One light many shadows

The European Parliament approved the new Pact on Migration and Asylum, consisting of ten measures and it was not a pretty sight.
The reactions were very different, from a triumphalism based on a historical choice to condemnations without appeal.

This Pact was announced as a key intervention at the beginning of the legislature, to try to find a shared solution on a complex and divisive issue, on which Europe was torn at the time of the Libyan and Syrian crises, with states that refused entry , they built walls, closed borders, with two referendums against Brussels.
Writing a dark page for Europe, with waves of xenophobia and anti-European sentiment in various member states, including Italy. Despite many difficulties and mediations, the European Commission presented a broad outline at the end of 2020 and then Parliament expressed itself with critical and improving positions on many aspects, but the governments kept the negotiations at a standstill for three years, pushing it towards this outcome. The approved Pact does not abolish the Dublin rules, as had been hoped, but tempers them in three respects.

First: it standardizes assessment procedures at the Union's external borders and makes them faster.
Second: it creates a partial system for sharing illegal immigrants between the states of entry and the others.
Third: pushes for partnerships with third countries, to facilitate the repatriations of those who are not entitled to enter Europe. After ten years we have at least the first timid steps of shared sovereignty.

However, this Pact is far from the initial promise of wanting to make a change, protecting the dignity of each migrant, saving lives at sea and providing solid solidarity to the countries of first entry under pressure (those in the Mediterranean so to speak), The so-called new border procedures they effectively replicate Greece's system of confinement islands, a highly questionable selection between migrants who may be most likely to obtain international protection and everyone else. The latter are locked up in fortress centers, awaiting repatriation, without the possibility of appeal.
Furthermore, many believe the new procedures are detrimental to the rights of families with minors, the risks of racial profiling are serious and these rules may even become the burial of the right to asylum as Europe has applied it over the last 80 years. Not to mention that, in exchange for limited solidarity between EU countries, which remains to be verified, all the burden is left on the shoulders of the Mediterranean countries, even for the so-called secondary movements. In the meantime, many are rejoicing because the "Rwanda model" would have won, which Italy has already replicated with Albania, i.e. exporting the selection and confinement centers outside Europe.

The Dublin rules were prehistoric, as Mattarella often said, and we would have had to move away from a logic of border protection alone to face an epochal challenge, which already sees over 100 million people in the world leaving their country and, in anticipation , up to 400 million are expected in the coming years, due to wars and climate change. Remembering that the real pull factor is linked to our societies which are aging rapidly and will need an impressive workforce, given that our country alone is destined to lose 15 million inhabitants by 2050. Not only do I fear that what has been decided will not work, but Europe risks losing its soul of reasoned compassion, the same one it applied in the case of the millions of Ukrainians who fled the war and for whom the temporary protection clause was activated for the first time, which allowed them to be welcomed, cared for, housed and have a job, without creating rejection in our countries.

We are therefore still far from having found that "indispensable and very urgent long-term structural solution" to which Mattarella invited us and which we would have liked.

Luca Jahier
NP May 2024