Disarray of EU migration policy squeezes the space for rational debate

The writer is editorial director and a columnist at Le Monde

Reignited by the dramatic arrival of some 12,000 migrants and asylum seekers on the Italian island of Lampedusa two weeks ago, the debate on immigration is again taking a wrong turn in Europe. It is already providing powerful fuel for far-right parties ahead of the campaign for the European parliament elections next June. 

Pope Francis deliberately jumped into that conversation when he visited Marseille last week. His focus was the Mediterranean, where at least 28,000 lives have been lost since he first went to Lampedusa 10 years ago. Then he had harsh words for what he called the “globalisation of indifference”. Not much has changed. Rescuing migrants at sea, he said, is “a duty of civilisation”.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National party in France, claims she has no issue with the pope’s language, though she confessed that his predecessor Benedict XVI, “who advocated protecting borders”, was more to her liking. The person with whom she crosses swords is Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has appealed to the EU for help. Doesn’t she know that the EU is “immigrationist”, asked Le Pen on French public radio? At least Meloni’s rival on the far right, Matteo Salvini, had, in Le Pen’s view, the right approach: set up a total blockade and turn the boats back to where they came from. 

And so the controversy rages on, pitting an energised far right against embarrassed centre-right or centre-left politicians unable to find the political space for a rational debate on such an explosive issue. With the European Commission’s pact on migration and asylum still in limbo, the situation in Lampedusa has revived tensions between member states, including Germany and Italy, about the relocation of asylum seekers. In Poland, two weeks from a crucial election, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczyński, could not hope for a better opportunity to rally his voters against an “invasion” of migrants that the pro-European opposition, he argues, would be unable to prevent.

Aware of this slippery slope, Ursula von der Leyen, the commission president, rushed to Lampedusa to show support for Meloni. Only two months earlier, both leaders, together with Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, had gone to Tunisia to secure an agreement under which the north African state was to receive a first instalment of €105mn in exchange for curbing illegal emigration. This is the strategy that former German chancellor Angela Merkel used with Turkey in 2016 during an earlier refugee crisis. But this time it has not worked. The unhindered departure of around 200 boats loaded with migrants over two days from the same shores, towards Lampedusa, casts doubts on the Tunisian regime’s good faith.

The timing is unfortunate. Such emergency measures and short-term proposals, prompted by a sense of panic among politicians, obscure a serious and indispensable debate which has finally emerged about the link between immigration, employment and demographics in Europe. 

It is a structural issue. The facts, documented by statistics, are there for everybody to see: migration, constantly increasing since 2000, is a global phenomenon which will not be stopped. It is not limited to Europe. In the US, illegal border crossings have quadrupled since Joe Biden became president; the biggest movements of populations actually happen within Asia and Africa. Europe, meanwhile, is experiencing a demographic decline which is also a long-term trend. With an ageing population, its economic growth is hampered by labour shortages. Most economists agree that it can only be fuelled by productivity gains or immigration. 

So rather than trying to block immigration, a sensible remedy seems to be to regulate and organise it. With nearly 2mn job vacancies and a declining birth rate, Germany’s governing coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and liberals has engaged in a proactive programme of work immigration, on the lines of the Canadian model. Yet it is encountering headwinds from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which is on the rise again.

France, which enjoys a higher fertility rate than its European partners, feels less under pressure. This is a mistake, experts argue: the pace of the demographic decline may be slower but the trend is the same. A bill presented by the government almost a year ago seeks both to legalise undocumented workers employed in sectors with hard-to-fill jobs and to increase the rate of deportation of turned-down asylum seekers. Even this is so divisive that it has not been brought yet to parliament for discussion. Sadly, waiting for the next wave in Lampedusa will only make things worse.