Only 65,000 refugees have been resettled in the EU since 2015. Europe's governments will do anything to keep asylum-seekers away
contrast. In 2015 thousands of irregular migrants and asylum-seekers entered Hungary, en route to Germany. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, built a fence along the country’s southern border to stop them. The European Commission chided Mr Orban. “We have only just torn down walls in Europe; we should not be putting them up,” tutted a flack for the European Commission. Fast forward five years, and ugly scenes erupted at the’s borders once again.
Brutality at the border is now a central feature of European migration policy. The misery is no coincidence. Anyone who makes it to Greece faces dreadful conditions. On the Greek island of Lesbos 20,000 people are stuck in a camp designed for a seventh of that number. The Greek government is building new facilities, but these will come with strict rules on when asylum-seekers may come and go.
Morality still sometimes rears its head. European leaders are not always comfortable with their choice. They grab policy figleaves to hide their shame whenever possible. Leaders from a handful of states this month cooked up a scheme to relocate minors abandoned in miserable camps on Greek islands. Legally, refugee status has nothing to do with virtue. Being a refugee is not about the content of your character but the misery of your circumstance.
Though some wrestle with the hardline turn, most officials are happy to justify it. Ugly scenes at the frontier are a necessary evil for convenience in the interior, goes one argument. Border control is never pretty. A strong external border is required if Europeans are to zip between Schengen countries with nary a flick of a passport. The situation in 2015, when the’s frontier was patently not secure, was untenable.
The most persuasive justification for all this is that hard borders may allow political space for softer measures, such as resettling refugees directly from trouble spots. Unfortunately, that is not how it seems to be working: only 65,000 refugees have been resettled in thesince 2015. Another possible excuse is that a second refugee crisis might help far-right parties win elections, just as the first one helped trigger Brexit and the rise of Italy’s Matteo Salvini.
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