As the UK reels from anti-immigration protests, its neighbours on the continent are driving through a massive overhaul of their migration and asylum rules.
From today, all 27 EU states must follow a single set of rules on border screening and asylum procedures that include expanded detention and fast-track removal powers. The new Pact on Migration and Asylum will be backed by a shared digital database, and the establishment of “return hubs” outside EU borders for failed asylum-seekers. The aim “is to end a patchwork system where someone arriving in Greece faces an entirely different legal reality than someone arriving in Germany”, said Euronews.
It’s unclear what knock-on effect these stricter, uniform EU rules will have on UK asylum claims and irregular arrivals. But some are already warning that it could make Britain more attractive to migrants – just as tensions around immigration rachet up.
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There is “growing recognition” that, to curtail “the rise of hard-right parties” across the continent, “centrists must be able to show that they are responding to their citizens’ concerns about increasingly uncontrolled immigration”, said The Times’ editorial board.
The EU’s new goal is to “reduce irregular arrivals, speed up procedures” and “limit the number of people who fall off the radar” within the bloc, said Politico. Member countries that “receive the most migrants” will also get more support, either in the form or cash “or the relocation of migrants from one country to another”.
But the new deportation rules “will enable what more than 80 human rights organisations call ‘ICE-style’ detection, raids, detention and offshore return practices across Europe”, said geopolitical analyst Shada Islam in The Guardian. One MEP “quite rightly calls the pact a ‘legal arsenal serving a xenophobic ideology’”. All the talk of control and deterrence hides “what the European Network Against Racism calls an ‘imagined whiteness’, a political construct that defines who naturally belongs to Europe and who remains a permanently suspect outsider”.
The impact on the UK “is likely to be uneven”, said the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. It’s possible that, if Europe is rejecting asylum claims more quickly, “some rejected applicants may attempt onward movement toward the UK”. But “stronger” border enforcement in the EU may reduce overall “movement towards the north”.
No, more illegal migrants may now “look to Britain, which has no returns deals and weaker defences”, said James Crisp, Europe editor of The Telegraph. “One such weakness is the soft border with Ireland.” We can’t harden that border without threatening the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit treaties. Keir Starmer could use his much-vaunted EU reset negotiations “to pitch for an EU-wide migrant return deal” but that would mean “agreeing to European Commission migrant quotas”, which “could be politically suicidal”.
What next?
The ambition of the EU pact “is already running into reality”, said EuroNews. Member states are not signing up to anything like their share of asylum-seeker relocations, “with Hungary and Slovakia committing to none.”
For the UK, the “more realistic” approach is to push for greater intelligence sharing and more cooperation on migration, said The Telegraph’s Crisp. Both “Northern Ireland and Ireland are struggling to adapt to the challenges of modern migration”, so if everyone wants to “preserve and protect a common travel area that has lasted more than a century, they need to find a way to ensure its safeguards are still fit for purpose”.
