The flow of migrants into Europe is becoming an ever-greater problem, with no solution in sight. As if it did not have enough problems already, Greece is bearing the brunt of the influx, receiving about half of the 200 000 refugees who have arrived in southern Europe by sea this year.
At least 1 900 migrants are reported to have died during the perilous journey.
Though the jumping-off points for the sea-borne migrants are in North Africa – mostly ungoverned Libya – most are actually fleeing wars in the Middle East.
In an article “Shipwrecked Europe” by its researcher, Liesl Louw, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) quotes the UNHCR as saying that up to 60% of the migrants are from Syria, with the rest mostly from Afghanistan, Iraq and yes, also Somalia and Eritrea.
The EU met at summit level three months ago to agree to commit greater resources to rescuing migrants at sea and also to share more equally the burden which front line member states, such as Greece and Italy, are bearing because they are the nearest to the main embarkation points. But few other EU states are willing to receive their quota of immigrants.
Individual states and other jurisdictions are responding to the problem in different ways but most have been uninviting. Hungary is rapidly erecting a fence to stop immigrants entering at all.
After about 44 000 migrants crossed the Greece-Macedonia border over the past two months, Macedonia declared a state of emergency, rolled razor wire across the frontier and used riot police to try to repel the masses of people. As of Sunday, though, it appeared to have abandoned resistance to the inflow.
Poland and the Czech Republic have vowed they will accept only Christian immigrants. A Czech official has been quoted saying that Muslim immigrants will be used by Islamic State to establish footholds in Europe.
However Oliver Junk, conservative Christian Democratic Union mayor of the small German town of Goslar, is asking for more migrants to prevent it becoming a ghost town because of Germany’s dwindling population.
But he is an exception. Most Europeans seem alarmed and angered by the migrant influx which appears to be increasing xenophobia.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has been criticised for referring to the people trying to smuggle themselves into the UK from France via the Channel tunnel as a “swarm”. The Labour Party reminded him they were “people not insects”.
The rash of derogatory terms for the migrants in the UK and elsewhere has sparked a politically-correct counter-reaction, with the Al Jazeera news network just announcing that it will not henceforth refer to the migrants as “migrants” but as “people” or “refugees” – the latter because most are indeed fleeing political persecution and/or warfare in their home countries.
But in fact an intense debate is raging about how many of the migrants are in fact genuine refugees and how many economic migrants, seeking a better life materially.
Louw reports in the ISS Today article that a seemingly-outlandish proposal by the American businessman, Jason Buzi, that the world should look for “a new country” for the 60 million or so refugees around the globe, has surprisingly gained some respectable support, including from migration expert Robin Cohen, former director of the International Migration Institute, at Oxford University.
This shows how desperate the problem has become. The AU has been criticised for doing too little to address the crisis, seeing that the migrants are mostly reaching Europe through Africa. But it insists it is trying to cut off the illegal migration routes – and also trying to return Libya, the main launchpad, to governability, a very difficult task.
The EU and AU are to hold a joint conference in Malta in November to find ways to tackle the crisis together. But it is hard to see how they will be able to resolve a problem that is really mainly a symptom of the greater political and security crises that are engulfing the Middle East.