Pressure builds at the periphery
EU migration patterns challenge the EU, but most member states are against burden-sharing.
For the past three months, European governments have watched in awe as popular uprisings swept through north Africa and the Middle East, toppling long-time leaders in Tunisia and Egypt and touching off a bloody civil war in Libya. But the response from European governments also betrays anxiety over the implications for established patterns of migration. The crumbling of law and order in Tunisia provoked a wave of emigration, which saw more than 20,000 Tunisians making for Italy. Now Libyan refugees look set to follow in great numbers.
On Monday (4 April), Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, flew to Tunis in a bid to persuade Tunisia to take its citizens back. The Italian government complains that Tunisia no longer enforces earlier agreements to control migrants, but even Berlusconi’s offer of €300 million in assistance was not enough to renew the deal. Tunisia’s interim government, which also has to deal with tens of thousands of refugees from Libya, has called on Italy to show “solidarity” with the difficult conditions in the post-revolutionary country.
Solidarity, of course, is the principle invoked by Italy in trying to extract funding and resettlement assistance from its fellow EU member states. Italy received around €80 million from the EU’s solidarity and migration management fund in 2010-11, to assist refugees, strengthen border management and support the return of migrants to the countries that they came from. The European Commission has allowed Italy to use some of the funds for emergency measures. The cost of some Italian naval patrols is now covered by Frontex, the EU’s border control agency.
Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for home affairs, has also begun talks with member states on the possible resettlement of migrants now in Italy and in need of international protection. These migrants are chiefly Eritreans, Ethiopians, Sudanese and Somalis fleeing the violence in Libya; most of the Tunisians who made it to Italy are economic migrants.
Fewer than half of the EU’s 27 member states operate domestic programmes to resettle refugees, but “several”, according to Malmström, have indicated their willingness to admit people from Italy who are in need of international protection.
“I hope that the rest of the member states will also show that solidarity is not a word, it is also something in practice,” Malmström said after returning from Tunisia last week (1 April).
Most member states are, however, unenthusiastic about admitting displaced migrants and are opposed outright to any obligatory burden-sharing. Most oppose the activation of an EU-wide mechanism for temporary protection, set up in 2001 and never yet used – but now requested by Malta. EU interior ministers are to discuss the issue on Monday (11 April).
France has now begun sending intercepted Tunisian migrants back to Italy, prompting grumblings from the Italian government and the EU. The attitude of the other member states has engendered a sense of isolation in Italy and Malta, the EU’s frontline states for migration from north Africa.
Fact File
North african migration
Italy’s migrant crisis pales in comparison with refugees fleeing the unrest in Libya. According to the latest figures from the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, 431,000 people have fled the violence in Libya since it began in February. Of those, 215,000 went to Tunisia, 172,000 to Egypt, and 23,000 to Niger.
At the beginning of this month, between 7,700 and 8,500 were still stranded at the border with Tunisia and around 3,500 at the border with Egypt.
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Tunisia has a population of 10.4 million and a gross domestic product of €6,061.33 per capita. Italy, by contrast, with a population of 61m, has a GDP per capita of €21,306.35.
Asylum applications
According to figures published in March by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, Italy received 10,050 asylum applications last year, and Greece roughly the same number. France had 51,595 and Germany 48,490.
Measured as a share of the population, Italy – with 40 asylum applications per million inhabitants – is not even in the top ten; Cyprus tops the list with 1,320 asylum applications per million inhabitants, followed by Sweden (990) and Belgium (765).
Room for manoeuvre
Niels Frenzen, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who follows trans-Mediterranean migration, says that burden-sharing – in the form of resettlement or financial support – is in principle a good idea. However, he believes the situation in Italy is not, at present, serious enough to warrant an emergency response by the EU. “Italy has the resources to deal with 25,000 or 50,000 people,” he says.
But Anna Triandafyllidou, a professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, who studies migration flows to Europe, says that Italy is less worried about the current wave of arrivals than about the unpredictable situation in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. “We don’t know how the situation will evolve, and migration flows are quite unpredictable,” she says.
An important feature of the more than 20,000 arrivals from Tunisia is that they are concentrated in the tiny island of Lampedusa, closer to Tunisia than to Sicily, which usually has a wintertime population of around 5,000.
Frenzen believes the squalor on Lampedusa serves Berlusconi’s political aims of winning EU assistance and says that the Italian government is “manipulating” the situation.
Ferruccio Pastore, director of the Forum of International and European Research on Immigration in Turin, agrees that the Berlusconi government has been pursuing “an irresponsible strategy of concentrating the problem in Lampedusa”. But, he says, there is also real indecision about what to do with the Tunisians. Granting them temporary protection would send a signal to others who may be poised to make the journey. Prosecuting them for illegally entering Italy was quickly abandoned on grounds of impracticality.
Thousands of Tunisians are now in limbo, awaiting the outcome of the negotiations between the Italian and Tunisian governments. There are others worse off, however: more than 400 African migrants from Libya are feared dead, according to the United Nations, after their vessels disappeared in the Mediterranean.