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A float satirising the EU refugee crisis at this year’s Rose
Monday parade in Dusseldorf
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crisis at this year’s Rose Monday parade in Dusseldorf
Tuesday, June 19, 2018 –
6:36am
The number of people seeking asylum in the EU dropped by nearly
half last year, as refugees were turned off and turned away by an
increasingly hostile environment stoked by the rise of far-right
anti-immigrant populist parties across the continent.
In decline
The European Asylum Support Office (EASO) counted 728,470 asylum
applications in 2017, a 44% reduction on the 1.3 million made the
the previous year.
The fall in asylum applications “reflects a sharp drop in people
making the hazardous journey over the eastern Mediterranean to
Greece, and the central Mediterranean to Italy” says The Guardian. Asylum-seekers coming from Syria,
Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for nearly a third of all
claims.
The pressure on the EU’s external borders from migrants
decreased for the second year in a row, as did the number of
migrants granted refugee status.
According to provisional data from EASO, in the first four
months of 2018 about 197,000 people sought protection in the EU,
fewer than during the same period in each of the last three years,
but “still higher that the pre-crisis levels in 2014”, says Politico.
Political battles
Growing tension within and between national governments over
immigration policy has been laid bare over the past week with
emergency talks in the German coalition over border controls and a
bitter stand-off between EU nations over a migrant rescue ship that
eventually docked in Spain after being banned from Italy and
Malta.
World Cup group G: England and Belgium win opening
games
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced widespread criticism
for her decision to let in over one million migrants at the height
of the crisis in 2015.
Weakened domestically, she is now caught in deadlock with her
own interior minister, Horst Seehofer, over plans to turn away
migrants already registered in other EU states. This will, she
argues, unfairly burden southern European countries such as Italy
and Greece, and further play into the hands of anti-EU, hardline
populists in those countries.
Merkel vs. Trump
NBC News says she managed to “sidestepped a
major political crisis” by securing more time to resolve the
coalition rift over border controls.
But just moments later, US President Donald Trump sought to
exploit the divisions within Merkel’s government to drive his own
agenda and deflect attention from his administration’s policies
towards Mexican immigrants, which has drawn fire in the US and even
been criticised by his own wife.
The people of Germany are turning against
their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin
coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over
Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and
violently changed their culture!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018
In a direct warning to the American electorate, Trump added: “We
don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen
with us!”
Crime statistics
German mass-circulation Bild newspaper described Trump’s
intervention on the domestic debate of a western ally as “highly
unusual.”
Others have questioned Trump’s claim that an influx of
immigrants over the past few years has led to a rise in crime.
According to official figures released last month, Germany last
year recorded its lowest number of criminal offences since 1992,
with figures showing the crime rate is falling more quickly among non-German
suspects.
But for now momentum appears to be with those seeking a harder
line on new immigrants entering the EU.
European leaders have spent more than two years trying to agree
common asylum rules, “but talks are deadlocked over whether there
should be a compulsory system for allocating refugees to different
member states” says The Guardian.
immigration Asylum
seekers Refugee
crisis
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