European refugee policy: here we go again

The EU received 1.1 million refugees within a year’s time between early 2015 and 2016.¹ This was widely known and is still called the refugee “crisis” of 2015-16.

In the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the EU received at least four times as many Ukrainian refugees (probably closer to five times) as the number of refugees in the “crisis” year 2015-16. There has been no remotely comparable political freakout over the Ukrainian refugees.

A Sherlock Holmes story from 1892, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” had a dog that didn’t bark that was Sherlock’s key to solving the case. In the story, the fact that the family dog didn’t bark at a time when an unknown perpetrator killed someone was a sign that the dog was very familiar with the killer.

The lack of organized outcry over Ukrainian refugees is not only a sign that it is ridiculous in retrospect to call the 1.1 million refugees of 2015-16 a “crisis.” The “crisis” was that the far-right parties and groups for whom xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia are the far right’s main public-facing set of issues - with the George Soros Jewish conspiracy looming behind it if you listen to the rhetoric carefully (and sometimes you just have to listen not-even-particularly-carefully.)

And, critically, the mainstream parties and in particular the center-right parties largely failed to push back against xenophobic hysteria. The “crisis” was a political crisis, not a crisis of capability or resources. The non-barking-dog of the Ukrainian refugee situation in 2022-23 is the evidence of that.

Note on refugee numbers: the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Agency (UNHCR) compiles extensive statistics on refugees but their reports require careful reading. The Ukrainian refugee numbers, for instance, are based on estimated border crossings both from Ukraine and back to Ukraine. The estimates are based on professional methodology, but they aren’t the same as a census count of national residents. Politicians also practice some chicanery around the number of asylum applications to conjure up exaggerated refugee counts by counting multiple document filings by the same person as part of the total.

A new wave of xenophobic politics?

But with elections in Poland in October and a government in Italy headed by “post”-fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, we’re getting a new round of the Golden Oldies of European xenophobia. Here’s the cover of the current (September 23) issue of the German news magazine Spiegel:

The headlines on Der Spiegel’s cover are: “Can we handle that once again? The German fight over asylum policy.”

Ashley Passmore² notes a similarity older than 2015-16:

The fundamental asylum policy is the same for Germany and every other country in the EU as it is for the United States. It’s called the Refugee Convention of 1951 and its 1967 protocol³ and those are binding international law. When people come to a country asking for asylum, that country is required to process their asylum application in a serious way according to the standards of international law. One common demagogic trick that is used in the US as well as Europe is to call anyone who enter a country without a visa “illegal immigrants.” But once somebody tells a government official in that country they are asking for asylum, their presence is legal there until their asylum claim is adjudicated.

The Refugee Convention was a result of the massive refugee situation after the Second World War, which included the Yalta Agreements that included massive relocations of populations, including ethnic Germans. The displaced persons (Vertriebenen) became a hard core of rightwing voters in postwar Germany. But current international law based on the Refugee Convention was based in major part on the plight of German refugees after the Second World War.

In the current situation, it’s important to note that the EU does not currently consider the five million or so Ukrainian refugees in EU countries asylum-seekers. Until early 2024, they have the designation of “displaced persons” and are automatically considered legal residents.

I consider Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative (ESI) my main guru on refugee issues, especially for Europe. Which for me means I have to take an especially critical view of what he says and not get lazy because he’s almost always right on these issues. In an interview in that issue of Der Spiegel, his first comment quoted is that European politicians have “learned nothing about” refugee issues since 2015. Which is not technically accurate, but it’s also basically right. He goes on to say that for Italy to forcibly return asylum-seekers to Libya as they did back in 2009 would be “an assassination attempt on the Human Rights Convention. A polemical metaphor, but also dead right.

He also comments, “The politics on this issue often comes off as unserious.” No argument there! He continues directly to note that on the outer borders of the EU “the rule of law is at stake” - he means the unwillingness of some EU governments like Italy’s and Greece’s to follow the law - “and because of that, thousands are dying,” mostly by drowning in the Mediterranean Sea.

When he is asked, “What is at stake here?” he replies, “Liberal democracy.”

The Tunesia deal

The Spiegel cover story by Markus Becker et al is pretty weak. It describes the recent deal with Tunesia⁴ as though it was a serious proposal and not the EU publicity stunt it obviously was. The kind of stunt that fuels cynicism instead of building trust in the EU’s ability to handle the issue responsibly.⁵ It was essentially an announcement that the EU and Tunesia had agreed to agree on something sometime in the future.

It includes the all-too-common lazy reporting that sees far-right xenophobia as some kind of force of nature that can be appeased by agreeing with the xenophobes but not refuted. In fact, politicians of the left and the center-right can argue directly against it. But that takes effort. When they find the moxie to do so, even Der Spiegel will find itself reporting what they are saying about how bogus the claims of the far right about the “Great Replacement” and such nonsense really are. The President of Tunesia, Kais Saied, even uses the Great Replacement rhetoric himself for other African refugees that come to Tunesia.

Wolfgang Münchau’s Eurointelligence comments:

Tunisia has well understood how to play the Europeans on migrant flows. The EU acts like a besieged citadel and tends to be defensive. Once in this position, it can be blackmailed, something Tunis has realised. This is the playbook that has been successfully applied before by Morocco and Turkey. And it appears that what we see in [the Italian island of] Lampedusa is the direct result of similar efforts from Tunisia’s government, to encourage migration towards Europe in order to get the Europeans to pay for it.

Kais Saied, Tunesia’s president, is a believer in the great replacement theory, and is keen to preserve the Arab-Muslim nature of his society. His xenophobic views and actions prompted African leaders to organise repatriation operations for migrants who felt in danger. In Europe, few leaders even noticed what was going on, too focussed on finding solutions to their own migration problem.

The deal that Ursula von der Leyen and Giorgia Meloni agreed with Saied in July was heralded as a new blueprint for Europe’s efforts to keep migrants out. But the opposite seems to be happening now.⁶ [my emphasis]

1. See: The Refugee Surge in Europe: Economic Challenges. IMF Staff Discussion Note, January 2016. <https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2016/sdn1602.pdf> (Accessed: 24-09-2023).

2. Passmore, Ashley (2023): X [Twitter] 09/23/2023. <https://x.com/golatschen/status/1705634612381093928?s=20> (Accessed: 2023-24-09).

3. The 1951 Refugee Convention. UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency). The 1951 Refugee Convention. <https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/1951-refugee-convention> (Accessed: 24-09-2023).

4. Liboreiro, Jorge & Genovese, Vincenzo (2023): The contentious EU-Tunisia deal is finally here. But what exactly is in it? Euronews 07/17/2023. <https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/07/17/the-contentious-eu-tunisia-deal-is-finally-here-but-what-exactly-is-in-it> (Accessed: 2023-24-09).

5. Akehurst, Nathan & Rabe, Joe (2023): No, Europe Isn’t Being Swamped by Migrants. Jacobin 09/24/2023. <https://jacobin.com/2023/09/lampedusa-europe-migrants-immigration-borders-tunisia-meloni-von-der-leyden> (Accessed: 2023-25-09).

6. Tunisia's double game. Eurointelligence 09/20//2023. <https://www.eurointelligence.com/> (Accessed: 2023-25-09).