CHURCH leaders and campaigners greeted with dismay the High Court’s ruling last month that the UK Government’s scheme to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda is lawful (News, 23 December).
Liberal pundits have framed the Rwanda scheme, and other anti-migrant measures, as integral to the Conservative Party’s “post-Brexit strategy”, thereby implying a widening dissonance of values between the UK and the European Union.
Beyond rhetoric, however, the scheme has little to do with Brexit. While the drive to “take back control of our borders” does resonate with messaging in the 2016 referendum, externalising the UK’s asylum provision, and racially securing its sea borders, makes Britain more, not less, like Europe.
EU countries and the European Commission set precedents for the UK’s outsourcing of migration issues to poorer countries (in Africa and elsewhere), and with significant human-rights failures. They did so through disastrous migration and border-security partnerships with Turkey, from 2016, and with Libya, from 2017.
Like the UK-Rwanda deal, these agreements entailed exchanging the hosting of asylum-seekers by poorer states for financial incentives from richer ones. When individuals monetise migration, it is trafficking; when states do so, it is diplomacy.
THE 2016 EU-Turkey arrangement arose in response to the 2015 “migration crisis”, when about one million migrants, many of them Syrians displaced by civil war, crossed into Europe over the Aegean and by land from Turkey. The agreement obliged Turkey to restrict crossings, and allowed Greece to return failed asylum- seekers to Turkey, which then hosted 2.7 million Syrians (the figure today is 3.6 million).
This was done in exchange for €6 billion of humanitarian assistance from Brussels (the UK’s pledge to Rwanda is just two per cent of that); the prospect of visa-free travel in Europe for Turks; and a promise by the EU to admit selected Syrians who had waited in Turkey, as part of a one-to-one exchange.
Brokered chiefly by the German Chancellor at that time, Angela Merkel, the deal was dubbed “a stain on the EU’s human-rights record” by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in 2021. The IRC said, furthermore, that it made “crystal clear outsourcing the EU’s migration management to non-EU countries is neither a humane, sustainable [n]or workable solution”.
Greece’s asylum apparatus broke down to such an extent that, instead of assessing cases individually, the country’s authorities implemented a blanket policy of informal, violent, and frequently deadly pushbacks of asylum-seekers at sea. They were supported in this operationally by Frontex, the EU’s border agency.
Forty thousand Syrians remained trapped in wretched conditions in Greek camps that had been designed for only a few thousand. Turkey, meanwhile, strategically weaponised migration flows at its land border with Greece, pressuring the EU to renew funding and to speed up visa concessions for Turkish citizens. An investigation published by The Guardian in May 2021 found that Frontex-supported pushbacks by Greece and other EU states had resulted in about 2000 deaths since 2015.
The consequences of outsourcing asylum-management have been even more alarming in Libya. An investigation by the Associated Press, in 2019, found that, “in a country without a functioning government, huge sums of European money have been diverted to intertwined networks of militiamen, traffickers and coast guard members who exploit migrants.” These claims were verified in subsequent reports by other organisations.
An overlapping web of financially incentivised agreements between the EU, Italy, and the UN-supported government in Tripoli seeks to pen migrants in the unstable North African country rather than have them cross to Lampedusa and other Italian islands.
AP’s investigation found that Libyan militias “torture, extort and otherwise abuse migrants for ransoms in detention centres . . . often in compounds that receive millions in European money”. Frontex denies the involvement of its staff in operating such centres, but Frontex drones and spotter planes co-ordinate with Libya’s coastguard in operations that lead to the placing of migrants there.
IT IS hard not to compare continued hostility towards brown-skinned people fleeing Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the welcome extended to white-skinned ones from Ukraine. The refugee wave of 2022 was eight times higher than in 2015, and yet the media have, by and large, framed it as a “humanitarian challenge”, not an “existential crisis” for Europe.
Ukrainians are allowed free transit across multiple countries to places where existing personal networks can help them. Unlike in 2015, there are no pejorative observations about “asylum shopping” or “failure to register in the first safe country” — nor calls for deportation to front-line states.
As Stefanos Levidis, a researcher at Forensic Architecture, a monitoring organisation, has observed, morally speaking, “borders are a mirror of the society they enclose.” Such a statement tells a harrowing tale about today’s Europe.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest. He reviews Evangelicalism: A very short introduction here
