Europe summons emergency meeting over refugee crisis

Adebayo Onanuga

August 31, 2015

Enjoying this story? Read the full magazine — archive back to 1993.

File Photo: People wait after disembarking from tanker Maria Bottiglieriin carrying more than 110 Central African migrants, men and women, on April 15, 2015 in the port of Corigliano Calabro. Italian coastguards intercepted 42 boats on April 12 and 13, carrying 6,500 migrants attempting to make the hazardous crossing to Europe.

Hungarian police arrested a fifth suspect, a Bulgarian citizen, in connection with the deaths. Three Bulgarians and one Afghan had already been arrested.

BORDERLESS SYSTEM

Criticism of Europe’s disparate laws and approaches to dealing with asylum seekers has mounted.

Some governments have refused to take in refugees and resisted EU proposals to agree on a common plan. Others are toughening their asylum policies and border security, sometimes because of rising anti-immigration and nationalist sentiment.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius accused eastern European states, notably Hungary, which is building a fence against migrants along its border, of a “scandalous” policy.

“They are extremely harsh. Hungary is part of Europe, which has values and we do not respect those value by putting up fences,” Fabius told Europe 1 radio.

But British interior minister Theresa May blamed Europe’s borderless system, known as “Schengen”, for fuelling the crisis and demanded tighter EU rules on free movement.

“When it was first enshrined, free movement meant the freedom to move to a job, not the freedom to cross borders to look for work or claim benefits,” May said. “We must take some big decisions, face down powerful interests and reinstate the original principle.”

Some European governments are considering amending the Schengen code, but the European Commission, the EU executive which enforces it, says there is no need to change the rules, either to improve security or control migration.

In Italy which as the entry point for many migrants has been at the forefront of the crisis, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said the rising death toll would push EU states to confront the problem.

“It will take months, but we will have a single European policy on asylum, not as many policies as there are countries,” he said.

One response to “Europe summons emergency meeting over refugee crisis”

AlgorithmicAnalyst
August 31, 2015

Best solution, most humane and most economical, is to set up housing voucher programs in their home countries, or thereabouts, so they can stay in the general area they came from ………

Initially, funding would probably have to come from foreign governments or international organizations, but housing voucher programs are an economic stimulus, and are close to being economically self-sustainable (or better), so the host government should be able to take over the funding in the long run.

Housing voucher programs have worked well in USA, to ease the disastrous homeless crisis, and in fact is the only type of program that has worked in practice.