Without borders in Europe, there is no hope of ending this migrant crisis. The principle of free movement cannot withstand this influx of refugees and the criminal efforts of people traffickers

Without borders in Europe, there is no hope of ending this migrant crisis

The principle of free movement cannot withstand this influx of refugees and the criminal efforts of people traffickers

By Janet Daley6:44PM BST 05 Sep 2015 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/11846760/Without-borders-in-Europe-there-is-no-hope-of-ending-this-migrant-crisis.html

The lesson of the past week is that a picture of a dead child can move a continent and overturn the stance of a government – but only, it seems, if that picture suits the politics of influential voices in the public dialogue. For some reason, the appalling photographs of the bodies of children who had been deliberately gassed by the Assad regime, laid out on a concrete floor in Syria two years ago, were not sufficiently moving to compel the world to take action. Are dead children only a moral outrage when they are on the beaches of Europe? Or is it just easier to use the image of that single drowned child to support the notion of Western guilt, whereas an indictment of Assad and the intervention that would logically follow from it would have invited all the recrimination which self-loathing Western opinion delights in?

The two things are joined fatally together. Europe (and America too) does have a moral obligation to those who have been misled and abandoned by its past irresponsibility. The failure to act against the Assad regime and against the Isil forces which have benefited from that failure, has created the conditions for a crisis which has no solution. Having largely ignored the problem through the summer – perhaps because most of the EU high command was on holiday – European leaders have suddenly sprung into incoherent and contradictory action. So the original irresponsibility has now been compounded by a desperate frenzy of implausible policy-making to deal with the migrant influx. Demands for a properly managed consistent programme to be agreed between member states were almost immediately undermined by unilateral pronouncements: Germany, clearly believing it owed the world restitution for its historical crimes, summarily announced that it was prepared to take 800,000 refugees.

Unfortunately, it failed to accompany this promise with any provision for their safe transport, so its offer of welcome was, in effect, an invitation to yet more thousands of people to risk their lives, as well as being a gift to the people-smuggling industry. (Which is why David Cameron’s solution of taking Syrian refugees – in supervised transit – only from UN centres in the region rather than from the migrant camps already in Europe is a good alternative.) Angela Merkel’s gesture was also an extraordinary flouting of the concerns of much poorer European partners. The shocking scenes in Hungary, and the furious obstinacy of its “hard-line” prime minister Viktor Orban, are a direct consequence of her open-handed inducement (apparently taken without consultation with Eastern European governments) to make Germany the destination of choice for Syrian asylum seekers.

The nations of the old Soviet bloc which are struggling to get their fledgling economies established are being turned into a chaotic corridor for waves of migrants seeking the benevolence of rich, secure countries like Germany and Sweden. As Mr Orban said: “Nobody wants to stay in Hungary [or] Slovakia, nor Poland, nor Estonia. All want to go to Germany.” And yet his country, and potentially others which have the misfortune to be on the Balkan land route, are being forced to cope with the consequences of this mass movement of peoples. Imagine if you were a poor householder, just managing to keep your financial head above water while you attempted to turn your circumstances around, and a very wealthy neighbour decided to throw open his doors to the needy – and one obvious way that those in need could reach that welcoming haven was by tramping through your house. Might you find yourself inclined to be unhelpful in the hopes of discouraging others from taking the same path?

The real fear of the Hungarians and their fellow Eastern Europeans is that the uncontrolled flow of migrants will force an end to the EU free movement policy which was one of the great attractions of membership for those states. And, of course, they are absolutely right. It is almost inevitable that border controls will be re-established for the duration of the present emergency. Arguably the Schengen principle is one of the causes of this crisis. It is now clearly understood all over the world that all of rich modern Europe will become instantly accessible if you can manage to set foot on any corner of an EU state: so the tiniest Greek island or the southernmost tip of the poorest region of Italy, which have no resources for registering and processing the arrival of huge numbers of people, become the entry points for unrestricted movement. What was intended to be a domestic freedom for Europeans within their own continent has become unbounded territory for the desperate populations of the world. This surely must be the irresistible pitch of the people traffickers.

The restoration of open borders, assuming it becomes necessary to suspend them, will become a moot point to be debated at great length and with maximum acrimony. This will be especially awkward since the forcible “redistribution” of migrants now under consideration must require border controls. The unelected European Commission is to propose a plan for 160,000 asylum seekers from Hungary, Italy and Greece to be “relocated” around the EU states. This would involve imposing quotas of more than 55,000 refugees on countries such as Spain and the Eastern states even though they had opposed a previous plan that involved taking more modest numbers. This is what the EU regards as democracy.

Disregarding national governments and their electorates is profoundly dangerous: it is probably no more than gross insensitivity but it might as well be a deliberate provocation to far-Right nationalist forces. (A French opinion poll last week asked, “Should France welcome a share of migrants and refugees currently trying to reach the EU, notably from Syria?” 56 per cent of respondents said “No”.) If this is not handled properly, if the EU becomes ever more heavy-handed in its panic, then the potential for public resentment turning to political unrest will be serious. Even in Britain, which would not be subject to the European Commission quotas, there are anxieties that cannot be ignored. Concerns about infrastructure and community are legitimate and plausible. The people I have met who express most alarm about taking in migrants are neither racist nor inhumane: they are simply aware of the pressures on their hospitals and GPs’ surgeries, and of shortages of housing and school places. These are not callous excuses for xenophobia. They are grown-up responsible concerns which deserve a fair hearing.

In any event, the quotas and forcible redistribution which are coming to those European states where popular resistance is not getting much of a hearing will be meaningless concepts if there is unrestricted movement of people between countries. Anyone “redistributed” to a country he doesn’t like could just jump on a train and redistribute himself to the place he actually wanted to live. Or are these relocated migrants to be subjected to some sort of surveillance which would inhibit their movement? (I daresay the European courts would have something to say about that.) I doubt that anyone has thought about this problem much at all.