EU: The tragic toll of a faulty asylum policy

Don’t call it an accident, said Vittorio Longhi in The Guardian (U.K.). Last week’s gruesome shipwreck, in which a 65-foot boat packed unimaginably tight with some 450 refugees sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa, was just “the umpteenth tragedy involving African migrants.” This time, the death toll was high enough—approaching 300 men, women, and children—to get the world’s attention. But smaller such shipwrecks happen many times a year on Europe’s southern border. In the past 25 years, nearly 20,000 people have died trying to get across the Mediterranean, most of them fleeing wars such as those in Libya and Syria. In this case, the migrants were from Eritrea and Somalia, where militant groups run rampant.

It would be comforting to blame these deaths solely on the human traffickers who pack migrants into unseaworthy boats, said Heribert Prantl in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). Yet it is the European Union itself—the winner, ironically enough, of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize—that has turned the Mediterranean into a graveyard. The union has no joint immigration policy. “Each country shunts refugees to the next country, washing its hands of the problem.” All the EU does is fund a border agency, Frontex, with the mandate of keeping refugees from reaching the coast at all costs. If they die, well, Europe “simply accepts the deaths with a fatalistic shrug.” The tears European politicians are now shedding for drowned children “are crocodile tears.”

This tragedy “should wake Europe up,” said Le Monde (France) in an editorial. “Every man for himself” is simply not working. Only a genuine policy for the whole EU can prevent more mass tragedies and ensure that the Continent’s border countries are not unfairly burdened. Yet now, in a time of mass unemployment across Europe, as social benefits are slashed from Portugal to the Baltic states and xenophobic parties are gaining everywhere, asking for shared sacrifice “is more unpopular than ever. Alas!”

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We shouldn’t see Europe’s collective failure as absolving Italy from its particular responsibility, said Stefano Rodotà in La Repubblica (Italy). Our 2002 law known as Bossi-Fini, which criminalizes illegal immigration, has been an utter disaster. It threatens anyone who helps an illegal immigrant come to Italy or gives him shelter with a sentence of up to three years in prison. The effect has been to deter Italian fishermen and those who live on our out-lying islands from assisting foundering boats, since any rescuer “runs the risk of being indicted.”

Ultimately, the solution to the migration problem lies beyond Europe’s borders, said Joan Smith in The Independent (U.K.). European countries once struck deals with dictators like Muammar al-Qaddafi to do the dirty work of keeping Africans in Africa. The Arab Spring has toppled those dictators, but “thousands of desperate souls” still head for Europe every year. “The long-term answer is to cut the huge disparity in living standards that is driving mass migration.” And that will not come easily.