Hard EU line on migration rose from the ashes of compassion

New Straits Times

4 hours ago

A DECADE ago, the image of a 3-year-old Syrian boy washed up dead on a Turkish beach prompted an outpouring of emotion and renewed commitments from European governments to take in refugees fleeing Syria's civil war.
Alan Kurdi drowned alongside his mother and brother when a rubber dinghy headed for Greece sank off the coast of Turkiye in September 2015.
A decade later, thousands of people escaping hardship, conflict and climate disasters still risk their lives on similarly perilous boat journeys to Europe.
But the reception they might get has changed. Ten years ago, the European Union vowed to prevent further loss of life at sea. Now, keeping migrants out is the key goal, as governments play to right-leaning voters.
Rights groups and experts say the future for these people is becoming even more precarious as the EU looks set to harden restrictions on migration.
"For people arriving in Europe, it will become more difficult to access an asylum procedure in the first place and for that procedure to actually assess their claim fairly," Josephine Liebl, head of advocacy at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, an alliance of non-governmental organisations, said.
The arrival of an unprecedented one million refugees in 2015 sparked a crisis in the EU, which over the last decade has attempted to reform its asylum system to ease the burden on frontline states such as Greece and Italy. At the same time, anti-immigrant feeling has gained momentum, encouraged by the rise of the far right.
The bloc has also sought to push the problem beyond its borders, making deals with third countries and reinforcing its physical and legal entry points.
Even before Kurdi died, a shipwreck that claimed the lives of over 600 people in April 2015 had driven migration to the top of the EU's policy agenda.
Then, the bloc's main aims were not far off what they are today: fighting people traffickers, preventing illegal migration and reinforcing solidarity in the bloc.
But the EU also pledged emergency aid to frontline states receiving the most refugees and tripled its funding of naval missions to strengthen rescue operations in the Mediterranean.
In 2020, when the EU reaffirmed its support to border countries, it emphasised bolstering border guard capabilities — not humanitarian aid.
Berna Turam, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston, said there was "a golden age of solidarity" pre-2019, when compassion outweighed anti-immigrant, populist forces.
"The mood changed because of EU policies criminalising people at the borders."
In 2016, the EU pledged €3 billion to support Syrians. Then it also poured money into strengthening surveillance tech and support for border agency Frontex.
Under a deal that year, Turkiye agreed to take back migrants and refugees who cross irregularly into Greece from its shores.
The islands effectively became a holding pen for migrants, barred from advancing their EU asylum claims and restricted to a camp life lived in limbo.
"Because these people got confined it suggested they were criminals," said Turam.
As the EU continued to enlist the help of non-EU countries, plying North African nations with kit and training to keep migrants out, fear spread — and with it, support for political parties that talked tougher on migration.
Across Europe, voters have steadily shifted right.
Far-right and populist parties have made gains in Italy, Finland, Croatia, Czech Republic, Sweden, Germany and Austria, as well as in the European Parliament.
"It is normal for people to believe that the far right is doing well because of people's immigration positions, but the far-right vote is about economic insecurity and austerity," said Claire Kumar, who researches public attitudes towards migration at think tank ODI Europe.
ODI's analysis of the European Social Survey, carried out every two years to measure beliefs across Europe, found attitudes towards migration as a whole were more negative after the 2008 financial crisis than after the 2015 migration crisis.
Lawmakers are already proposing harsher policies and considering how to send people back, said Martha Roussou of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organisation.
"Things will change for the worse," said Roussou.