“They came with chainsaws and cleared that whole area,” said Jamal, a 24-year-old Sudanese refugee who fled war in Darfur, gesturing at the mass of sodden tree stumps that once were a verdant forest on the outskirts of Calais. “We know they don’t want us here. But we don’t want to be here either.”

Most of the makeshift refugee campsites that remain in Calais lie barren after municipal teams from the French port city cut hundreds of trees down last month. “Now it’s a jungle without trees,” added Jamal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions from the authorities. “Everything in our lives is getting more difficult.”

Jamal is referring to the ramshackle Calais “Jungle”, which at its peak in 2015 became a semi-permanent slum city, housing 12,000 asylum seekers as men, women, and children fled from war and persecution en masse to Europe. But following its destruction in October 2016, and subsequent efforts to prevent “fixation points” from forming, the camps are now a tenth of the size and scattered into fragments across the city and its suburbs.

Humanitarian charities told VICE World News on a recent visit that the conditions faced by refugees in northern France are now “more precarious than ever”. People in Calais want to reach the UK before strict Brexit policies come into play, with many seeing the UK as providing better living conditions than those afforded in the rest of Europe. But the rise of anti-immigration politics, blocks on crucial NGO support, and uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and Brexit is creating a hostile atmosphere that is pushing people to the edge – and some beyond it to their deaths.

“The situation is catastrophic,” said Siloé Medriane, coordinator for Utopia56, French nonprofit supporting refugees in Calais. “They are all across the city and the outskirts. It’s a lot more difficult for us to help them because there is no longer one place with thousands of refugees but several with hundreds. For them, it’s just about survival now.”

According to Medriane, curbs imposed by the French state against aid for refugees have caused the situation to decline further. Last month large rocks were installed to block roads near the historic Fort Nieulay, an area close to the entrance of the Eurotunnel where charities provide food and support to refugees. La Vie Active, the only charity mandated by the state, has stopped distributing meals at the location, citing a lack of need. Since September, charities have also been banned from distributing food in Calais city centre.

Human Rights Observers (HRO), which monitors the almost daily evictions of refugee campsites in Calais and Grand-Synthe, near to Dunkirk, said it received 30 fines worth nearly €4,000 (about £3,500) for carrying out its work during lockdown in November and December. “Police will often use excessive force against us while we are carrying out our work,” said Isabella Anderson, a field coordinator for HRO. “We’re always pushed and shoved.”

For some of those working in Calais, the moves to hinder humanitarian aid are proof of France’s failure to deal with the refugee crisis. “The outcome of policy is that people are in a constant state of precarity,” said Alex McDonald, programmes manager in France for Collective Aid, which supports rough sleepers in Calais. “It’s very clear that refugees aren’t welcome. But the state doesn’t have a solution that works.”

According to McDonald, this hostility extends far beyond targeting NGO work and pervades the daily experience of refugees – through evictions, confiscation of possessions, and arbitrary identity checks in the street. Those checks took a more sinister turn earlier this month in Grande-Synthe, when several refugees, including those working as volunteers for a charity, were prevented from entering a supermarket.

In a statement, the prefecture said the checks were in “strict compliance with the law”. But Akim Toualbia, president of the group Solidarity Border, which provides nightly support to refugees in Dunkirk, insists the incident was discrimination. “They let everyone with white skin past, and nobody else could enter. Even volunteers that were asylum seekers were ID’d and stopped,” he said.

Ahmed, a 17-year-old refugee from Algeria, who has been in France since May, said police have also racially abused him. “Once the police told me ‘go back to your country!’” he said. “I just want for people to have a basic respect for my dignity. I haven’t stolen, I’m not a criminal and I came here with a visa. We are humans, we need to survive. Their strategy is to weaken us,” said Ahmed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Recent freezing temperatures have led to even tougher conditions outdoors. Collective Aid said it had given out 80 hypothermia kits since November and Utopia 56 has accompanied three refugees suffering from hypothermia to the hospital. But France’s Plan Grand Froid, a policy that requires all rough sleepers to be housed by the state in certain conditions, has not been activated so far this winter despite snow this weekend.

Juliette Delaplace of Secours Catholique, which runs the only permanent centre in Calais city centre for refugees, said that the government’s treatment of refugees is part of an “inefficient and inhuman politics” that has worsened since Gérald Darmanin became France’s Minister of the Interior in July 2020. “It’s been years that there has been this politics of repression, violence and harassment and it doesn’t work,” she said. “We consider it illegal and we demand that shelter be offered in Calais.”

This perfect storm is pushing refugees into even more perilous journeys to the UK, often with ramshackle, barely seaworthy boats provided by traffickers rather than the overland routes once preferred. In 2020, there were more than 9,500 attempts to cross the Channel, according to France’s maritime prefecture – four times more than in 2019. On Saturday, another 36 refugees reached the UK in two boats.

But other attempts have ended in tragedy. On the 19th of August, one Sudanese refugee, who had his claim for asylum in France refused, drowned while trying to cross the Channel using an inflatable dinghy with shovels for oars. On the 18th of October, a 32-year-old Iranian named Behzad Bagheri-Parvin washed up dead on a beach close to Calais. On the 27th of October, a family of Iranian Kurds, including three children, died after their dinghy capsized off the coast of Dunkirk. On the 20th of November, Mohammad Khamis, a 20-year-old Sudanese was crushed by a lorry in Calais, fleeing police that had fired teargas.

“It’s the police that killed him,” said Medriane of Utopia56, who had personally worked with Khamis. “But on the documents, you would never see that written. He died because he was crushed by a lorry, but he was being chased by the police, there was gas everywhere. He ran, to try to escape the police. He was very young. But nothing will change. It wasn’t the first death and it won’t be the last, unfortunately.”

Despite the grim events, Mustafa, another 20-year-old refugee from Sudan, who had met Khamis in Calais, is undeterred. “Yes, I saw him around here,” said Mustafa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Of course it’s dangerous, but I can’t live here. It’s very difficult here. The French police are totally violent. When it’s dark, and the cameras can’t see they attack you and use tasers.”

Mustafa, who has been in Calais for six months, still hopes to cross to the UK but fears that Brexit may thwart him. “I don’t know about the asylum system after Brexit,” he said. “It’s a big question mark. I don’t know if I will be accepted.”

The full impact of Brexit remains to be seen but there are fears it will cause a tightening of asylum policy. The Home Office has yet to explain if unaccompanied minors will be allowed to rejoin their families in the UK post-Brexit or how it will return people to EU countries now the UK no longer follows the Dublin Regulation, a European Union law that states refugees must apply for asylum at the first country they enter in Europe.

“I’m afraid that in the future refugees won’t even be able to have a real legal case heard after Brexit,” said Imogen Hardman, operations coordinator for Care4Calais in Calais. “I’m concerned about what will happen if they are caught trying to cross now. For me, it’s about what the UK government can get away with doing and whether the refugees will still properly be able to have their asylum cases heard.”

One of the few certainties is that border policing in northern France will be as strong as ever. In November, the UK and France announced a deal to double the number of French police patrolling the coast, with an enhanced package of surveillance technology, including drones, radar equipment, cameras, and optronic binoculars. Under Le Touquet agreement, which allows British border checks to be carried out in France and vice versa, the UK paid £150 million between 2015 and 2019.

With policies tested in Calais likely to have implications across the continent, those future developments will be closely watched. “This area is a zone of experimentation in France, but also within Europe, to test new security policies,” said Ellen Ackroyd, field manager for northern France at Help Refugees. “Whatever is not contested, you can be assured that model will probably be adopted in other places.”

The French Interior Ministry and prefecture of Pas-de-Calais did not respond to requests for comment.

Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akd45g/the-situation-is-catastrophic-inside-frances-brutal-evictions-of-refugees

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The post The New EU Migration and Asylum Package: Breakthrough or Admission of Defeat? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Perhaps no other phrase uttered during Angela Merkel’s long chancellorship has made such an impact. The words “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”) were meant to express confidence in the face of a huge, self-imposed task. In a matter of a few weeks, 10,000 people had come to Germany, mostly via what became known as the Balkan route. Many of them, initially stuck in Hungary. The majority came from Syria, but others from North Africa, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Merkel let them enter Germany even though other EU member states were officially responsible for them under the Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that asylum-seekers must be registered in the first safe EU country they enter. Instead, Germany allowed people to cross the border first and have their asylum claims checked later.

Nearly half a million people applied for asylum in Germany in 2015, and another 750,000 the following year. The interior minister at the time, Thomas de Maiziere, admitted to public broadcaster ARD in mid-August this year that there had been “moments when control was lost.” His successor, Horst Seehofer, then premier of Bavaria, once called the situation in 2015 a “reign of injustice.”

Merkel’s political opposition voiced very different opinions about her actions, at least in retrospect. The Greens’ Irene Mihalic said, “It was right for the chancellor not to close the borders back then. The alternative would have been chaotic conditions in the heart of Europe with an incalculable potential for conflict.”

Refugees were made to wait for days to register with German authorities

Although Lars Castellucci, a parliamentarian for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), largely agreed with this view, he tempered it with some criticism: Germany should have consulted European partners more. “That causes us enormous difficulties even today,” he said.

Gottfried Curio of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is of course more vehement in his objections. “The realistic and responsible thing to do would have been to adhere to the law … If the people had been turned away from the outset, fewer of them would have set out on the journey and fewer would have drowned in the Mediterranean.”

Read more: Are Germany and the EU prepared for a new influx of refugees?

Approval and skepticism

Merkel’s memorable phrase put a lot of people on her side. Outside Germany, there was much approval for Merkel’s decision. The New York Times wrote on September 5, 2015, that Germany had “held out an open hand” to refugees. The broadcaster Al-Jazeera reported that “Germany has opened its doors and borders to all those searching for refuge and a safe haven.”

But some skeptics believed from the start that Germany was taking on more than it could handle. Others asked what exactly had to be done and whether the country should feel responsible for so many people from different cultures. Merkel’s decision divided the nation.

Castellucci, whose SPD party, as junior coalition partner, shared responsibility for implementing Merkel’s policy, would have liked the chancellor to have presented a more detailed plan: “She definitely should have said how we can do it and who has to do it. And then there should have been discussions about it in society,” he told DW. “That might have avoided the way supporters and opponents of our policy were so irreconcilably at odds with one another, to the benefit of populists.”

Germany’s “welcome culture” lasted several months after Merkel’s statement

The initial “welcome culture” that Merkel advocated dissipated on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, when women were assaulted by migrants in Cologne’s main railway station. Even before this, there were numerous xenophobic attacks on refugee shelters, showing how the mood in parts of the country was tipping.

The AfD profited from the discontent, seeing large increases in voter support in several state elections before becoming the Bundestag’s biggest opposition party in federal elections in 2017.

Merkel has always stood by her decision of 2015, but told a conference of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in December 2016 that a situation like the one in late summer 2015 “can, should and must not be repeated.” The German government introduced a more restrictive asylum policy, and from 2016, the number of asylum-seekers dropped mainly because countries along the Balkan route made it increasingly difficult for people to cross their borders.

Read more: Migrants stuck on EU doorstep: What is Germany doing?

Progress on integration

How well have those new arrivals been integrated in Germany? Migrants are still much less likely to have a job than the average German. Only around half the people who have come to Germany since 2013 have paid employment, according to a 2020 study by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The generally upward trend is also now being canceled out by the coronavirus pandemic as many of those who fled their home countries for Germany are being laid off, the study found.

The difficulties on the job market also have an effect on criminality. Immigrants are disproportionately involved in violent crime including murder, manslaughter, assault and rape. But this is partly because many of the immigrants are young men who tend to be more frequently guilty of such offenses.

Bavarian State Premier Horst Seehofer remained critical of Merkel’s position, but stayed in government, and was eventually elevated to Federal Interior Minister

CDU domestic policy spokesperson Patrick Sensburg said a distinction must be made between asylum-seekers and those who want to come to Germany to work.

“For me, protection for refugees is primarily temporary protection,” he said. “Anyone wanting to come here to live and work on a permanent basis has other means of doing so if he or she has the necessary qualifications and accepts our values.”

German society remains divided over immigration policy. Around 60% of Germans believe that the country can cope well with the refugees while 40% believe the opposite. Political scientist Herfried Münkler said 2015 had “exposed a rift in German society” and radicalized politics. “The tendency towards the political center that we saw before came to an end,” he said.

Five years after Merkel’s famous statement, has German society really shown that it could cope with the challenge? Former Interior Minister de Maiziere said he feels that it has at least made significant progress. His party colleague Sensburg said Germany has “mastered the 2015 refugee crisis well, all in all.”

Irene Mihalic from the Green Party said she sees the task as still unfinished: “Integration doesn’t happen overnight, and we will keep having to work on it at all levels. But I am convinced that immigration is a great opportunity for Germany, particularly with regard to the labor market and demographic developments,” she says.

Studies by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) came to similar conclusions. They found Germany is on the way to success, while also pointing out that considerably more effort must still be made by both those who have sought refuge in Germany  and those who have offered it to them.

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-five-years-after-the-refugee-crisis-whats-been-achieved/a-54660166

The post Germany: Five years after the refugee crisis, what’s been achieved? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The measures announced by President Emmanuel Macron of France on Wednesday included tightening access to health services for new asylum seekers.Credit…Pool photo by Jason Lee

PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron of France tried to seize control of the issue of immigration on Wednesday, as his government announced steps to make the country less attractive to migrants while cracking open the door to skilled foreign workers.

The combined moves were a bid by Mr. Macron to wrest the issue from his main political challengers, the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen, which for years has skillfully used immigration in its political ascent.

With critical municipal elections just months away, Mr. Macron has shifted right and begun talking tough on immigration, especially on the perceived abuses of France’s generous social welfare system, hoping to keep Ms. Le Pen’s party, formerly known as the National Front, at bay.

Among Mr. Macron’s new get-tough measures is a provision that asylum seekers would have to wait three months before qualifying for non-urgent health care.

A makeshift migrant camp on the outskirts of Paris early this year.Credit…Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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But the government also announced that starting next year, it would for the first time establish a system of annual quotas to grant visas to skilled immigrants looking to enter France.

“We want to regain control over our immigration policy,” Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said.

While that may have been the intention, the announcement did as much to underline the political peril the issue presents for Mr. Macron, a centrist whose shape-shifting has often dissatisfied French voters across the political spectrum.

The measures drew immediate criticism from both the right, who said they didn’t go far enough and the left, who said Mr. Macron was unnecessarily endangering the already vulnerable population of asylum seekers for political ends.

In recent weeks, Mr. Macron — who as a presidential candidate lauded Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for saving Europe’s “collective dignity” through her pro-migrant policies during the height of the crisis in 2015 — had been setting the stage for Wednesday’s announcement.

In a long interview on the presidential plane with a right-wing magazine, “Valeurs Actuelles,” Mr. Macron recently said the authorities had been lax in expelling those who had entered France illegally.

“My goal is to throw out everybody who has no reason to be here,” he said.

In an interview on Radio France, Ms. Le Pen said that the government was addressing the issue of immigration simply because of the municipal elections, scheduled for March. She said the measures would be ineffective in reining in illegal immigration.

“They’re talking about immigration because they think it’s enough to talk about immigration to the French to make them believe that solutions are being brought,” Ms. Le Pen said.

Nearly 124,000 people requested asylum in France last year, a record number and an increase of 23 percent from the previous year. The requests came mainly from Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan and France’s former African colonies, but also from Albania and Georgia, two countries that France says respect human rights.

The increase in asylum seekers has exacerbated housing problems, overwhelming shelters established by the government.

In Paris and other cities, groups of migrants, often numbering in the hundreds, have set up tent cities or are squatting in unused buildings. Nearly 3,000 are estimated to be living on the streets in northern Paris and an adjoining suburb.

The evacuation of a migrant camp in northern France in September.Credit…Francois Lo Presti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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The authorities have regularly expelled migrants from specific sites, leading them to move elsewhere, in a continuing cat-and-mouse game.

Those expulsions have increased with the government’s tougher line on immigration, according to advocates for the rights of immigrants.

“Since last summer, the government has been really pushing to close down these camps without offering any solution for those who find themselves on the street, said Yann Manzi, the president of Utopia 56, a group that assists migrants in Paris.

The number of asylum seekers in France has risen, migrant support groups say, as part of the continuing effects of the migrant crisis that reached a peak in 2015.

According to the European Union law governing the process, known as the Dublin Regulation, applicants must request asylum in the first country they set foot in, and remain there. But many end up moving to a second country. Those who have gravitated to France are called “Dublinés,” in reference to the law.

Nations like Italy and Greece argue that the system presents an unfair burden on them. But France, Germany, and others have stepped up efforts to send migrants back where they landed.

With countries unable or unwilling to rapidly process applications, migrants have been stuck in limbo for years, or ended up wandering inside Europe, said Pierre Henry, the director of France Terre d’Asile, a migrants rights group.

“You have 200,000 to 250,000 people who are being sent back and forth in Europe like Ping-Pong balls,’’ Mr. Henry said.

Mr. Macron’s government has increasingly adopted arguments that some migrants are exploiting France’s welcome of asylum seekers, who can quickly qualify for health care and other benefits.

A beach near Calais, a northern French port city that has been a flashpoint over immigration.Credit…Benoit Tessier/Reuters

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His government has accused some asylum seekers of engaging in what it describes as “medical tourism” by seeking treatment for serious medical conditions in French hospitals.

Mr. Macron said that reforms were necessary so that France “shouldn’t be too attractive a country” for asylum seekers.

Last year, nearly 320,000 people without legal status benefited from a government health care program reserved for them — a situation that has long angered France’s right.

Migrant rights groups said that tightening access to health care would harm most legitimate asylum seekers.

“Many of them suffer from real mental and physical problems, given the very difficult journeys they’ve had,” said Bruno Morel, the director of Emmaus Solidarité, a migrant rights group. “The government says if we welcome migrants too well, more will come. That’s totally false. That just feeds populism.”

Mr. Macron has been criticized for representing the interests of France’s economic elite, especially during the Yellow Vest protests that roiled the country for months starting in October of last year.

In explaining his focus on immigration, Mr. Macron told members of his party, La République en Marche, that they must avoid becoming a party of the “bourgeois.” The bourgeois, he said, lived in areas with few immigrants and did not encounter immigration in their daily lives.

It is France’s working classes that live with the difficulties of immigration, he said, and “have thus migrated to the far right.”

Migrants in France

Hundreds of Undocumented Migrants Occupy Panthéon Monument in Paris – July 12, 2019

Macron Aims to Keep Migrants, and Far Right, at Bay in France – Feb. 22, 2018

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Norimitsu Onishi is a foreign correspondent on the International Desk, covering France out of the Paris bureau. He previously served as bureau chief for The Times in Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo and Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/world/europe/france-macron-immigration.html

[Disclaimer]

The post France Announces Tough New Measures on Immigration first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Victoria Macchi and Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this report.

NEW YORK – U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to dramatically curtail claims for asylum in the United States — cheered by the administration’s supporters and condemned by immigration rights advocates — is unprecedented on America’s southern border but not unique on the world stage.

Europe, in particular, has imposed restrictive rules for asylum-seekers that predate this year’s flurry of activity in the United States.

Recent months have brought sweeping changes in how the U.S. handles asylum claims at the border. Those changes are expected to preclude asylum for the vast majority who seek it.

Washington has forged pacts with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, designating them as asylum destinations where claims are to be filed before protection is sought in the U.S. The accords work hand-in-hand with a Trump administration policy, temporarily greenlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court, stipulating that non-Mexicans must seek asylum in a third country they transited on route to the U.S. border before filing a claim in the U.S.

The result, according to critics, is a de facto asylum ban that forces people to file claims in some of the most impoverished and violent nations in the Americas.

“No one is seeking protection in countries from which everyone is fleeing,” said Helena Olea, an international human rights lawyer, and Alianza Americas human rights adviser.

President Donald Trump addresses a campaign rally, Oct. 10, 2019, in Minneapolis.

For his part, Trump on Thursday proudly touted his immigration agenda at a political rally in Minnesota, saying, “My administration is taking historic action to secure the border. We have reduced illegal border crossings by over 60% since May, and we are building the wall [between the United States and Mexico] faster than anyone ever anticipated it could be built.”

For all the attention the White House’s border initiatives have drawn, the United States is not alone in forging regional asylum deals in which nations share responsibility for processing claims filed by people fleeing persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations.

The “safe third” model

It has been 29 years since the European Union adopted its first “safe third country” asylum initiative, known as the Dublin Regulation. In its present-day form, any migrant who requests asylum at an E.U. country’s borders, having entered from another E.U. country (or Norway or Switzerland), is refused entry.

The procedure was intended to share the burden of asylum-seekers among nations party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

As the Syrian refugee crisis has worn on, leaders representing some of the involved nations have grown weary of burden-sharing responsibilities. Denmark, a member of the E.U., declined to participate in the Malta Agreement, a stop-gap effort to expedite screenings and redistribute migrants rescued in the Mediterranean Sea. The pact was signed by Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and Malta in September.

On Oct. 4, Italy signed a decree designating 13 non-E.U. countries across West Africa and Eastern Europe as “safe countries of origin.”  The move gave Italy greater discretion to examine and reject asylum claims from those countries.

The U.S., meanwhile, has had a “safe third country” agreement in place since 2004 — with its northern neighbor, Canada. Like its recently signed agreements with Central American countries, the U.S.-Canada pact requires asylum-seekers who transit through either country to seek protection there first, regardless of their preference for an ultimate destination.

Economic migrants

In its interim final rule — the basis for the current U.S. asylum ban — the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) questioned whether some “aliens genuinely fear persecution or torture, or are simply economic migrants seeking to exploit our overburdened immigration system.”

Trump has long said that U.S. immigration law contains loopholes for economic migrants.

That sentiment, too, has reverberated among right-wing voters in Europe opposed to accepting asylum-seekers in their countries. In January, Italy’s then-Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said his country had taken in “too many fake refugees.”

Some see a more complicated dynamic — “mixed flows” of people fleeing both violence and economic distress — at a time of heightened migration overall.

“In the U.S. now, and Europe during their crisis, the entire human rights apparatuses were never designed to actually deal with that level of people,” said Cristobal Ramón, immigration project senior policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “[They] crumbled under the weight of all this.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) New York director, Ninette Kelley, says the agency has been working on a “holistic approach” with partners in the Central American region to address asylum capacity.

“We need to invest in trying to help the governments get control of their countries and impose law and security in accordance with human rights principles and, at the same time, reinforce asylum systems along routes so that we don’t see this mass exodus in an unmanageable way for any country,” said Kelly.

Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan reacts while protesters interrupt his remarks at the Migration Policy Institute annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference in Washington, Oct. 7, 2019.

Funding asylum pacts

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, planned efforts to increase regional asylum capacity include $47 million in aid to Guatemala through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

“The goal is to build the shared capacity to extend asylum protections in partner countries in the region and ensure that those who need protection from persecution for political, racial, religious, or social group membership can seek them as close to home as possible, without putting themselves or their family in the hands of dangerous smugglers,” Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan wrote in prepared remarks for an immigration policy conference that was interrupted by protesters.

According to UNHCR’s 2018 Global Trends Report, 3.5 million people were awaiting decisions on their asylum applications by the end of 2018, while an additional 1.7 million had submitted new claims.

The U.S. was the world’s largest recipient of new individual applications (254,300). Peru, with a population one-tenth the size of the U.S., received 192,500 claims, followed by Germany (161,900), France (114,500), and Turkey (83,800), according to UNHCR.

A policeman observes the scene as immigrants who arrived aboard a cargo ship from Turkey queue for meals in a basketball arena where they have been given temporary shelter in the town of Ierapetra, Crete, Nov. 28, 2014.

In Turkey — where 1 in 22 people is a refugee — a March 2016 deal with the European Union determined that Syrian refugees on the Greek Islands could be returned to Turkey. In exchange, Europe would accept Syrian asylum-seekers already in Turkey.

Like the U.S.-Central American pacts, human rights activists have decried the E.U.-Turkey deal. Human Rights Watch reported in July that Turkish officials have been forcibly returning Syrian asylum-seekers to Syria, under the pretense of voluntary return.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Ramón says the U.S. should learn from the experiences of other nations that have sought to redirect flows of asylum-seekers.

“If there isn’t any capacity [in Central American nations], they [asylum-seekers] will likely just look at the situation, and say, ‘You know what? I’m not being processed. I’m going to try to go back to the United States,’ or in some cases, [they] may go back home,” Ramón said.

Source: https://www.voanews.com/usa/immigration/us-not-alone-restricting-asylum-eligibility

The post US Not Alone in Restricting Asylum Eligibility first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Valletta (AFP) – Interior ministers from four EU countries meet Monday in Malta to try to work out an automatic system to determine which countries will welcome migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean.

The ministers from France, Germany, Italy, and Malta hope to end the long, drawn-out negotiations that have seen vulnerable asylum seekers including babies stranded at sea, sometimes for weeks.

They take place ahead of a European summit in October in Luxembourg.

The mooted automatic distribution system would only be a temporary solution until the current system, the “Dublin regulation”, can be revised.

Its critics have long argued that it places an unfair burden on the Mediterranean frontier countries Italy, Malta, Greece, and Spain.

Italy’s new, pro-EU government has moved quickly to turn the page on the hardline anti-migrant policies pursued by former far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini, who closed the ports to those rescued.

A successful European migrant agreement would be a blow to Salvini, showing that cooperation gets better results than confrontation.

After a meeting last week, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and French President Emmanuel Macron both called for a reform of Europe’s “ineffective” policy.

Countries that did not volunteer to take migrants should face financial penalties, they argued.

– Rotation? –

In a sign of how things have changed over the last few weeks, Italy late Sunday authorized charity rescue vessel the Ocean Viking to disembark its 182 people rescued at sea in Messina, Sicily.

The Italian decision “puts an end to five days of unnecessary suffering,” said charities SOS Mediterranee and Doctors without Borders (MSF) which operate the ship.

“It is unacceptable that the people who have survived this very dangerous crossing… are stranded at sea for days and sometimes weeks before finding a Place of Safety,” the ship’s search and rescue coordinator Nicola Stalla said.

“It is urgent that a European agreement is found to put an end to these repeated stand-offs,” he said in a statement.

At an informal meeting of foreign and interior ministers in Paris in June, 15 countries agreed to the creation of a “European Solidarity Mechanism”.

Croatia, Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and Portugal said they would “actively” take part.

But Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, rejected redistribution quotas in comments made during a visit to Rome on Saturday.

Monday’s meeting in Malta will try to decide where those rescued can be relocated — and whether that covers just those fleeing war and persecution, or economic migrants too.

France and Germany are reportedly willing to receive 25 percent of people plucked from vessels in the Mediterranean.

But they are not keen on Italy’s idea for migrants to be sent to countries across southern Europe on a rotation basis.

Italy could take 10 percent of new arrivals — a lower proportion because it has already hosted tens of thousands of new arrivals.

The number of migrants arriving in Europe via the Mediterranean has dropped sharply in recent years. The UN’s refugee body recorded nearly 115,000 arrivals in 2018, down from 170,000 in 2017 and over one million in 2015.

Malta’s Interior Minister Michael Farrugia on Sunday bemoaned the lack of European solidarity when it comes to migrants, despite having “supported one another when faced with harsh economic realities.

“If this doesn’t change, then I don’t see the migration issue being solved,” he told the Times of Malta. “Unfortunately, I see it becoming a divisive issue between member states in the years to come.”

European migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos will also attend the Malta talks, as will Finland’s interior minister — as they hold the EU presidency.

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/eu-ministers-malta-thrash-migrant-system-030217177.html

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When German Federal Police officers talk about what it’s like to accompany a migrant on a deportation flight, it’s easy to feel a sense of shame for this country’s immigration apparatus. The officers, who are regularly attacked on the job, share how they’re often spit on with blood or pelted with feces. A meager 1.20 euros ($1.36) a day is meant to offset the cost of general wear and tear for the suits they are expected to buy themselves — and have to wear during deportation flights. Their employer will only pay for laundering “if the clothing has been particularly dirtied (blood/saliva/urine) while at work.”

There’s more: The cost of on-board meals is taken out of the officers’ daily travel allowances, which are already negligible. After the officers return from, say, an exhausting 72-hour trip to Asia or Africa, they must then painstakingly log their work hours. Several people told DER SPIEGEL the hours they spent flying home weren’t even counted as “work time,” since their superiors considered them to be “travel time.” Sometimes the officers are forced to put in 20 to 30-hour shifts before even seeing a cheap hotel bed. “When we’re in Afghanistan, standing around waiting for the next thing to happen, sometimes they’ll deduct that time from my hours as a break,” says one Federal Police officer.

The officers are also required to pay up front for costs incurred while working abroad — “and then I wait weeks until the government reimburses me.” When officers return from a deportation flight, beset by jet lag, they’re often expected to report for normal duty the next day. That’s because there is no such thing as extra time off due to jet lag in the service regulations. On top of that, escorting officers invariably have trouble getting their full shift bonuses — since they aren’t home and can’t take part in rotating schedules. In the end, they earn less money than they might have if they had simply stayed in Germany. That’s the reality, though most people rarely hear about it.

The trials of civil servants who stick their necks out for Germany and keep its constitutional democracy running smoothly often go unnoticed, especially amid the appalling disorganization surrounding deportations. That Germany’s asylum landscape is full of holes is nothing new, but it’s becoming more clear just how deficient the system is. After the mass, uncontrolled migration of 2015 and 2016, it will take years for a sense of normality and order to set in.

Low-Hanging Fruit

But instead of getting down to brass tacks and working together to establish a coherent system of asylum laws, immigration laws and orderly deportations that works for everyone, things have only gotten more chaotic and confused. And so the problem remains among the lowest hanging fruit for populist politicians and right-leaning media to get worked up about. When acts of violence are perpetrated by foreigners, Germany’s largest tabloid asks, “How many more victims do there have to be?”

In Germany, there are two diametrically opposed camps, each of which holds the other in the absolute lowest regard. On the one side, there are people led by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who ominously warn of a “population exchange” ushered in by dark forces. On the other side are their ideological opposites, those who eschew xenophobia and national borders and want all government policy to follow strict moral codes. Between these two extremes — “all foreigners out” vs. “all foreigners in” — are Germany’s political parties, which are all too happy to exploit this black-and-white mentality for their own electoral gains.

The reality of the situation is often drowned out by all the clamor. Germany’s federal and state governments and its administrative bodies don’t seem to have learned anything from the exodus from Yugoslavia in the 1990s that brought the last major wave of refugees to Germany. To this day, there is room for less than 500 people in the country’s pre-deportation detention centers, even though thousands are slated for repatriation. Despite all statements to the contrary, even the case of the Berlin Christmas market terrorist attacker, Anis Amri, a Tunisian national who was the product of a failing asylum bureaucracy, failed to spark any radical rethinking or system overhaul so that Germany’s bureaucrats could learn to work together in a meaningful and sensible way. Instead, the country has been left vulnerable to that kind of attack at any time.

No Action, Clarity or Oversight

A simple rule of thumb applies in Germany: Politicians who stand in front of the cameras and portray themselves as the “country’s toughest migrant deporter,” or a “person who toughens laws to protect the German people,” are generally impostors. There is no shortage of laws, provisions, regulations or tough rules. What’s lacking is action. And clarity. And oversight. And above all else, the recognition that German states and communal immigration authorities are drastically overwhelmed in their bureaucratic task of handling migrants from all corners of the world. There is also a need, even in a country with the kind of federalist structures Germany has in place, for a centralized process that guarantees things will be carried out in a clear and fair manner. There is no shortage of proposals, working groups or task forces, and yet there still isn’t a coherent overall framework, even though a “master plan” has existed for months. In the end, this dysfunction hurts everyone involved in the deportation process.

A few figures illustrate the mess the European and German asylum systems are currently in: In light of the Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that migrants must file their asylum applications in the first EU country in which they set foot, Germany deported 9,209 migrants to other European countries this past year, while taking in 7,580 asylum applicants from others.

A total of 23,617 people were deported from Germany last year. But at the same time, there were 30,921 failed deportation attempts. This was because people got sick, went missing, suffered some ill stroke of fate or because court orders got in the way. There were 7,849 cases of “unsuccessful delivery on the day of flight,” and 3,322 times, ongoing repatriation attempts had to be aborted due to “denial of transportation,” “active/passive resistance,” “unsuitability for air travel” or “legal appeals.” But one reason not included in this list is: “Germany’s absurd administrative complexity.” One Federal Police officer estimates that in order to successfully deport 150 people, 1,000 official deportation procedures must be initiated for around 600 people to be identified who qualify for deportation. Of those 600, some 400 nighttime raids must be organized in order to ultimately take into custody 150 people who can actually be put on a plane. And even that number isn’t a sure thing.

Once a deportation has been carried out, a “revolving door effect” begins. There are no official statistics, but high-ranking officials estimate that a large number of deportees return to Germany sooner or later to try their luck anew.

Bad for Everyone

Behind this wall of numbers lurks the nasty business of deportation. Most of the time the customers are people whose hopes have been destroyed. They are afraid of what will happen to them and they despair to think that everything may have been for naught. That includes the money they have paid to smugglers and also the dangerous journey that brought them to Germany. Deportation represents the dirty end of all their dreams, and whoever says Germany should simply deport rejected asylum-seekers — just like that, get rid of ’em, all those pesky foreigners — has no idea just how dirty it can get. This is just as true for the people being deported as it is for the police officers doing the deporting. There are plenty of examples.

On June 6, 2018, 90 foreigners sat on a plane chartered by the Czech low-cost airline SmartWings. There were also 83 Federal Police officers on board, four doctors and a paramedic. The flight was to Madrid because all of the 90 men, women and children first touched European soil in Spain. According to EU asylum law, they should have stayed there rather than continuing on to Germany.

The Berlin Refugee Council, an association of human rights activists and advocates, speaks of “horror deportations.” They allege police tied up a woman and carried her onto a plane in front of her crying small children, while she screamed for her husband who was not being deported with her. Another woman was hit. Yet another man, mentally handicapped, was sedated with medication until he appeared “completely out of it.” Everywhere there were desperate, sobbing people. And what did the police do? They laughed at them.

In response to an inquiry by the Green Party, the state government in Berlin took a more sober tone: “The general accusations of physical violence cannot be confirmed.” By any account, it was not a pleasant flight. In a statement, the federal government confirmed that indeed, one “person” had to be carried onto the plane, three families had been torn apart and, yes, police had tied up five people.

None of this is uncommon, statistics show. From January to November 2018, restraints or tethers were used on such flights roughly 300 times. Five foreigners were forced to wear head or bite guards because they kept resisting transport. Police escorts regularly find razor blades in shoe soles or in people’s mouths, which deportees use to injure themselves. This shows just how high the stakes can be: For many of these forced passengers, repatriation is a matter of life and death.

What About the Police?

In light of these conditions, human rights advocates are constantly asking what the state is doing to these people. But on the other side are the police officers. Who’s asking on their behalf what effect all this violence and anguish has on them? No one. Not even their employer, the Federal Police, which organizes most of the deportation flights.

Police officers are supposed to conduct themselves in such an inoffensive manner that no one has any reason to complain about the government. But the fact that it’s the police officers themselves who are doing much of the complaining is something the authorities have not taken seriously in recent years. The government simply doesn’t seem to care how officers are supposed to find the necessary energy to fulfill their duties. On the contrary, civil servants who set foot on any of these repatriation flights are treated extremely poorly by their employer.

It begins with money. So far, officers that have accompanied deportees have not received a single cent extra for doing so, even though it goes above and beyond the normal requirements of their job. Instead, they get the usual allowance public servants receive when they travel, such as when they attend conferences. This is not the case in Norway, for instance. There, the government pays police officers between 600 and 2,000 euros per flight. Italy pays its officers 1,000 euros for every three repatriation flights they escort. Now, the German Interior Ministry is considering its own extra pay scheme — it’s been fiddling with the details for more than a year — but it won’t be higher than 50 to 100 euros per trip. The maximum rate would also only apply to flights that are longer than eight hours. This is all according to a draft law that could be ratified in 2020, and maybe it would even apply retroactively to 2019, but who knows?

Degraded to ‘Piggy Banks’

Progress happens at a snail’s pace in today’s Germany. “The more deportations there have been, the worse the conditions have become for the accompanying officers,” says Jörg Radek of the German Police Union. “Accompanying officers have been degraded to piggy banks.” And what these “piggy banks” have been forced to put up with on repatriation flights, in addition to a lack of additional pay, is all documented in the deployment reports.

Oct. 24, 2018. A flight from Munich to Rome. “The nine deportees on board continue to put up massive and active resistance. Three air escorts from the Federal Police were spat on with a mixture of blood and saliva directly into their eyes (deportee had bitten his own tongue).”

Jan. 22, 2019. Düsseldorf to Dhaka. “Deportee No. 4 attempted to bite or headbutt police officers.”

And then there was the incident along the A3 autobahn near Cologne in late October 2018: A Bavarian police officer, just 20 years old, and her colleague were escorting a Nigerian man to Düsseldorf in a VW bus for a mass deportation. The Nigerian was sitting behind them in the vehicle’s prisoner compartment. For the first 550 kilometers (342 miles), it remained an uneventful ride. Suddenly, the man began to try and strangle himself with his seat belt. The officers hit the brakes, pulled over and jumped out to help the man. The sliding door to the rear compartment, however, which can only be opened from the outside, somehow slid shut amid the scuffle. Inside, the Nigerian was flailing aggressively with his arms and legs. Only with considerable effort were the officers able to unwrap the seatbelt from his neck and restrain him. Afterward, it took them a while to free themselves from the locked bus, which they were only able to do by using their batons.

An Unattractive Job

In an internal paper dating from last April, the Federal Police leadership spoke of a “growing disposition to violence and malice” with which officers had to grapple. But it’s not only the aggressiveness of the people they’re escorting that weighs on them — it’s also the sheer stinginess of their employer. Official regulations specify whether and how expenses incurred during shifts are to be reimbursed. In the past, this has led to a situation in which food consumed on board has been deducted from an officer’s daily allowance. During longer assignments, escorting officers are only allowed to book rooms in cheap hotels, where — of course — breakfast is deducted from their daily allowance. Backpacks and fanny packs for the trip must be provided by the officers themselves. They don’t even receive an allowance for the suits they are required to wear — and buy themselves. Germany’s sky marshals on the other hand, who are tasked with neutralizing potential terrorists on board airplanes, receive a few thousand euros from the Federal Police to cover the costs of their undercover business traveler outfits.

Of course, when it comes to limits on working overtime, the federal government’s adherence to regulations is conspicuously absent. During one deportation on Aug. 14, 2018, from Munich to Kabul, police officers from Dresden were required to work a 27-hour shift. The record is apparently 40 hours. In a confidential report from last April, even the Federal Police’s own leadership admitted “that the general conditions do not exactly make this job more attractive.”

All of this has consequences. According to officials involved in deportations, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find enough officers for the flights. The flights aren’t compulsory, after all; the Federal Police seeks volunteers from within its ranks who are willing to accompany foreigners as they are deported against their will.

On Dec. 4, 2018, the Federal Police headquarters in Sankt Augustin put out its second call for volunteers for a deportation flight to Pakistan. “Of the 110 officers required, only 59 have so far come forward.” A similar appeal for a flight last summer to Nigeria and Gambia was also documented: “This is a renewed request for participation so that at least an appropriate number of the announced deportees (38) can be escorted.” Sixteen police officers volunteered, but 75 were needed for the flight.

Necessity Knows No Law

In their confidential paper from April, the Federal Police openly diagnosed “operational fatigue” among its officers. It was becoming “increasingly” apparent that they were “reaching their limit for stress and motivation” and that “a great deal of effort was required” to find volunteers. This was not a one-off observation, either, it stated: The problems go much deeper.

For politicians, the findings are dramatic. “It must be emphasized that these structures will make it impossible to significantly increase the number of deportees. Even maintaining the current levels of deportation will only be possible if everyone involved remains highly motivated.”

So what can be done? Necessity knows no law, as the saying goes. One of the first things the Interior Ministry came up with was to pass a decree in September 2018 which did not go down well at all with the Federal Police’s staff council or many deportation escort officers.

Ever since Aamir Ageeb from Sudan suffocated in an airplane while being deported in 1999, only police officers who have completed a 15-day “Personal Air Companion” course are allowed on board planes used for deporting unwanted migrants. At the end of last year, there were 1,269 such qualified officers around Germany. Only around 1,100 are currently in a deployable state. The decree passed in September 2018 states that “further suitable” Federal Police officers may now “be deployed.” That is to say, officers who haven’t completed the 15-day course. But the decree, which is valid until the end of June, leaves open the question of which officers are now suitable.

The Interior Ministry’s decree had merely formalized what had long been standard practice. Under pressure from an increasing number of deportation flights, the Federal Police hadn’t only used untrained officers on the alleged “horror deportation” flight from Berlin to Madrid back in June. For months, the Federal Police has been knowingly operating in a legal gray area. There is evidence that a “mixed” escort team, made up of officers with special deportation training and officers without such specialized knowledge, was deployed on a flight to Kabul last August. After another flight with untrained officers on board, one flight attendant noted that the inexperienced colleagues “hadn’t really known how they were supposed to work on the plane.”

Untrained and Misused

Last February, the Federal Police deployed a class of air escort trainees from the eastern German city of Frankfurt (Oder) onto a deportation flight. Their deployment was billed as “quasi practical training.” In a formal letter of complaint, the Interior Ministry’s main staff council told senior ministry official Hans-Georg Engelke that now even office clerks were allowed to board deportation flights, regardless of whether they had the necessary vaccinations or even a visa for the target country. “It’s irresponsible to misuse untrained civil servants for deportations,” says Radek from the police union.

Now, the planned law is expected to at least secure the air escorts some extra remuneration. In addition, there will also be official credit cards, balaclavas and more so-called “spit shields.” Subtracting the cost of unappetizing airline food from officers’ daily allowance will be a thing of the past. Somehow the Federal Police needs to attract 2,000 escort officers and keep them coming back until 2021. Otherwise the German government’s promise of firmer action to ensure that deportations take place will be mere lip service.

The way things are going now, it’s already an empty promise. And it doesn’t only have to do with ill-equipped civil servants; the system itself is dysfunctional. One Federal Police officer told DER SPIEGEL that deportation flights were routinely canceled, regardless of whether they were supposed to be bringing harmless asylum-seekers out of the country or people who were deemed public safety threats. “If the foreigner isn’t in custody, you don’t need to bother applying for the job. You get to the airport and he’s simply not there, so the deportation is canceled and you don’t get paid for your time. I almost only ever apply when the foreigner is in custody,” the officer says. “That’s what a lot of us do. Otherwise, you take the time to get yourself a visa, it’s a ton of work, and it’s all for nothing. Somehow they’ve vanished into thin air.”

Again and again, deportation flights were canceled because not enough escort officers had reported for duty, he says. There were “a whole bunch of measures” that didn’t happen “because no one volunteered.” The most recent example was on Wednesday, Feb. 27. It was a flight from Düsseldorf to Accra, Ghana. Fifty-three foreigners were to be deported, but only 24 showed up. The usual. Of those 24, eight had to be left behind because there weren’t enough escorts. In the end, eight foreigners had to be shackled anyway; one had punched an officer in the head, a second kicked an officer in the knee and a third kicked an officer in the stomach.

Arbitrary Limbo

As of Jan. 31, there were 238,740 foreigners in Germany who were “required to leave the country.” Only half are refugees whose asylum claims have been rejected. Tourists whose visas have expired or students whose semester is over are also required to leave the country. The terminology can be confusing, even for lawyers. In many instances, a “deportation ban” is issued, which translates into a right to stay. Such protection applies when an affected person faces “a significantly concrete threat to limb, life or freedom” or when treatment for a serious disease cannot be guaranteed back home. On top of that, there are many other obstacles to deportation that can lead to a person being given a “tolerated” status.

They include things like serious health concerns or an imminent marriage. If a child living in Germany would lose touch with their father. If someone is caring for a family member in Germany. These are all reasons why deportation may be prevented. In addition, German states have the power to impose deportation bans to certain countries based on their own humanitarian or political reasons. The official position on deportations to Afghanistan, for instance, varies from state to state due to the complicated security situation there. Afghans that make it to Bremen, for instance, have a good chance of being allowed to stay. But if they’re in Bavaria, their country of origin will do little to protect them. When it comes to deportations, German policy is reminiscent of a patchwork rug.

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The system of “tolerated” foreigners has become byzantine. Of the nearly 240,000 foreigners who were required to leave the country at the end of January, 182,169 had a “tolerated” status for a variety of reasons, based on various interpretations of the law. Some people may see a political or humanitarian argument for tolerating refugees, but there’s been a lot of fiddling around lately. For a long time, everything was stuffed into one paragraph of Germany’s Residence Act, from obstacles to deportation to tolerated statuses due to educational enrollment. Now, Paragraph 60a seems so long, complex and at the same time wildly cobbled together that even a renowned legal expert in this field would despair. But now the federal government is planning to restructure the whole thing and, in doing so, make it possible for a migrant to receive tolerated status due to employment.

That means the problems are definitely being worked on. But how! Working groups and sub-working groups from the federal and state level have been meeting regularly for years. Specialists are initiating legislative changes. In the fall of 2015, their efforts led to the so-called Asylum Package I, and in 2016, the Asylum Package II. Both were designed to weaken the rights of affected foreigners and strengthen the ability of the state to intervene. Regulations were also tightened after Anis Amri’s attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016, and in July 2017, a law was created especially for the treatment of individuals deemed threats to public safety. As far as the government was concerned, it had done its job. Yet for all the fiery wording of its lawyers, the government had not created a coherent, uniform legal reality for Germany. And that wasn’t only because of the seemingly never-ending back-and-forth between the federal and state governments.

Unhelpful Alliances

Currently, of the roughly 240,000 foreigners who are required to leave Germany, more than 75,000 of them are tolerated “due to a lack of travel documents.” But since Germany’s Central Registry for Foreigners is so poorly maintained, that number is probably even higher than 100,000, according to estimates by the Interior Ministry. Most of all, they complicate the lives of Germany’s immigration officials. The most attention is garnered by those foreigners labeled as “dangerous persons.” This is a vague term, derived from police jargon, that is applied to people for whom “certain facts justify the assumption” that they “will commit politically motivated crimes of considerable importance.”

It’s a tricky needle to thread, because a person cannot be punished in Germany for having certain convictions. People are free to think what they like. Thanks to the part of the Residence Act that refers to people deemed to pose a serious danger to public safety or order, the German government can at least try and keep a close eye on them: Paragraph 58a provides that such dangerous people can be directly deported. At least in theory.

In practice, however, those deportations are often thwarted because the person in question’s country of origin doesn’t want to take them back. Sure, there are international treaties and repatriation agreements, but a written promise isn’t worth much if a country doesn’t follow through on it, even if it does bear the signature of a head of state.

Morocco is a perfect example of just how complicated it can be to achieve tangible results with individual countries. In 2016, the Task Force Morocco was created at the initiative of the state government in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), because the number of Moroccan criminals there had risen significantly over the years. Since the 1990s, an agreement has been in place with Morocco over the issuance of passport replacement papers, but it stopped working a long time ago. So the state government got in touch with the Moroccan general consulate in Düsseldorf to make clear to the diplomats that their criminal compatriots in Germany were damaging the reputation of their homeland.

‘It’s Just Not That Simple’

Meanwhile, things have improved, at least slightly — not least because Germany has exerted pressure on a federal level. While Germany once had to send fingerprints to Morocco in the mail in order to check identities and have replacement passports issued, officials now report there is a digital data exchange system in place that is compatible with the German system. Fingerprints can now be transmitted to Morocco instantly — and within 45 days, the Germans receive a response.

In 2016, NRW deported 59 Moroccans. By last year, that number had increased to 382. So the system works, albeit slowly. Morocco doesn’t allow Germany, for instance, to deport its citizens en masse via chartered aircraft. When asked how the situation could be improved, representatives of NRW’s state government suggested the federal government would have to negotiate with Morocco, otherwise the most problematic cases will take years to sort out. “We have thousands of people who are ‘enforceably obliged’ to leave the country,” says NRW’s interior minister, Joachim Stamp. “And whoever reads that, thinks, ‘Are the politicians crazy? Why aren’t these people being deported? But it’s just not that simple.”

Nothing is simple when it comes to deportations. Not even when it comes to foreigners who have committed multiple crimes and whose presence in Germany is regarded by many as an intolerable provocation. Violent men from crisis countries like Syria, Libya or Gambia, among them alcoholics and drug addicts, only make up a tiny portion of migrants in Germany, but they’re the ones throwing the most fuel on the political fire. How does one regain control of this situation? What should Germany do with a habitual offender like the Pakistani Saïd K., who stormed into the district office in the city of Tuttlingen in May 2018 with a wooden slat full of nails? A man who reportedly later raped a fellow prisoner? Whose asylum application had already been rejected in 2016, but who couldn’t be deported because he didn’t possess a valid passport?

Removing Obstacles to Deportation

The perpetrator finally was able to be ejected at the end of January thanks to a special task force at the Baden-Württemberg Interior Ministry. The unit was established in early 2018 to deal with the new situation in the state: Between 2012 and 2017, the number of non-German suspects who had committed at least five crimes a year jumped from 2,807 to 4,058.

The special task force not only has its eye on potential terrorists, but also the most detestable foreign criminals as well. The unit’s director, Falk Fritzsch, operates a complex case management system with only a handful of employees. Their stated goal is to accelerate repatriations by “removing obstacles to deportation,” Fritzsch says.

To do so, his unit must first determine where a perpetrator is from. Sometimes Fritzsch will personally visit foreign consulates in Stuttgart to discuss missing passports, replacement documents and repatriations. He cooperates closely with various foreigner registration offices, which are overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases. Most of the time, the offices don’t have time to arrange for someone’s mobile phone data to be analyzed.

Fritzsch maintains contact with public prosecutors’ offices, the State Office of Criminal Investigation (LKA), the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and federal ministries. In the case of the Pakistani Saïd K., Fritzsch got in touch with the Foreign Ministry. Through a trusted lawyer, he was able to find the repeat offender’s family and determine his country of origin. The special task force in Stuttgart has been able to solve 56 cases using methods like this. “The work we do isn’t on a mass scale,” Fritzsch says. “We focus on getting people who pose a direct threat to society out of the country.” But their case list is growing faster than they can whittle it down; the same is true in other states as well.

Within NRW’s Ministry for Children, Families, Refugees and Integration, there is an office called Unit 524, the purview of which is “security conference, extremism.” At the moment, it is processing the cases of around 130 foreigners who pose threats to public safety as well as “relevant persons.” Last year, NRW, as Germany’s most populous state, deported the most people who had been required to leave Germany. In total, there were 6,603. But there are still around 15,000 more people in NRW who are considered to be enforceably obliged to leave the country.

‘Johnnie Walker’ Cases

The state of Hesse is fighting a similar battle. In the last year, several “joint working groups for repeat offenders” have been established, pulling from local police forces and employees of the state’s foreigner registration offices. Thanks to the work of these units, some 200 habitual offenders have been deported, says Peter Beuth, Hesse’s interior minister. He speaks of a “successful model.”

In Saxony, a working group with the designation “Residence” inside the state Interior Ministry is working to specifically deport Islamists and criminal foreigners. Estimates put the number of repeat offenders in the state at around 1,600, most of whom are Libyan or Tunisian. Here, too, most of the battles are fought and won on paper: The job is all about overcoming a lack of documents, missing passports or insufficient proof of identity.

For years, officials have complained about how difficult and thankless it can be to find missing travel documents. In Interior Ministry documents, foreigners who don’t cooperate in the clarification of their identity are considered “identity swindlers” and “refuseniks.” Sometimes, 20 years can go by without determining whether a man is from Burkina Faso or Senegal. In reference to the often fantastic names some refugees like to give themselves, the head of one foreigner registration office calls them “‘Johnnie Walker’ cases.” The authorities have little choice but to send the “Johnnie Walkers” to the embassies of the countries of which they claim to be citizens. But when those embassies then say, sorry, this person isn’t one of ours, there’s often not much the authorities can do about it.

Even if a person’s citizenship can be determined, some countries will still refuse to take them back. Lebanon, for one, was long regarded as one of the most uncooperative countries when it came issuing the necessary passport replacement papers. More than a year ago, German officials noted that “responses to applications are rare. Contact with the embassy is poor.” With India, they said, “Processing of passport replacement applications ranges from slow to not at all.” And with Iran, the verdict was, “In many cases it is impossible to obtain a replacement passport, since Iran continues to demand a statement of willingness from the people concerned.” This makes it virtually impossible to deport an Iranian against their will.

The fact that many deportations are thwarted by paperwork isn’t only the fault of prospective deportees’ native countries. German immigration authorities are also overburdened. In some embassies in Berlin, completed passport replacement papers are piling up, according to officials in the federal government. In some diplomatic missions around Berlin, clerks wonder whether their German counterparts are simply too dumb to pick up the documents they themselves requested.

A Mood Shift

Any serious assessment of the current situation must recognize that for a long time, deportations were a taboo subject in Germany, one that politicians were all too happy to avoid. There was basically an implicit consensus that it was wiser not to get involved in such a sensitive issue. Church groups and humanitarian organizations, as well as gung-ho lawyers, did a good job of making a big emotional splash anytime a family or a well-integrated immigrant were adversely affected by deportation. For a long time, many Germans regarded deportations as an expression of an overzealous and unsympathetic state.

But public sentiment shifted in 2015, when more people migrated to Germany than ever before. The mass sexual assaults that occurred in Cologne on new year’s eve that year swept aside any lingering moral ambivalence and had people longing once again for the rule of law. For many people, including many politicians, the “nafris” — a diminutive made up of the German words for “North African habitual offender,” since most of the perpetrators in Cologne had been North African men — could not be deported soon enough. And while they were at it, send all the rejected asylum-seekers back with them, people thought.

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The federal government commissioned McKinsey to conduct an analysis of the deportation process from the ground up. The consultants’ conclusions were entirely to be expected: Things weren’t going so well. They prescribed a give-and-take solution that, on the one hand, foresaw higher financial incentives for voluntary departures, and on the other, more severe penalties for anyone who resisted. They also recommended closer, more efficient cooperation between the many agencies involved in the deportation process — better “deportation management,” so to speak.

There can be no illusion that this has been achieved yet, even though the various agencies are working together more closely today. There is a central asylum database that can be accessed by any involved agency, for instance; files can be transmitted electronically; and agencies don’t do nearly as much redundant work anymore. But problems remain, to be sure: There are contradictions, loopholes and planning errors that prevent things from going more smoothly.

No Uniform Jurisdiction

And so, a political-administrative consensus on deportations has yet to be reached in Germany. The amount of leniency a rejected asylum-seeker can count on depends on the political constellation of the state in which they find themselves. This confusion also spills over into the courts. Contrary to what one might expect, the administrative courts responsible for matters of asylum don’t always hand down consistent rulings. For instance, some judges think deporting refugees back to Bulgaria — if that’s the first EU country they set foot in — is unconscionable because asylum-seekers are not treated properly there. Other judges, however, have no problem with that. Such contradictions exist because there are no fundamental rulings in asylum law that judges can use as guidance. Court proceedings have been shortened to such an extent that many cases no longer end up in the higher courts, which are usually responsible for ensuring uniform jurisdiction.

“It’s an asylum lottery in the end,” Robert Seegmüller, a judge with Germany’s Federal Administrative Court, said at a recent conference. “And of course everyone then says, ‘Hey, I’ll take part in the lottery. Who knows? Maybe I’ll win.'”

To be fair, when it comes to people deemed to be threats to public safety, the authorities have woken up — also at the federal level. Since Anis Amri’s terrorist attack, the federal government has upped the pressure on North African countries to take back their citizens, whether they are dangerous or not. Tunisia and other countries in the region have, in fact, been notably more cooperative. While only 17 Tunisians were deported back to their home country in 2015, that number had climbed to 343 by last year. Algeria and Morocco are repatriating 10 times as many citizens now as they did in 2015; last year, the Algerians took back 567, while the Moroccans took back 722.

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

At the Joint Counterterrorism Center in Berlin, the “Status” working group is currently handling around 660 cases involving Islamists, according to the Interior Ministry. At the center, specialists from multiple agencies look into what measures are possible under German residency law — all the way up to an immediate deportation order by the interior minister himself. When it comes to deporting criminals, they receive support from the task force “Security” at the Joint Center for Repatriation Support, which was created in 2017. Currently, 120 cases are being processed there. In addition, the Interior Ministry has also set up another task force — “Public Threat” — to help the states deport Islamists and habitual offenders.

The ministry has some other measures in the works too. For the next few weeks, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet will be drafting an “Orderly Return Law.” Corresponding working papers circulating internally seem to have been compiled with an eye to state elections this fall. Prerequisites for being awarded a “tolerated” residency status are to be curtailed. Anyone who is demonstrably at fault for not having the necessary papers to be deported, or anyone who is caught cheating or swindling, will from now on be given a “less than tolerated” status and be required to live in group housing without the ability to work. Refugee aid organizations will also face legal recourse if they warn people of impending deportations or other planned measures.

In the future, it will also be easier to place migrants in custody pending deportation. German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer also intends to flout existing EU law in order to hold people awaiting deportation in normal jails. Much like U.S. President Donald Trump invoked his executive privilege to declare a state of emergency, Seehofer argues that desperate times call for desperate measures. Given that there is only space for 479 people in Germany’s pre-deportation detention centers, and the German states still have to create more space for the deportees, he argues the EU’s separation rule should be suspended for three years.

DER SPIEGEL

Much of this seems like political whitewashing. Instead of creating a new space in Germany for asylum and immigration law and convincing federal states to adopt a common policy, Germany’s approach is jumbled and confused. The German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), determines which asylum-seekers may stay and which must go, and it’s also responsible for processing cases that fall within the purview of the Dublin Regulation. Deportations and “tolerated” statuses fall under the jurisdiction of the central foreigner registration offices and the around 600 municipal foreign registration offices in the various states. When a deportation is imminent, employees from a state’s foreigner registration office or the state police will pick the person up and drive them to the airport. On the plane, however, deportees are accompanied by Federal Police officers. A layperson could be forgiven for not fully understanding Germany’s complicated deportation structures. Even those directly involved sometimes have a hard time wrapping their brains around it. And wherever there is institutional confusion or legal gray areas, novel workarounds are bound to arise.

An Atmospheric Shift

“Church asylum” is one such workaround. Officially it doesn’t exist, yet somehow it’s tolerated. At any rate, this phenomenon involving churches helping to protect people from deportation, causes regular tension between authorities and representatives of the church. In 2015, BAMF and emissaries of both churches agreed upon the current wording: “The participants agree that church asylum is not an independent institution existing outside the rule of law, but rather has established itself as a Christian-humanitarian tradition.” It’s essentially a truce agreement.

Since then, public prosecutors’ offices have regularly gone after representatives of the church for aiding and abetting illegal residency, but they nearly always let them off the hook eventually. Most of the lawyers are annoyed by this practice since they are legally obliged to look for violations of the law, making them seem like callous bureaucrats in the public eye while priests and ministers and their congregations get to look like heroes.

Some 3,000 migrants have at least temporarily entered church asylum since 2017, though that number has declined steadily as laws have been tightened. Whereas in 2017, between 100 and 200 new church asylum cases were being reported every month, there have only been around 60 a month since August 2018. But the decline does not change the fundamental legal dilemma. Church asylum, as it were, has become a favorite topic of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In the German parliament, the Bundestag, as well as in several state parliaments, the party has agitated against the concept, which it says has “no legal basis” — the government was “granting the church a de facto special role as an advocate for asylum-seekers.”

The AfD isn’t alone in its condemnation. Throughout Europe, the mood toward asylum-seekers has become much less sympathetic. This is just as true in Italy as it is in Austria and Hungary. The Scandinavians were long viewed as being the most liberal in Europe, but now even they have adopted stricter rules and regulations for new arrivals. This has had something of a domino effect. According to documents from the Federal Police, the number of refugees who have moved to Germany after seeking asylum in Scandinavia has been rising steadily for years. Experts call this secondary migration, and according to the Federal Police, it is attributable to the Scandinavians’ stricter immigration policies.

Denmark has cut social expenditures for refugees and wants to enforce deportations more consistently. Finland’s public agencies can require asylum-seekers to live in specially designated housing and regularly check in with authorities. Norway has also considerably tightened its deportation policy. In Sweden, rejected asylum-seekers receive less social assistance than before. Europe is witnessing an atmospheric shift, even in places where the climate toward refugees has been relatively mild until now.

By Matthias Bartsch, Felix Bohr, Jürgen Dahlkamp, Jörg Diehl, Lukas Eberle, Ullrich Fichtner, Jan Friedmann, Dietmar Hipp, Roman Lehberger, Andreas Ulrich, Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt and Steffen Winter

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/why-germany-s-deportation-policy-is-failing-everyone-a-1256414.html#ref=rss

The post A Migration Nightmare-Why Germany’s Deportation System Is Failing Everyone first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The agreement stipulates that Germany is allowed tosend certain migrants arriving in Germany straight back to Spain. This only applies to a small number of people, though: Migrants coming to Germany via the three border crossings with Austria that are currently subject to controls. Refugees who are picked up there and who have already applied for asylum in Spain can be sent back to Spain if this is done within 48 hours.

Those arriving in Germany are checked using the Europe-wide fingerprint database Eurodac. Every refugee is supposed to be registered on this as soon as they arrive in Europe. Unaccompanied minors are excluded from the migrant return agreement.

Isn’t this already determined by the Dublin Regulation?

Yes, in principle it is. According to the Dublin Regulation, a migrant is supposed to become the responsibility of the country where he or she is first registered. As a rule, it should be the country where they first set foot on European soil. If a refugee comes to Germany and it turns out that he’s already registered in Italy, the German government could send him back there. However, European law also requires it to consider whether it makes more sense for a refugee to stay in Germany — if, for example, they have relatives living here.

Many EU countries consider the Dublin Regulation impracticable. The transfer of migrants from one country to another is extremely time-consuming. Furthermore, many migrants are not even registered at the point when they first set foot on European soil. During her visit to Spain, Merkel too described the Dublin Regulation as “unworkable.” In theory, the chancellor said, under the Regulation “no migrant or refugee would ever arrive in Germany.” However, she went on to say that the legal situation did not correspond to reality, which meant that “a fair distribution system” was needed.

Read more: Opinion: Germany-Spain migrant deal lacks substance

What does Germany expect from the agreement?

Reports quoting the Federal Interior Ministry state that in 2017 an average of five people per day were apprehended at the three controlled border crossings between Germany and Austria who had already applied for asylum in another EU country. Only a fraction of this number had applied for asylum in Spain.

There are no official figures to substantiate this, but there are figures detailing Germany’s transfer applications under the Dublin Regulation. Berlin makes these applications if it considers that a migrant is already another country’s responsibility. In the fourth quarter of 2017, only slightly more than 5 percent of such applications by Germany were made to Spain. According to the news portal tagesschau.de, 32.7 percent were addressed to Italy.

Nevertheless, the new agreement does have a certain symbolic value. Germany’s grand coalition government has been arguing for months about how to deal with migrants. The German Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, wanted to turn refugees away at the German border even without a migrant return agreement, but this was opposed by Merkel.

The agreement with Spain could be seen both as a signal to other countries — that Germany has strict rules, too — and as a kind of appeasement of Merkel’s interior minister. Berlin also hopes that the agreement with Spain will be the first in a series of such bilateral arrangements.

Which countries does it hope will follow?

Horst Seehofer is currently negotiating with Greece and Italy to reach similar agreements— but it’s not proving easy. Although Spain hopes that Germany will invest more money in protecting the EU’s borders, it didn’t directly ask for anything in return for taking the refugees. Athens and Rome, however, are already making demands. As things stand, they are only prepared to enter into a joint arrangement of this kind if, in return, Germany accepts some refugees from their countries; for example, those who wish to join family members already in Germany.

Seehofer, however, has rejected this proposal. “There’s no point in us signing this, because the German public would not understand it if we were to accept more than we turned away at the border,” he said. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said that, in spite of the difficulties, an agreement with Greece was in sight — but there was no immediate prospect of a deal between Berlin and Rome.

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/what-you-need-to-know-the-german-spanish-migrant-deal/a-45055694

The post What you need to know: The German-Spanish migrant deal first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Brussels (CNN) European Union leaders have averted the collapse of a key summit with a deal struck on migration in the early hours of Friday morning, which will see the burden of resettling refugees shared more widely among member states.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said the deal took “long negotiation, but from today Italy is no longer alone.”

READ THE MIGRANT DEAL

 

In a statement, the Council said it had agreed to adopt a “comprehensive approach to migration that combines more effective control of the EU’s external borders, increased external action and the internal aspects, in line with our principles and values.”

“The European Council is determined to continue and reinforce this policy to prevent a return to the uncontrolled flows of 2015 and to further stem illegal migration on all existing and emerging routes,” it said.

It added that more support would be provided to Italy and other Mediterranean countries, and “efforts to stop smugglers operating out of Libya or elsewhere should be further intensified.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May praised the agreement, saying it addressed many issues the UK had previously raised, and would “ensure that people aren’t making these dangerous journeys … in the hands of people smugglers.”

French President Emmanuel Macron said that despite suggestions a deal would be “impossible,” member states had succeeded in reaching a “European solution.”

Migration deadlock

Earlier, in an impassioned speech ahead of the summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said migration could be a “make or break” issue for the European Union.

“We cannot leave those countries where asylum seekers arrive to deal with (the problem) alone,” she said.

Merkel is facing considerable pressure at home to reduce the number of asylum seekers Germany accepts and agree to other restrictions on immigration, or risk a collapse of her ruling coalition.

She became the accidental architect of European migration policy in 2015 when she decided to allow hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers that had crossed the Balkans on foot into Germany.

Italy’s new government has closed ports to ships rescuing migrants daring the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing from north Africa, and taken a hardline approach on negotiations.

In an interview with CNN this week, Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini said “we need to revisit” the Dublin Regulation, which requires asylum seekers to be registered in the first European country they enter — regardless of whether they entered legally or otherwise.

The Dublin rules have put a huge amount of pressure on southern and eastern European nations, where the vast majority of refugees fleeing war and unrest in the Middle East and North Africa first enter the Union, and meant richer countries in north western Europe have borne less of the burden.

In an invitation letter sent to EU leaders ahead of the summit, Council leader Tusk said a failure to ensure full control of Europe’s external borders risked strengthening the hand of newly emerging populist political movements.

“More and more people are starting to believe that only strong-handed authority, anti-European and anti-liberal in spirit, with a tendency towards overt authoritarianism, is capable of stopping the wave of illegal migration,” he said.

“If people believe them, that only they can offer an effective solution to the migration crisis, they will also believe anything else they say. The stakes are very high. And time is short.”

Italian demonstrators hold a banner reading “against fascism, racism and sexism.” Right wing, anti immigrant parties recently took power in Italy.

Desperate situation

Despite a significant drop in the number of people seeking refuge in Europe, thousands of desperate migrants continue to make their way to European shores. Many make the perilous journey by sea.

As of June 6, there had been an estimated 785 deaths on the route this year, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said, with the majority of the 33,400 migrants and refugees arriving through Greece and Italy.

This week, a search and rescue ship was stranded in the Mediterranean for five days with 233 migrants on board before it was finally permitted to dock in Malta.

European governments had wrangled over the responsibility for migrants arriving on the continent’s southern shores as conditions on the ship began to deteriorate.

Salvini, the Italian minister, had accused it of sailing under a “fake flag,” and Malta has impounded the ship while an investigation is carried out into whether it breached international law.

According to the International Maritime Organization, the Lifeline sails under a Dutch flag, supporting the ship’s assertion that it is correctly registered in the Netherlands.

Growing concern over migration comes at a time when Europe is already dealing with a lingering debt crisis, a rise in European populism, an escalating trade war with the United States, questions over Washington’s commitment to NATO and faltering negotiations for Brexit.

If Italy blocks a joint statement on these other important issues, the entire EU summit would be rendered ineffective.

CNN’s Atika Shubert, Nadine Schmidt, Laura Smith-Spark and James Griffiths contributed to this report.

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Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/28/europe/italy-eu-summit-migrant-crisis/index.html

[Disclaimer]

The post EU summit deal reached after Italy demanded action on migrant crisis first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

This June 12, 2018 photo released Wednesday, June 13, 2018 by French NGO “SOS Mediterranee” shows migrants being transferred from the Aquarius ship to Italian Coast Guard boats, in the Mediterranean Sea. Italy dispatched two ships Tuesday to help take 629 migrants stuck off its shores on the days-long voyage to Spain in what is forecast to be bad weather, after the new populist government refused them safe port in a dramatic bid to force Europe to share the burden of unrelenting arrivals. (Kenny Karpov/SOS Mediterranee via AP)

Forget Brexit or a looming trans-Atlantic trade war. The diplomatic spat this week between Italy, Malta and France over who should take responsibility for more than 600 people rescued at sea shows that the biggest challenge Europe faces today is migration.

It’s not about the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived across the Mediterranean in recent years — many in perilous sea crossings like those aboard the rescue ship Aquarius — seeking better or safer lives. Turkey has welcomed more. Tiny Lebanon and struggling Jordan handle almost two million refugees between them.

The crisis threatening the very existence of the European Union is the enemy within: the inability of the 28 states that make up the world’s biggest trading bloc to manage those migrant arrivals collectively.

Asylum reform is stranded on the rocks of national interests. The questions of who should take responsibility for those arriving — and whether there should be a quota system for European countries to share refugees — are fiercely disputed.

Long-suffering EU nations like Italy and Greece, where most sea migrants enter, feel abandoned by other EU nations.

In response, some European countries have deployed troops, erected border fences or temporarily reintroduced ID checks, undermining Europe’s wide-ranging passport-free travel area. Others have welcomed the migrants in.

Those acting alone have mostly angered their neighbors by passing the problem on. Mutual trust between nations in the bloc has evaporated.

Anti-migrant parties have exploited the chaos, winning votes as they foment fear of foreigners.

“As long as we keep refusing the idea that we have a collective problem that can only be tackled with collective solutions — as long as we don’t see that — we will not find a solution,” European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans warned. “We will fail collectively.”

EU nations are now flirting with that collective failure, struggling to reform the bloc’s asylum rules known as the Dublin Regulation. It’s a pillar of Europe’s passport-free travel area. Failure to fix Dublin could sound the death knell for check-free travel and easy cross-border business across Europe — the two crowning achievements of the bloc.

For two years, EU governments have battled without success to fix Dublin’s biggest contradiction: that migrants must seek protection in the first European country they arrive in. With most migrants entering the Europe via Turkey or Libya, that chiefly means Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy.

That rule was part of this week’s dispute over the Aquarius, a rescue ship carrying 629 people including pregnant women and children who were saved off the Libyan coast.

Italy, which controls Mediterranean rescue operations, halted the in-bound ship, claiming that the small EU island of Malta was closer and should take responsibility.

French President Emmanuel Macron waded in, accusing Italy of cynical, irresponsible behavior. The new populist government in Rome found this hard to swallow, given that French border police have been routinely blocking thousands of migrants who try to leave Italy, upholding the EU’s flawed asylum rules.

Spain’s new center-left government came to the rescue, offering the boat safe harbor in Valencia.

“This is not something that Malta, Italy, Greece or Spain should be left alone to deal with. Countries not in the Mediterranean cannot try to use geography to exonerate themselves from responsibility,” Roberta Metsola, a leading EU lawmaker on migration, told The Associated Press.

So sensitive is the topic that the EU’s Bulgarian presidency has spent months supervising closed-door lower-level talks to find a compromise — but the problem is eminently political, not technical.

Hungary and Poland have refused to take in refugees, and other nations barely contributed in the EU’s earlier failed attempt to share the refugee burden.

The problem has put strong domestic political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel — who in 2015 refused to close Germany’s door to migrants, many fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer now wants to turn away refugees registered elsewhere.

Austria and Denmark, meanwhile, are championing the idea of setting up migrant camps outside western Europe, in the neighboring Balkans. Elizabeth Collett, the director of Migration Policy Institute Europe, says such plans are a sign of desperate times.

“These ideas … look good on paper, but it has been hard to identify a non-EU country willing to be a ‘vassal state’ in this way, or design a system that would actually function,” she said. “What has changed now is the amount of political desperation involved in pursuing these ideas. Countries are willing to put more on the table — that is, pay third countries more — and are less concerned about how well they function.”

EU leaders had ordered a solution to be found by this month. With none in sight, Merkel and her colleagues are forced to grasp the migration nettle again at their June 28-29 summit. A new populist government from Italy in their midst — one whose interior minister has vowed to deport tens of thousands of migrants as soon as he can — will make any compromise on migration even more difficult.

“Europe can be the example to everyone on this issue but we have to see real political will to move away from fiery rhetoric to taking tough decisions,” Metsola said. “The ball is in the (leaders’) court now. The world is watching.”

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/disputed-policies-migrants-top-threat-eu-unity-55940273

The post Disputed policies on migrants are the top threat to EU unity first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.