Migrants are drowning en masse but louder calls for burden-sharing fall on Europe’s deaf ears

TPPI Analysis

Ahead of the EU council, leaked conclusions are proof that pressure is building for more just and humanitarian policies. But the outcry is unlikely to bring about the burden-sharing that Greece and its southern neighbours are working for.

“I was profoundly touched by what I saw. The images will remain impressed on me for ever”, said José Manuel Barroso, the president of the EU commission after visiting Lampedusa in the wake of the biggest single boat migrants’ disaster in the Mediterranean this year: More than 360 people, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, died when their boat sank off the coast of the Italian island midway between Libya and Italy on October 3. A week later, another tragedy happened when a boat capsized in the Sicilian channel, costing at least 36 migrants their lives.
Since 1988, at least 19,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach a European shore. It is nevertheless the most recent tragedies that are the pretext for the discussion that European government leaders will have on migration during their summit in Brussels Thursday and Friday.
The governments of Greece, Italy and Malta see this as a chance to influence the European-wide asylum policies that put an uneven burden on them – and that have exposed them to heavy criticism of their handling of the migrants that arrive on their shores. They have made a proposal about the migration flows for consideration at the summit, the Malta Independent reports. 
“The Union is doing too little too late”, said  Malta’s deputy prime minister, Louis Grech. He called it unfortunate that so many hundreds of people had to perish for the issue to be brought once again at the forefront of discussion at European level.  He highlighted the need that European action has to be commensurated with the significance of the phenomenon and the magnitude of the challenge.
This cry seems to have been heard by EU’s commissioner for asylum, Cecilia Malmström. She, too, walked between the coffins of drowned men, women and children in Lampedusa recently. “We also need a change of approach towards migration. The recent events have shown that this restrictive approach is not sustainable and that it is now time to move towards more openness and solidarity”, Malmström said, according to European Voice.
As long as immigration policies are a matter of national legislation, however, such comforting noises are not likely to change deeper European realities: That the majority of  EU states are not interested in reforms that would require them to receive more migrants in order to lighten the burden for the countries on Europe’s southern frontier.
“There should be more of a burden sharing in Europe when it comes to dealing with this huge challenge. But I see no signs that this will happen,” said Thorbjoern Jagland, the secretary general of the 47-members Council of Europe, during a visit to Athens this week. “Therefore, I think that it’s important now to see how we can work with those countries that are having the highest burden there”, he said, according to the Washington Post.
Jagland called Europe’s handling of the migrant flow ”a shame”. ”A small group of countries hhave taken the whole burden, and my sympathy goes …..to them”, he said.
The recent mass drownings have been followed by calls for tougher action against the networks of human traffickers. But this is a logic that turns the causality of events upside down. “It is the tightening of border controls that forces migrants to take dangerous routes and that makes them increasingly dependent on human traffickers to get across borders”, claims Hein de Haas, co-director of the International Migration Institute at Oxford university.
Sealing off the coastlines of the Mediterranean is an almost impossible task. According to de Haas, the efforts to block migrants have just forced migrants to rely even more on human traffickers, who lead them to take bigger risks and more dangerous routes to reach Europe’s shores.
”The result was an unintended expansion of the area EU countries have to control in their “fight” against illegal migration. That area now includes the entire North-African coast and various places along the West-African coast, from where refugees set course for the Canary Islands”, writes de Haas in the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. 
Human rights organisations, too, are pushing for a more humanitarian approach on EU’s borders. The Lampedusa drownings should shake everyone’s conscience in Europe, says Human Rights Watch. 
“EU leaders should move beyond expressions of regret and commit to concrete actions to help prevent more deaths of migrants at sea,” said Judith Sunderland, acting deputy Western Europe director. “New proposals for increased monitoring of the Mediterranean need to focus on saving lives, not barring entry to the EU.”
The main principle guiding European-wide handling of immigration is stated in the Dublin II Regulation:
Only one member state is responsible for examining an asylum application, and that state is the country that the applicant first sets foot in. This is supposed to prevent asylum seekers from “shopping around”. Because of their geographical location near Africa and Asia, Europe’s southern countries are receiving the brunt of the arrivals on land – and subsequently are also legally bound to deal with them.
Proposals for new and fairer mechanisms have been tabled. But immigration policies are not decided on EU level. And anti-immigrant sentiments in most European nation states are a heavy influence on governments when they are faced with the demands for greater burden-sharing from their partners in the south. Politicians see that there are few political points to score at home in opening up for more migrants to their country.
On a European level, however, there is a growing choir of voices that call for changes to Dublin II. One is Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament.
“All major immigration regions, like USA, Australia or Canada, have modern laws that allow for legal immigration. The illegal immigration is connected to hopelessness, the legal immigration with hope”, according to Schulz. He thinks that Germany, being EU’s major power, should receive more migrants, and that there should be a mechanism for dividing migrants more evenly between EU countries. In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, he calls for “radical new thinking” where Europeans realize that Europe “has become a continent of immigration”..
Schulz is a German social democrat. But these thoughts are not completely limited to the left. Veronique Houillon, French conservative member of the European Parliament, has similar ideas. She wants a full revision of Dublin II, according to Euractiv.
Houillon calls Dublin II ”the biggest obstacle blocking the establishment of a common asylum policy”.
“All 28 member states need to commit to a solidarity policy on asylum, so that the burden of responsibility won’t fall systematically on those countries whose borders are most exposed”, she said in an interview.
Human rights organisations, as well as the EU commission, have sharply criticized conditions offered to migrants in the reception systems of Italy, Greece and Malta over the years.
Bruce Leimsidor, a professor of asylum law at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, accused the Italian government of “cynically using what happened (outside Lampedusa) to Europeanise the problem”, according to European Voice. 
“I think the Italians are using this to pass the buck,” he said, by getting other member states to admit some of the approximately 30,000 migrants who have landed in Italy this year.
“[Appeals for] burden-sharing out of Greece would have made sense, given that it's a country with a broken economy. Burden-sharing out of Malta makes sense because as a small island it can only receive so many people,” he said. “But burden-sharing out of Italy, a prosperous country of 60 million people, doesn't make any sense whatsoever.”