Europe's current policies won't 'stop the boats'

A woman pleads with traffickers to be let on to a small boat as it arrives to collect people in thick fog in Gravelines, France. Getty Images

Greek officials this week are speaking once more of how Europe is the target of “weaponised migration”, but how far is this grave warning resonating?

The contrast between what an individual migrant represents and the overarching challenge of migration flow is off the scale. Largely, these asylum seekers are desperate for a future that their homeland isn’t able to provide. Many of them are indebted to their friends and family and exposed to extreme physical dangers.

As a mass movement of people, the migrants are dividing Europe internally and exposing its governments to a generational challenge they are failing to master. Instead, the continent’s leaders are expected to become increasingly brutal in their literal pushback against the migrants.

As Donald Trump is proving in America, the migrant crisis is a potently dominant factor in shaping politics. His methods may be met with disavowal in Europe but the continent is starting to go down the same path as the US President.

There was a stark illustration of how much hatred has leached into the debate on migration last week, when a loyalist community in Northern Ireland created a migrant boat for the top of a bonfire. These fires built in July celebrate the community’s loyalty to the English Crown. They also give vent to whatever political hobby horse has exercised local political agitators most.

The migrants arriving in the UK from across the English Channel continue to expose a loss of control that several European nations are feeling over this crisis. A phenomenon of the past decade, the sight of a boat crammed with people wearing yellow and orange life jackets – many of them fake life-savers – has become a symbol of the desperation in the hearts of everyone.

Burning a migrant dingy on top of a 20-storey pile of wooden pallets becomes a talisman of extremism, bound to be repeated at scale on social media.

Models depicting migrants on top pallets stacked for a bonfire in Moygashel, Northern Ireland. AFP

Many of the migrants on those boats traversing the narrow and choppy English Channel will have already crossed the Mediterranean Sea. Hailing from Sudan or Eritrea, for example, they must cross the Sahara and then press on to the North African coast for the chance to get to Europe.

Libya has become the pre-eminent gateway to Europe. Alongside its neighbours Tunisia and Egypt, it is scarred by the emergence of criminal gangs with deep networks capable of sustaining the movement of tens of thousands halfway across the Western Hemisphere.

When then-US president Barack Obama decided to lead from behind in the Libyan war to overthrow the country’s establishment in 2011, Britain and France stood up to spearhead the operations. Years later, the consequences of their military intervention are still unfolding as they become destinations for the fallout. Today, the North African country has an embedded divide that is not only intractable but nurtured by the links each side is making across the Mediterranean.

“[Greece] is proceeding to suspend the processing of asylum applications, initially for three months, for those arriving ... from North Africa by sea,” said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, just as those embers from the bonfire on the other side of the continent were dying out on Friday.

No one thinks this is a line in the sand that ends the crisis. So far this year, 9,000 migrants have arrived on Crete from Libya, double last year’s total. In the UK, the number of boat people so far this year has moved above 20,000 – a 50 per cent increase on the rate of arrivals for 2024.

The rate far outpaces the ability of the authorities to respond. On the day that the UK and France last week agreed to a “one-in, one-out” deal on migrant flows to return some of the arrivals, 10 boats arrived in England.

Migrants continue to launch small boats to UK despite deaths in Channel

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A study by University of Birmingham researchers found that the sight of small boat arrivals has a direct, immediate impact on public opinion fuelling anti-migrant views. This applies not only to illegal seaborne arrivals but across the board to foreign students, EU-based migration and family reunions. The report suggests that “highly visible irregular migration” fuels broader anxieties about even legal migration routes.

Outrage directed at organised crime and talk of “weaponised migration” are both key to understanding how a popular backlash on the continent has been built up towards the migration crisis. Not only does the wealth or grotesque power of the warlord-like gang bosses register with the public, so too does the kind of warnings that Greek and Italian governments are making against authorities in Libya.

In imposing ever tighter rules on migration and raising the costs of travel and settlement, European governments are following the shift in public opinion. Such is the antagonism in the relationship already that a delegation of European Commission officials was summarily thrown out of Benghazi last week, which was just the latest sign of the jockeying for alliances going on across the Mediterranean and beyond.

Without a political solution in sight to the breakdown of the Libyan state, the crisis can only speed up. Burning cardboard boats as a stunt could yet be seen as a harbinger of worse to come.