Paradoxes of politics, the center-left government of Germany, made up of social democrats, greens and liberals, has just given a shift to the right on immigration, by establishing strict border controls on the borders with its nine neighbouring countries, and burying the open-door policy towards refugees from the Middle East, Eastern Europe and North Africa, which was established in 2015 by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right government.
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The turnaround shakes up the politics of the entire European Union (EU). And not only because Germany had until now been the main proponent of giving refugees a humanitarian welcome, with the obvious economic gain – which Merkel defended – of obtaining cheap labour to maintain industrial competitiveness. Also because Berlin’s stance meant that it had to accept and legalize, between 2015 and 2023, more than 2 million migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and Africa.which significantly eased the burden on other EU countries, many of which gave refugees the green light to continue into Germany.
“No country in the world can accommodate refugees in an unlimited number of ways,” wrote German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser in a letter last week to the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. Despite German generosity, or perhaps because of it, the pace of asylum applications has continued to rise over the past decade, reaching around 450,000 last year.
No country in the world can accommodate refugees in an unlimited number of ways.
Apart from those already admitted, By April of this year, there were 3.8 million refugees waiting for the government to resolve their immigration status or who were rejected but have not left Germany. According to figures given by Berlin to justify the imposition of border controls (contrary to the philosophy of open internal borders in the EU), it costs the German federal government, its states and municipalities more than 50 billion euros a year to maintain these migrants.
Germany is thus aligning itself with the majority of its neighbours, which are in the process of tightening their immigration policy. In May, 15 EU countries sent a letter to the European Commission asking it to “think outside the box” by agreeing to tighter controls on migrants and encouraging agreements with third countries outside the EU, with the idea of installing detention centres there, similar to what the Italian government of right-wing Giorgia Meloni agreed with Albania.
Behind the abrupt change in policy by the Berlin government is undoubtedly the victory of the far-right party AfD (Alternative for Germany) in the recent regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia. In that region, AfD won 32 percent of the votes, but among those under 30, it got more than 36 percent, all thanks to its anti-immigration rhetoric.
Although this same anti-immigration discourse has been gaining strength for years in several European countries, the first national triumph of the populist right in one of the continent’s largest countries came in 2022, when the Brothers of Italy party (FdI, for its acronym in Italian) won the parliamentary elections in that country, with a rhetoric focused on stopping migrants who arrive by the hundreds of thousands each year on Italian shores.
Together with its centre-right and right-wing allies, FdI was able to form a government, and the presidency of the Council of Ministers (equivalent to the position of prime minister) was taken over by Giorgia Meloni, who within a few months put in place a strategy to reduce the flow of refugees, especially those from Africa.
The Italian prime minister launched what the media soon dubbed the ‘Meloni method’, which involves stopping migrants in the transit country in North Africa before they embark for the Italian peninsula. Meloni concluded a series of agreements, in particular with the government of Tunisia, a country where tens of thousands of refugees from sub-Saharan countries such as Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan arrived, mired in misery and an endless series of civil wars.
With the support of Italy and the European Union, Tunisian authorities have unleashed a harsh crackdown that has discouraged sub-Saharan migrants and, in particular, human trafficking gangs, who earn millions of euros by encouraging migrants to cross the Mediterranean. Dozens of traffickers have been arrested by Tunisia.
The ‘Meloni method’ appears to be successful, at least according to the figures provided by the Ministry of the Interior in Rome: in the first eight months of 2024, the number of refugees arriving by sea to the Italian boot was reduced by 65 percent compared to the same months of 2023, when 114,000 illegal immigrants landed on the coasts of Italy, against 41,000 this year.
Spain, the loser
The ‘paganini’ of the ‘Meloni method’ has been Spain. Migrants who previously settled in Tunisia with the hope of crossing to Italy have now drifted west to countries such as Morocco, from where thousands jump the fence to enter the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, on the southern shore of the Strait of Gibraltar, and from there cross to the Iberian Peninsula. Thousands more leave the coasts of Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco itself, and sail towards the Canary Islands.
Every day, between 200 and 300 refugees have tried to jump the Ceuta fence in recent months. As for the route to the Canary Islands, more than 25,000 migrants have arrived since the beginning of this year. Nearly 900 have drowned or disappeared along the way, either because they are shipwrecked in their canoes or because traffickers who swindle and rob them end up throwing them into the sea.
The blow received by Spain is notable: 66 percent increase in arrivals of illegal migrants by different routes, compared to the previous year. As for the Canary Islands, the increase is 126 percent, while arrivals to Ceuta rose 143 percent. “The pressure is there and will continue to increase because floods of refugees continue to move from all over the Sahel and the sub-Saharan area to the African coasts with the intention of emigrating,” they recently told The Country from Madrid sources from the Spanish Ministry of the Interior.
Fear of the radical right
The rising number of refugees, the attacks by lone Islamists on unarmed civilians, the radical anti-European preaching of some imams and fundamentalists both in mosques and on social media, and the rise in insecurity, which is often unfairly blamed on migrants, have ended up pushing public opinion towards a radicalisation against immigration.
Although it has been a topic of debate for decades, immigration has always found humanitarian justification in centrist and left-wing parties and, in some cases, such as that of Chancellor Merkel, validation from an economic point of view. But now Almost no sector of the political spectrum supports it and, from moderate socialists to the extreme right, everyone calls for stricter controls.
The paradox is that this is happening in a year in which migrant numbers are falling across the EU as a whole, even though they are rising in Spain. According to Frontex, the European border and coast guard agency, irregular entries into the Union fell by 39 percent in the first eight months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. There were also record falls on some routes: 77 percent in the Western Balkans and 64 percent in the Central Mediterranean (especially towards Italy), according to Frontex.
We can no longer tolerate borders that become sieves
These are encouraging figures, but after many years of growth and with the general perception in public opinion that we are facing a huge problem that has gotten out of hand, the moderate left, the centre and the Republican right have decided to react, frightened by the rise, both in the polls and in some elections, of the forces of the extreme right, in Germany as well as in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and other Nordic and Eastern European countries.
In a survey released last weekend by Europe 1, 77 percent of French people are in favour of re-establishing border controls with their European neighbours. The new prime minister, Michel Barnier, declared upon taking office: “We can no longer tolerate borders that become sieves.” Barnier is trying this week to form a government with proposals he made in 2021 when he was a presidential candidate, such as freezing the granting of new asylum and regularization of migrants for a period of three to five years.
He was heavily criticised at the time, even within his own party, the Republicans. But now that he has returned to the subject, a broad spectrum of the political spectrum views these ideas with sympathy. “Barnier knows, and President Emmanuel Macron knows, that if there is no greater control over immigration, the big winner will be Marine Le Pen with her right-wing populist RN party, which promotes a severe hardening on this front,” a diplomatic analyst in Paris told EL TIEMPO.
Given the rise of the German far right and the populist right in France and elsewhere, this hardening of the others is understandable. But it does not address the root of the problem: the dramatic situation of misery and violence in many poor countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which generates hundreds of thousands of refugees every year, encouraged by mafias of migrant traffickers, who fill their pockets thanks to this drama. As long as tragedies like this do not decrease on the planet, immigration will continue and controlling it will become increasingly difficult.
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