Migration: hidden Europe

By Richard North - April 21, 2023

I’ve said before that one of the benefits of Brexit is that we’re no longer tied to EU politics and don’t have to spend so much time shadowing them.

Pundits tend to forget that, before we left, the prime minister had to attend at least four European Council meetings each year (mistakenly called “summits”), while the workings of the Council required an endless procession of ministers and officials to Brussels and Luxembourg, all of which absorbed a great deal of political and media bandwidth.

Even then, media coverage of EU affairs was often sporadic and superficial, and far too Whitehall-centric. Little interest was taken unless there was a specific UK angle to it. It wasn’t so much coverage of EU affairs as a narrative based on the more sensational aspects of Britain’s relations with the EU and its member states.

However, it hasn’t taken much for the media to manage its own retreat from “Europe”, so much so that we get massively more reporting from across the Atlantic than from over the Channel, despite the impact of European politics on our daily affairs.

We’re getting perilously close to absorbing Chamberlain’s view of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, which he described as “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”. “Europe” itself is becoming that “faraway country”.

A case in point is the UK’s political focus on the “dinghy people”, and the turmoil over the Migration Bill going through the Westminster parliament. Not for one moment would we learn from the British media that a measure of almost equal contention is currently going through the EU legislative process.

This relates to the EU’s “New Pact on Migration and Asylum” proposed by the Commission on 23 August 2020, with key aspects to be implemented by the Regulation on Asylum and Migration Management.

In pre-Brexit days, I would probably have been all over these instruments like a bad smell, but the goings-on in that “faraway” place no longer excite the same interest. And, despite the Regulation going up for a vote in the European Parliament at Strasbourg yesterday, you would look in vain for any reports in the popular British media.

That said, it was always the case that the proceedings in the European Parliament were poorly reported, and especially in Strasbourg, where few papers would take the trouble or bear the expense of sending a reporter down from Brussels for the week.

But, if we follow some of the more recent twists and turns of the treatment of this Regulation, it appears that it got something of a mauling in Council, where some of the more ambitious Commission proposals were knocked back after objections from member states.

It was then a question – as there usually is when a heavily amended draft gets to the parliament – of whether the MEPs would side with the Commission and reject the amendments or follow the Council line – as well as adding a few amendments of their own.

For those who follow such proceedings, the situation can get quite tense, especially if it then goes to the next “trilogue” stage, where representatives of the Council, the Commission and the Parliament sit down in a smoke-free room in an attempt to thrash out their differences and come up with a common position which will allow the legislation to be finalised.

It has been known at this stage for the Commission to pull its legislation, creating something of a crisis when a flagship measure has to be abandoned or resubmitted in a heavily modified form. Therein has lain many a battle between Council and Commission, with the Parliament most often supporting the integrationalist Commission.

In this case, though, if we are to take the Politico report at face value, MEPs yesterday “gave the green light” to what it terms “a central plank of the EU’s flagship migration package”, describing this as “the latest sign of progress” on what have been long-stalled reforms.

What we are being told, therefore, is that the EP is endorsing “the new rules”, one aim of which is to introduce measure which will speed up the return of migrants who entered Europe without permission and prevent these migrants from traveling to other countries within the EU, in the hope of evading deportation.

Crucially, Politico has it that the EP’s position “strikes a middle ground” on the contentious question of whether countries will be required to take in asylum seekers from fellow EU members.

This latter step is one favoured by so-called “front-line” countries, and especially Italy which is in the throes of passing its own legislation, creating new government-controlled migrant centres to house those waiting on asylum applications and more detention facilities, as well as establish harsher punishment for people smugglers.

It is partly to pre-empt such measures that has brought the Commission into the fray in the first place, and it is the conflict between border and second-line states that has given the measure such a hard time in Council.

The text approved by the EP is a compromise solution which apparently only foresees such “mandatory relocations” in emergency situations, which Brussels would determine, with all other relocations being voluntary. According to MEP Tomas Tobé, this represents a “most important shift”, agreed by a pragmatic parliament which recognises that it needs the agreement of member states.

In passing, MEPs have voted for the use of EU funds to support border protection, which is regarded as “a controversial move” as it inches Brussels closer to directly funding border fences and walls, creating a newer version of festung Europa.

MEPs even came close to passing a separate amendment explicitly calling for the EU to finance border fences. That text narrowly failed despite the support of nearly three-quarters of lawmakers from the EPP group, Parliament’s largest.

It was yesterday though that the EP’s most powerful groups – the EPP, the center-left Socialists and Democrats, and the centrists with Renew – all voted in favour of revised draft. This cleared the way for the support of Italian far-right MEPs aligned with the country’s anti-immigration prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

However, the legislation is very far from out of the woods yet. The EP website tells us that the key vote, approved by 419 MEPs to 126 against, with 30 abstentions, was to enter into interinstitutional negotiations (the so-called “trilogue”) on all the files on which they voted.

This means that the substantive issues or not resolved and that the Commission has not (as yet) accepted the amended draft (which it can do in its response to the votes).

The next move, we are told, is negotiations the Council, expected after the EU justice and home affairs ministers settle on a common position during their meeting on 8/9 June, whence the Commission will have to take a view on whether to accept the final draft.

Progress in such a system is inevitably slow, but all parties hope to have the measures approved before the European elections next year. And then the fun will start, as the migration crisis in Europe shows no sign of abating.

The EU’s Frontex border agency reports that three times as many people sought to reach the European Union across the Mediterranean in the first three months of 2023 compared to the previous year, with 54,000 irregular crossings into the bloc via all routes in the first quarter of the year, up a fifth from 2022.

“The Central Mediterranean route accounts for more than half of all irregular border crossings into the EU”, Frontex says, adding nearly 28,000 people had arrived that way from the start of the year until the end of March, three times as many as in the same period in 2022.

This compares with the 5,000 or so migrants that have crossed the Channel to the UK in much the same period with fears that, as the crisis in Europe intensifies, the pressure on the UK will also increase.

Detached as we are now from EU politics, therefore, what happens in Brussels (and Strasbourg) is still of some considerable relevance to us and, whatever one’s view of the EU, we need its measures to work. It would thus help if the media told us something about them, if for no other reason than to inform the UK debate.