Legitimate protest

Camp installed in the old powder magazine of Barranco Seco, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.Angel Medina G. / EFE

Lesbos, Lampedusa and, although not so dramatically yet, the Canary Islands have become the sad symbols of the failure of the EU migration policy.

One after another, the proposals of the European Commission to solve one of the existential dilemmas of the community club have crashed due to their lack of political realism (as in the case of mandatory quotas for the distribution of asylees), due to the lack of solidarity of some Member States (read especially Hungary and Poland) or by blatant inefficiency on the ground (such as the fragile performance of Frontex and EASO, the European asylum agency).

The new attempt by the Commission to order and regulate the demographic flows towards the Old Continent, baptized as the Migration and Asylum Pact, comes loaded with good intentions, but it also seems doomed to failure if the demands and needs of European partners at the forefront of the problem.

The prime ministers of Spain, Italy, Greece and Malta, in a joint movement of unusual forcefulness, this week expressed their objections in writing to an immigration package that, in their opinion, would leave them exposed to face alone a phenomenon that it is a common challenge.

The secondary movements show that the majority of people who arrive irregularly in Spain, Italy or Greece do not aspire to stay in those countries but to continue on their way as soon as they can to Germany, the United Kingdom, France or the Netherlands, due to their casualties unemployment rates and their powerful social protection systems.

The Commission proposes to solve this problem with a triple intervention: border shielding, with the reinforcement of Frontex and the deployment of up to 10,000 European border guards;

expedited return policy, to increase return rates of just 40%;

and a mandatory solidarity mechanism among the member states to share the burden of irregular migrants, but with several ways of concretization (quotas, support in returns, or projects in countries of origin).

The countries of the South see in the Pact a clear imbalance between the “strict and detailed” precision of their responsibilities and the “complex and vague” nature of solidarity mechanisms that, in practice, are predicted difficult to implement and almost impossible to implement. check.

They are right.

Without greater precision in these mechanisms, the foreseeable outcome will be the escape of many partners, chaotic ad hoc solutions at critical moments and an accumulation of people who are very difficult to manage at entry points to the continent, such as the Canary Islands.

Converting EU island lands into large migrant holding camps is not an acceptable solution.

Not even the EU can leave the management of a common challenge on the shoulders of a few countries;

not even it and its member countries can establish unworthy practices that violate their fundamental values.

It is imperative to find a solution in accordance with these values ​​and that is fair between the partners.

The Pact is a good starting point for solving a temporary and occasional problem such as refugee crises.

But it must be improved when it comes to structural economic migration, which is the main part.

Solidarity mechanisms must be specified.

And in general, the channels of asylum and regular migration must be improved.