Refugees from Afghanistan may be escaping Taliban rule. Those from Turkey, Iraq and Syria may be fleeing wars. Economic migrants from Tunisia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Algeria and Morocco are determined to reach the EU to escape poverty, earn living wages and build a better life. Yet the EU welcomes them all with razor wire and refugee camps.
Around 1800 kilometres of border walls and fences have been built on the perimeter of the EU in the past decade. The hefty prices include cameras, heat sensors, drones, armed vehicles and guards to patrol and keep the migrants and asylum seekers out.
Serbia is constructing a fence on its border with North Macedonia and plans another to prevent crossings from Bulgaria.
Greece is planning to extend its high-tech 40-kilometre-long, 5-metre-high steel, concrete and barbed wire fence on the border with Turkey by a further 140 kilometres.
Over the past two years Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have fortified their borders with Belarus by erecting fences of steel and barbed wire at a cost of more than half a billion euros.
Hungary spent €1.64bn erecting steel and razor-wire barriers on its borders with Serbia and Croatia.
The new militarised borders are unlikely to stop the refugees. If the fences can’t be scaled with ladders, they can be walked around: the wall on the Polish-Belarusian border maybe 186 kilometres long, but that leaves 232 kilometres of the border unfenced. The barriers do force would-be migrants to take more dangerous routes. The long journeys of asylum seekers include dangerous crossings of seas or rivers, sleeping rough in cold and heat, and abuse by people smugglers. According to the Missing Migrants Project, more than 25,000 people have gone missing in the Mediterranean alone since 2014.
They also permit higher profits for smugglers and traffickers of people.
The war in Ukraine drove four times as many refugees into the EU in 2022 than the conflict in Syria did in 2015-16. In contrast, the status of Ukrainian refugees is regulated.
Over 4.8 million of them, mostly women and children, have registered for the EU’s temporary protection scheme or other national programmes, including over 1m in Poland and Germany, and over 100,000 in the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, the UK, Bulgaria and France. The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive allows Ukrainians to move freely between member states, gives them instant rights to live and work, and offers access to benefits like housing and medical care for up to three years. While migrants are a net cost in the short run, in the long run they are taxpayers. Some will assimilate and settle in the EU, thus helping relieve its worker shortage and demographic crisis.
Why not adopt the same policies for others? Governments can provide asylum-seekers with temporary accommodation, legal pathways to obtain jobs, language classes and modest financial support. Once employed or in school, the young men – most of these migrants are young men – can productively contribute to the host society. The fears that natives lose jobs to migrants are largely overstated, because migrants tend to take less desirable jobs. Moreover, they create new jobs within and outside diaspora communities – in other words, groups of migrants in host countries who have come from the same original culture.
Local diasporas and personal sponsors can be asked to support new migrants and bear some responsibility for their housing, language training and employment. With more support and mentoring available, migrants will be better able to assimilate into the EU culture.
The new Slovenian government is removing a 143-kilometre razor-wired border fence with Croatia, built during the 2015-16 refugee crisis, due to its ineffectiveness. Let’s hope that other countries will follow.
Opinion | Fortress Europe Is Cruel, Misguided, and Doomed to Fail | Common Dreams
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