From preventing harm to the maximization of suffering: How Europe fumbled migration

Arab News

20 hours ago

https://arab.news/zdhda
Europe's hastily constructed migration frameworks have evolved from mere bureaucratic missteps into the calibrated engine of devastation that we see today.
What began as fatally misguided attempts at containment, fixated on hardened borders and outsourced deterrence at a cost of billions, has mutated into a self-perpetuating source of misery, amplifying human suffering to gain an edge in the face of the ever-changing winds of domestic politics.
Naysayers will argue that the crisis that emerged as migrant arrivals increased, and the death tolls from unsuccessful attempts mounted, forced Brussels into what proved to be such a sloppy response and so there was bound to be some 'policy drift' — unfortunate mishaps to be temporarily endured until future interventions corrected them.
However, the reality of the situation is rather different, because the sum total of Europe's failures is now a measurable, accelerating retreat from its proclaimed values, which is being executed using a cold political calculus.
Humanitarian obligations are being discarded not through neglect but as conscious strategy. The driving imperative? Electoral survival at any cost, even if it means dismantling the very principles and ideals Europe projects globally. The initial failures have hardened into a purposeful architecture in which harm is not a byproduct but the main output.
Consider the numbers: Brussels channels more than $5.2 billion into outsourcing its border enforcement, transforming Libya, Tunisia and Morocco into de facto migration buffer zones that inevitably become markets for cruelty in which payment hinges on suppression of arrival numbers, regardless of the methods used.
The result? A 59 percent reduction in Mediterranean crossings in 2024. However, this masks woeful operational realities in the strategic abandonment of tens of thousands of people in desert expulsion zones, including surging death tolls, many of which go undocumented, and the identification of mass graves near the border between Libya and Tunisia.
That is without even taking account of the domino effects of illicit economies and networks that thrive on 'double-dipping.' In Libya, for example, non-state armed groups easily obtain EU funding for containment efforts while simultaneously actively trafficking desperate people via 'safe route taxes,' boat fees and even 'auctions.'
Europe has engineered a self-sustaining machinery of harm. By outsourcing brutality, legitimizing xenophobic rhetoric, and criminalizing humanitarian acts, it has rendered its own asylum norms obsolete.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
The fault for this lies primarily with programs, initiatives and sources of funding such as the EU's Neighborhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, which financially rewards autocrats for migrant suppression while omitting any binding safeguards on human rights.
Naturally, such myopic policies allow, inadvertently or not, evil to metastasize through impunity: regimes that often score the lowest on human rights indices face zero consequences for systemic abuses, precisely because they deliver the required reduction in arrival numbers.
In Tunisia, for instance, EU-funded operations enable the regime of President Kais Saied to detain, extort and forcibly abandon sub-Saharan migrants in the desert, a policy explicitly designed to 'make life difficult' until refugees 'ask for voluntary return.' It is a chilling calculus that reduces human lives to the level of deterrence metrics, all underwritten by funding and tacit endorsement from Europe.
Clearly, this externalization machinery is not a passive drift, or the handiwork of overzealous actors with a blank check empowered by Europe's tilt toward far-right populism. Europeans are now actively fortifying authoritarian governance abroad while simultaneously feeding political radicalization domestically.
By providing funding and technical support, Europe is empowering its 'partners' to enact violent crackdowns and forced displacements, actions that in turn validate and intensify the nativist rhetoric within European capitals.
This cycle is mutually reinforcing: electoral anxieties drive the funding, the funding manufactures containment 'successes' at the cost of human suffering, and these manufactured results further entrench the political forces demanding increasingly harsh action.
Humanitarian principles are not eroded by accident, they are traded for a '59 percent' statistic.
Simultaneously, the political landscape in Europe has been irrevocably poisoned by the very xenophobia its policies help to cultivate. Political corrosion now manifests as a self-inflicted contagion, wherein the mainstream parties that adopt increasingly nativist rhetoric inevitably accelerate their own irrelevance while empowering the very extremism they claim to combat.
Germany's center-right Christian Democrats promised intensified border theatrics and mass deportations of Syrians while hemorrhaging support to extremists despite initial leads in polls, ultimately resulting in the far-right Alternative for Germany party securing 21 percent of the vote at the federal election in February.
Meanwhile, the suspension of asylum rights in Poland, a move rubber-stamped by Brussels, failed to act as an electoral shield and instead merely paved the way for anti-migrant populists to secure executive and veto authority.
The 16.6 million forcibly displaced persons in the Middle East and North Africa are confronted not only by razor wire but a continent that is actively investing in their suffering.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
These far-right parties now wield ministerial authority that is normalizing the dismantling of international protection frameworks. Their playbook is consistent: manufacture consent through spectacle, in the calculated normalization of cruelty and abandonment.
Germany's Interior Ministry, for example, illegally rejected 330 asylum seekers within two months of performative border operations, a spectacle divorced from efficacy yet potent in terms of political messaging.
Similarly, Poland concealed the documented deaths of dozens of migrants in the Bialowieza exclusion zone since 2021, a direct consequence of systemic pushbacks.
Beyond the Mediterranean, other countries historically remote from front-line arrivals are also actively pursuing regressive policies, as European values capitulate to misguided reactionism. The human toll of this is both immediate and intergenerational.
Germany's suspension of family reunification rights for subsidiary protection holders (individuals who do not meet the criteria for refugee status but have been granted international protection because of the risk of serious harm in home countries), primarily Syrians, will result in fractured households for years to come, severing integration pathways.
Moreover, Germany now processes a mere 2.8 asylum claims per 100,000 people. The rate in Poland has plummeted to a negligible 0.4. These figures are dwarfed by the 8,900 in Jordan.
This deliberate institutional collapse facilitates the next regression: the targeted erosion of protections for even Ukrainian refugees. Once deemed 'acceptable,' and initially welcomed as 'European kin,' they now face punitive means-testing, reduced child benefits in Poland, and the denial of social provisions in Germany under Merz's spurious 'social tourism' libel.
Solidarity, it seems, expires when usefulness diminishes.
The capitulation of the more moderate center-right has failed to contain the surge in anti-migrant populism or reduce its appeal to enterprising politicians seeking office or reelection. It has succeeded only in commodifying human suffering as electoral currency, and entrenching the dismantling of protection frameworks as standard operating procedure.
Worse still, Europe is even criminalizing compassion. The 'Hajnowka 5' face five-year prison sentences in Poland for providing water and clothing to an Iraqi family. In Belgium, police colluded with far-right militants to violently dismantle solidarity vigils.
The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, set for implementation in 2026, codifies this moral collapse by incentivizing 'remigration,' a euphemism for coercive strategies of attrition that effectively abandon migrants in a lethal state of limbo.
The conclusion to draw from all this is inescapable: Europe has engineered a self-sustaining machinery of harm. By outsourcing brutality, legitimizing xenophobic rhetoric, and criminalizing humanitarian acts, it has rendered its own asylum norms obsolete.
The 16.6 million forcibly displaced persons in the Middle East and North Africa are confronted not only by razor wire but a continent that is actively investing in their suffering.
With far-right parties now entrenched in governments from Warsaw to Berlin — for now — and the EU institutionalization of deterrence-as-doctrine, any return to protection-based policies is politically foreclosed.
Europe has not merely failed to manage migration, it has weaponized despair. The ruins of its values are now scattered in deserts, forests and voting booths alike.
• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington D.C. and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
X: @HafedAlGhwell