Broken promise of ‘European solution’ on migration overshadows next week’s summit

Twelve years ago, EU summit leaders announced they had a strategy to tackle unprecedented migrant arrivals. Next week, they will meet again in Brussels and to tell us something similar. We journalists will report on the latest twists and turns, hoping to get some sort of angle that hasn’t been covered. But the reality is that our leaders have broadly failed. Dozens of EU summit conclusions have been published since 2015, when one around million Syrians arrived in Europe to seek protection. We need stronger external borders to preserve the Schengen passport-free zone, they said. We need partnerships with foreign states to save lives. We need to step up deportations. We need a European solution. All of these ideas and strategies have found a home in council conclusions, in various iterations, since 2015. All of them. Some have actually panned out, including an EU migrant swap deal with Turkey and other deals with autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Others like internal reforms on asylum have also been delivered. Yet the sense of urgency to tackle these issues continues because there is an obvious disconnect between what has been delivered, the promises made and the lived experience on the ground. People still come. Some 80,000 arrived in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta end of July alone. Many are still fleeing violence, war and economic hardships. Others are lured by the promise of labour in Europe by Europeans willing to exploit them. I remember meeting a group of boys from Bangladesh on the Ocean Viking, freshly rescued in the middle of the night, asking when they would be able to start working in Italy. One of them was still shaking with fear and sobbing, following a near death experience. The European Commission is now claiming that the drop of irregular arrivals is due to their migration policy reforms, as if the fall of the murderous Assad regime in Syria had no discernible impact. Perhaps some of that is true. But there is no disputing that Syrians accounted for over 100,000 irregular crossings in 2023, a year before Assad fell. It then dropped to around 6,000. Today, it is around 1,000, according to Frontex. At some point, one has to wonder if these conclusions, repeated ad hominem, is nothing but political theatre by a leadership that has run out of ideas.