ARGUMENT
Spain Rescued a Ship. It Won’t Rescue Europe.
The new Spanish prime minister has refused to follow Italy
in a race to the bottom, but that doesn’t mean that Madrid will lead the EU to
adopt more humane migration policies.
BY GONZALO FANJUL | JULY 2, 2018, 7:35 AM
When Italy refused to allow a ship carrying hundreds of
migrants rescued at sea to dock at one of its ports in early June, Spain
unexpectedly came to the rescue.
Four years into the largest refugee crisis to strike Europe
in decades, the hide-and-seek game played by former Spanish Prime Minister
Mariano Rajoy was abruptly ended by the new administration of Pedro Sánchez.
The decision to admit the Aquarius into Valencia’s harbor was both a moral and
symbolic triumph for Spain, showing that the country is not afraid to row
against the populist tideThe decision to admit the Aquarius into Valencia’s
harbor was both a moral and symbolic triumph for Spain, showing that the
country is not afraid to row against the populist tide unleashed by Italian Deputy
Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and his xenophobic comrades across Europe.
There will likely be more of these symbols in the months to
come. The decision on the Aquarius is part of a migrant-friendly stance that
includes a proposal to eliminate barbed wire at the borders that separate
Spain’s Ceuta and Melilla enclaves from Morocco and a commitment to guarantee
asylum rights. Spain could also start to improve its shameful record in refugee
resettlement and relocation — so far a mere 11 percent of the agreed EU quota
by the September 2017 deadline. Most important, the new Socialist government
will restore undocumented migrants’ full health coverage, reversing a 2012
decision by Rajoy’s government.
Each of these steps is a corrective to a period during which
Spain’s migration policies became regressive at home and hopelessly vague at
the European level. The question now is whether Spain’s domestic shift will
evolve into a genuine challenge to the current state of affairs in Europe. That
would mean fighting within the European Union for an alternative to Brussels’
immoral and self-defeating migration regime. In this regard, unfortunately,
refugee advocates are likely to be disappointed.
Over the last 20 years, neither Spain nor the Socialist
Party have been moral exemplars. On the contrary, Spain was a laboratory for
the model adopted later by the EU. Abundant immigration flows followed the
economic expansion of the 1990s and the 2000s. Between 2000 and 2010, almost 5
million migrants arrived in the country, mainly from Latin America, Eastern
Europe, and North Africa. As is often the case, most of them integrated
naturally and found opportunities in the construction and tourism sectors; some
moved elsewhere or returned home when the economic boom ended after 2008.
But it was the 2005 to 2007 “cayuco” crisis, when 70,000
migrants reached Spanish shores via the West Africa to Canary Islands route,
that changed everything. In response to Europe’s habit of looking elsewhere,
the government of then-Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero consolidated
the logic of securitization and externalization of migration control that
became widespread in the following years.
Between December 2005 and October 2010, nearly a dozen
migration control and repatriation agreements were signed or implemented
between Spain and countries in West and North Africa. In some cases — such as
Senegal and Mauritania — the agreements included the physical presence of
Spanish police forces. The fences around Ceuta and Melilla were reinforced,
Spain’s integrated external surveillance system — a technologically
sophisticated mechanism to detect irregular maritime movements towards the
border — was established, and Spain created a comprehensive Africa plan to
promote development cooperation with the region.
Private companies and organizations played an increasingly
significant role in all of these policies. In fact, the privatization of
migration policies is another area where Spain has shown Europe the way. An
investigation by the journalistic foundation porCausa found that a migration
control industry covering four critical sectors has been booming. This industry
handles border protection and surveillance, detention and expulsion of irregular
migrants, reception and integration of migrants through temporary and long-term
programs, and externalization of the control of migration flows in third
countries.
Between 2007 and 2016, porCausa was able to identify 943
public contracts worth more than $700,000. Ten out of the 350 identified
companies — mostly focused on border protection and surveillance — receive more
than half of the total funding and have secured a critical position in any
future technological and logistical development of the system. The similarities
between this business and the defense industry are striking, not least because
the former is potentially vulnerable to the same risks of policy capture that
have been observed in the latter — a situation in which companies are able to influence
the laws and institutions affecting them.
In less than a decade, the EU has replicated and expanded
the Spanish migration model. As in Spain after 2007, politicians across Europe
have focused their rhetoric and energy exclusively on irregular crossing
attemptsAs in Spain after 2007, politicians across Europe have focused their
rhetoric and energy exclusively on irregular crossing attempts, which averaged
approximately 980,000 per year from 2015 to 2017 according to the European
Border and Coast Guard Agency, rather than legal entries, of which there were
an average of about 4.5 million per year across the EU from 2014 to 2016,
according to the latest figures from Eurostat.
This was reflected in the 2015 European Agenda on Migration,
which ignored previous attempts to provide a comprehensive approach to human
mobility that sought to govern movement of people rather than control it.
Serious policies that would align economic migration with labor market signals
and demographic trends and build real partnership agreements with origin
countries based on mutual trust and common institutions were sidelined.
This is a fundamental paradox of Europe’s migration regime.
The EU’s societies and economies depend upon human mobility, and most arrivals
take place in an ordered, predictable, and legal way. Yet, the inability of EU
member states to confront the humanitarian crisis at their borders even when
the numbers are decreasing — with current irregular inflows back to pre-2015
levels — is contaminating everything else. Major political instruments such as
aid, in critical foreign territories such as the Sahel, have been subordinated
to the goal of deterring a few thousand desperate people trying to reach the
EU. These misplaced priorities are distorting Europe’s moral compass and
changing its politics beyond recognition.
The scariest consequence is the spread of what French
President Emmanuel Macron recently called the “leprosy” of populism.
And on this count so far, Spain has been dramatically
different from the rest of Europe. The absence of any kind of representative
xenophobic political movement is rooted in a combination of factors: four
decades of a fascist dictatorship that is a not-so-distant memory; a long
history of Spanish emigration to Europe and Latin America, a process that
resumed during the Great Recession a decade ago; a reasonable integration
process facilitated by cultural commonalities and access to essential public
services; and a mainstream conservative party, the Popular Party, that has been
able to contain and restrain its most radical factions.
This anomaly could soon come to an end. Spurred by conflict
with Catalan separatists and the need to gain or maintain their electoral base,
both the Popular Party and Ciudadanos, a rising center-right party, have
brandished the flags of nation and identity. When slogans such as “patriotism”
and “territorial integrity” are presented in opposition to others, they
constitute a disguised yet powerful form of anti-immigration rhetoric.
When it comes to migration and refugee policies, Spain is
not essentially different from the rest of Europe. The only reason why the
current Spanish government appears to be moving forward is because most of the
other EU member states are moving backwards.
The real litmus test of Sánchez’s
leadership will be if he can move beyond symbolic gestures and demonstrate he
has the vision and the political will to promote a European migration policy
based both on principles and enlightened self-interest.
Unfortunately, he missed his first opportunity to stand out
from the crowd last week during the migration summit and European Council
meeting in Brussels. In both cases, Sánchez and other European moderate leaders
trapped themselves in the discussion of euphemisms such as “disembarkation
platforms,” showing just how effectively populist xenophobes have captured the
narrative and the political initiative in this debate. But the new Spanish
prime minister should know that it is possible to be right and alone at the
same time, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel proved at the beginning of this
crisis. Unless more governments break the logic of the lowest common
denominator and stand up to denounce the moral and practical race to the bottom
led by Italy, Austria, and Eastern European leaders, the EU is doomed
politically.
On that front, for the time being, Spain will not come to
the rescue.
Frontex chief: Increase in migrants reaching EU via Spain
Fabrice Leggeri said his agency registered 6,000 irregular
border crossings from Africa in the region last month.
By JANOSCH
DELCKER 7/7/18, 11:44 AM CET
Updated 7/7/18, 11:54 AM CET
BERLIN — Migrants are increasingly taking the Western route
across the Mediterranean to reach Europe via Spain, the head of the EU’s border
monitoring agency warned.
“If you ask me about my greatest concern, I say it’s Spain,”
Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag in an
interview to be published Sunday, excerpts of which were released Saturday.
The agency registered 6,000 irregular border crossings from
Africa in the region last month, Leggeri said. Around half of those trying to
enter the Continent are Moroccans, while the rest of them come from countries
in West Africa, he added.
“If numbers there [continue to] increase as they did
recently, this route will become the most important one [into Europe],” he told
the newspaper.
Increasingly, traffickers in Niger offer migrants to bring
them to Europe via Morocco instead of through Libya, Welt am Sonntag wrote,
referring to Frontex information.
Leggeri stressed the importance of setting up international
housing centers in Africa where migrants are brought back to when they’re
picked up at sea instead of bringing them to Europe.
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