya] that you can work with,” noted Arjan Hehenkamp, the general director of MSF. The agreement between Italy and Libya states that “efforts to stabilize Libya are now more important than ever, and the EU will do its utmost to contribute to that objective.”
However, for refugees, realities on the ground stand to belie the EU’s intentions. Certainly, the willingness of both Italy and Germany to spend significant monetary sums to stem the tide of migrants shows the issue is becoming too taxing to ignore, and potential political transformation — including the election of new populist leaders — may now dictate the next steps for both nations and for the EU as a whole.
