Why EU leaders should re-align policies on irregular migration and asylum with EU Civil Society
Even if EU leaders remain motivated by the same extrinsic political motives, strategically it makes more sense for them to re-align with EU civil society.
This is in addition to co-subscribing to this open letter-
I think it’s worth adding a political strategic point of view, because frankly I don’t think any of the above is new to EU top politicians, nor are they motivated by intrinsic values such as belief in universal human rights. If they were genuinely motivated by such values, they wouldn’t have chosen and persisted with the policies that they’ve developed over the last seven years.
The motive for aligning EU policies on irregular migration and asylum with the populist-right, outwardly since March 2016 and internally probably since Autumn 2015, has been to conserve the center-right parties’ hold on the middle ground of EU politics and to repatriate voters from the populist right to the mainstream center right, to avoid their voting and polling %s increasing further and then having disastrous consequences for everyone.
I think this probably relies on the assumption that the populist right’s voters are more likely to be low turnout or floating voters, who are thus more likely to swing an election than the more predictable, mainstream center-left voters are. So, even though at the time of deciding in March 2016 the Refugees Welcome volunteers and activists movement was about three times bigger than the populist-right or populist nationalists (‘pop-nats’), EU executive government leaders decided to align with the populist right.
Now for some more facts:
There’s no sign in the voting or polling statistics that this strategy made any difference as intended. The expected benefits of reducing growth of the populist-right and repatriating swing voters back to center-right parties have not materialised, and what’s been and is being sacrificed for this strategy is: a) at least 27,047 (since 2014) lives of people who were most probably refugees and attempted to cross the Mediterranean by irregular means to enter and claim asylum; b) the political support of the mainstream center-left voters, civil society organisations and the most sociopolitically active and influential segment of the center-left and left who are the persistent volunteers and activists; c) it’s further damaging the moral social cohesion of the EU as a political community by acting against the EU’s foundational liberal humanistic and universally democratic values and principles, and it mainstreams and normalises far-right politics into the center of EU politics, like the Trojans pulling the wooden horse into their citadel.
The calculation, albeit Macchiavellian, that the sacrifices are worth it for their own selfish, extrinsic political motives, does not even hold up to scrutiny compared to the results. Even if EU executives are only interested in their parties’ hold on power, this strategy doesn’t make sense. It never really did, and they’ve been doubling down harder ever since despite all the evidence it’s useless for their aims and more probably counter-productive.
The next relevant fact is that people’s moral orientations to immigration and especially people of other ethnic backgrounds entering ‘their’ country when the immigrants are not expected to be immediately instrumentally useful to them are very inelastic. People’s moral attitudes to this tend to be stable over their lifetimes. What varies more is the salience or importance people attach to the issue. This is essentially why the strategy doesn’t work — it doesn’t change populist right voters’ moral orientations, it just gives more importance to the topic which they organise their movement around. So it’s more likely to be counter-productive and sustaining their electoral support.
The article above proposes compromising, which is sort of what EU leaders are doing now — using outwardly humanitarian rhetoric to disguise policies which are really coming from and effectively aligned with the populist right, but I don’t think it’s fooling anyone on the center-left anymore, at least not those of us who are actively engaged with refugees and in civil society, who also have the most influence on the rest of center-left to left public opinion.
The whole system of policies: the punitive deterrence regime, externalising border control to third-countries where they pay the government, regardless of whether it’s a repressive dictatorship, for extraterritorial refoulement services, and obstructing, falsely criminalising and deliberately delaying the civil rescue fleet in every way they can (until the judiciary step in) is predicated on the assumption that sea rescue is a pull factor, which is false —
I think the populist right and EU executive leaders carry on repeating the story that sea rescue is a pull factor because the reality on social media that their followers believe it and demand such policies is more important to them than what’s real in universally shared, external, material reality.
I don’t agree with compromising on fundamental moral values. Besides my personal moral disgust and utter contempt for populist nationalist values and assumptions, I don’t think it makes sense even from an extrinsically motivated political point of view to compromise on such a basic level so that eventually almost everyone will end up hating EU political leaders equally. The populist right hate them for not doing even more spectacular public displays of sadistic cruelty to the most marginalised and vulnerable foreigners, and the center-left and left hate them for being so cruel, arbitrary, and undermining our core values in actual government practices. It’s really a lose-lose-lose strategy
The only compromise I am willing to make is to explain why regularly porous borders of democratic states are legitimate in terms of human rights constitutional legal philosophy. According to the human rights and inherent human dignity based view of states’ legitimacy and authority, all legal procedures should ultimately be means of enacting and proportionately balancing different valid human rights claims. The clearest legislative articulation of this view is in German Basic Law Article 1.
Border procedures ordinarily are a means of balancing different human rights claims of those inside and outside the border. Without borders, we would be unable to protect anyone from their persecutors pursuing them, on mass and not just individually as happens in some cases now, so there would be no safe place to flee to. But, ordinary border procedures are not absolute legally, nor should they be treated as sacred or beyond rational scrutiny. The populist right now talk about borders as if they’re valuable in and of themselves, rather than merely procedures for certain purposes.
The legitimate purposes of ordinary border procedures are related to ordinary human needs, in accordance with basic human rights, but those ordinary border procedures are legally supposed to have exceptions and extraordinary procedures to match with extraordinarily vitally serious human needs to enter. In international law, if a person presents at a border and declares an on first appearances valid claim for international protection, unless the receiving authorities can find a solid reason to consider their claim manifestly unfounded or ineligible for asylum within a reasonable timeframe, they must be admitted to access the ordinary asylum procedures, but governments now have arranged things so that this is practically impossible to access in almost all cases, in order to preclude most people from claiming asylum, while still performing their rhetorical claims to human rights as as legitimative story for their own political benefits. There is also an extraordinary form of border procedure in the transit zone asylum procedures, in airports, but EU governments have arranged conditions to make that procedure practically almost totally inaccessible, especially for the people from the countries where they’re most likely to really need it.
As some Syrian friends have ironically joked: their passports are the most expensive in the world now (800$ for a renewal), but it feels like they need a visa to go the bathroom. As soon as a Syrian applies for any sort of visa other than a humanitarian or asylum visa, unless they’re already established in Europe, they’re assumed to be trying to enter to claim asylum and refused.
The populist right’s talking points include the rhetorical device created by EU executive leaders of mentioning ‘legal routes’, as if these practically exist at a relevant scale and speed, which they don’t. The legal procedures for asylum seekers to enter Europe are tokens used in governments’ legitimative rhetoric for themselves, not a realistic response to the scale of human needs now, nor a realistic response to European governments’ shares in the culpability for the causes of the vast and unprecedented number of people globally now in need of resettlement due to forced displacement, 110m.
https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends
Most of the 110 million people forcibly displaced globally now are probably in need of resettlement. Keeping people effectively arbitrarily detained in refugee camps indefinitely, even if they are really safe, which is often not the case (e.g. Rukban), doesn’t allow people opportunities to live with hope again, and that’s almost as cruel as killing people. Also, most of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) included in UNHCR’s numbers there would probably leave their countries if they could, but they’re violently prevented from leaving by Western governments’ commissioning third-parties outside their territories to commit extraterritorial refoulement.
The non-refoulement principle is only limited in law by “effective authority or control,” not whether the actions committed or instigated occur inside or outside the state in question’s territorial jurisdiction. Governments have de facto normalised the practices of commissioning extraterritorial refoulement, penalisation of irregular entrance, as an example to deter the rest, and ignoring the right to leave any country including one’s own, all of which are very clearly illegal, and on much more fundamental grounds, in terms of legal philosophy, than the existence or legitimacy of borders.
Even more tragically, this set of unlawful practices and rhetoric will probably continue in the world for decades after Western governments maybe eventually move on from this phase, like the War on Terror rhetoric and practices of repression are still used by despotic regimes, both Western-alied and opposite, for decades now after Western governments moved on, and that’s a part of why we have 110 million people forcibly displaced globally.
The EU’s rate of resettlment of people in need of it should be proportionate to the real scale of human needs now and to the EUs objective capacity to resettle and integrate people relative to (only) other genuinely safe countries globally. That would be very challenging, but it’s not really materially impossible, and in the long-term it’d do us all good to get over our politically normal now, deeply habitual and historical, narrow-minded selfishness and systemic racism. It’s probably the only way our civilization can be saved, or extend its lifespan beyond a few more generations, by transcending itself.
If Western governments had in fact applied the values they claim and had carried out democratic internationalist policies universally and consistently, we would not now have 110 million people forcibly displaced globally and most of them urgently needing international resettlement. The consequences of irresponsibility are ultimately unavoidable. Yes, its absolutely unsustainable to have so many people needing and trying to enter Europe for asylum, but forcibly keeping people out when they need a genuinely safe place where they can rebuild a life with hope is absolutely immoral, and it’s not even strategically feasible to maintain this long-term.
I know legal routes for asylum into the EU are practically almost non-existent because I’ve been helping people to apply for these routes for almost seven years now. I know of at least 50 people who got out using the information and advice I gave them, and sometimes drafting and checking applications, mostly to France, which is the only EU country that allows direct individual applications for visas for asylum in significant numbers. I don’t know exactly how many people because I published general how-to advice online, and sometimes people tell me after they succeed ‘it worked, thanks!’, but I don’t keep a count and I don’t know if people don’t tell me. For the last 6 years or so before Christmas I get a surprise message from someone: we got visas, we’re going to France! which is always my best present. This is also thanks to the French consulate staff who I think make a point of issuing some more asylum visas just before the Christmas holidays.
Even if only from a selfish political point of view, it makes more sense to pick a side, preferably the biggest side, and have at least part of the EU electorate supporting the executive leadership. And given that the biggest section of EU citizens who vote is the center-left and we are radically more aligned with the values and principles which are built into the whole of EU law and institutional structures, that’s a better bet for institutional stability.
EU disintegration is a real ongoing risk. We’re not just risking the far-right gaining more power, but if we continue with policies which radically undermine the electorate’s support for the leadership by persistently acting against the core moral values of the majority of the EU population it risks the EU becoming unsaveable as a system of institutions, which would probably tip the balance of risk and protective factors for the whole of Western civilisation to collapse. The conflict between philoxenia versus xenophobia is really at the heart of any system of beliefs about self, others and the world, that’s why people’s values and views about it are so inelastic, and also why it affects the whole system of societal resilience for better or worse so much.
Sadly that’s not an exaggeration. Every civilisation before has had a lifetime, and there’s no solid reason to expect Western civilisation (euphemistically known as ‘the international democratic order’) to be the first exception ever. Given the state of our global polycrisis and our ostrich head in the sand approach to it as a whole so far, I would be quite surprised if I see this international system survive til the end of my lifetime. As Ibn Khaldun argued in the Muqaddimah in 1377(AD), the strongest predictor of adaptive stability or decline and collapse of societies, or clusters of societies (‘civilisations’), is whether they maintain or degrade their عصبيّة ‘asabiyya, moral social cohesion, related to worldviews and core assumptions. Opting for xenophobia over philoxenia is radically undermining the EU’s moral social cohesion, as views about strangers are an inherent part of the inchoate unconceptualied emotional core of ethics, implicit ontologies and social epistemologies. That’s probably why the Bible emphasises philoxenia so many times, and it’s in the first recorded spiritual experience of the first patriarch, Abraham (Genesis 18:1–8 and 22): philoxenia as theophany.
The sacrifice of refugees’ lives and losing the support of the EU center-left to left electorate has not yielded the intended results, for seven years now. Continuing with the strategy of rhetorically framing far-right policies in center-left language is not working. It’s long overdue for a strategy change.
Legally how to solve this so that we don’t continue causing more mass drownings includes:
- Allow much bigger quotas for resettlement via UNHCR, so that people who’ve already been through the Refugee Status Determination procedure or have been registered with UNHCR for many years already can access genuinely safe resettlement and renewal of hope;
- The EU Council and European Parliament should resolve that CCV 25.1 is obligatory for all member states not discretionary, and that “when international obligations apply” is not time limited to 90 days, which would mean that all EU member states are obligated to apply or create implementing national laws to apply for humanitarian visas;
- Explicitly recognise the ongoing Mass Influx, which has only been suppressed forcibly since 2016, and activate the Temporary Protection Directive, including obligatory proportional shares of responsibility for relocation around member states, and including the provision in clause 5 for proactively going to get people and bring them into the EU safely, in the least expensive manner, with ferries or flights;
- Amend carrier’s liability regulation 2001/51/C to exempt people with prima facie valid asylum claims, so that people can actually approach border control to declare their asylum claims and if found on first appearances valid be promptly admitted in acccordance with the law.
