EU agreement on voluntary migrant intake is the type of compromise Cameron seeks
Anna Sonny, 26 June 2015
Prime Minister David Cameron’s much anticipated speech on his renegotiation demands for Britain’s EU membership took a back seat to dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis at an EU summit last night. The talks concluded with an agreement to allow EU member states to opt into reallocating migrants, and the scheme will be finalised by the end of July.
The pervasive political turmoil that plagues parts of the Middle East and Africa has resulted in 153,000 migrants being counted on Europe’s borders so far this year, a 149% increase since 2014. According to EU rules, asylum claims have to be processed in the first country of entry, so countries on the edge of the EU, such as Hungary, Greece and Italy bearing the brunt of the burden.
Following a string of tragedies at sea, and repeated calls from Italy for more support from other EU member states in dealing with the crisis, the European Commission proposed a plan in May to reallocate 40,000 migrants currently based in Italy and Greece. There were discussions over whether it would be fairer to use a distribution key based on GDP, unemployment rates and immigration figures to reallocate migrants according to quotas, but Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic and Hungary were opposed to this, anxious over not having the capacity to cope with more arrivals. As one senior EU official put it: ‘It is so divorced from political reality – you can’t make people move based on an equation.”
It is easy to see why Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi does not feel the plan to resettle 40,000 migrants who are now in Italy and Greece does not go deep enough when you look at the figures: so far this year, 63,000 reached Greece by sea and 62,000 reached Italy.
It is hard to find a compromise that suits all involved, not least the migrants who are undertaking treacherous journeys to get into Europe. Asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants all crowd underneath the umbrella term ‘migrant’; these vast figures represent people are risking their lives to flee from war-torn countries and abject poverty.
Even though Cameron’s renegotiation demands were overshadowed by the crisis, the agreement reached by the EU leaders represents what Cameron will be campaigning for: a compromise that gives EU member states the choice to participate according to their specific domestic circumstances, rather than imposing rules directly from Brussels.