Europe has no answer to its immigration problem

Pulling off the rhetorical trick that Brexit would undermine the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator, said in 2018 that the agreement meant removing borders not only from maps, ‘but also in minds’. Even a single CCTV camera on the North-South roads was considered a threat to the peace process. Now it turns out, which is grimly amusing, that the Irish government has not banished the border from its mind. The Republic is upset that asylum seekers are crossing the border that it does not believe in, fleeing the threat of deportation to Rwanda from the United Kingdom. It talks of sending them back, ignoring a recent decision of its own courts that Britain is not a safe country. It surely lacks the capacity to do this because of our common travel area with Ireland. I am fascinated to see the deterrent effect of Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda policy even before it is implemented. It is still highly possible that the policy won’t work, because of legal loopholes, but one can sense the beginning of a certain envy for what Britain is trying to do. The whole of the EU is bound by its own rules called, by chance, the Dublin Regulation. We are not. Immigration is an ever-growing issue of popular discontent across the EU, but European theology insists on open internal borders and is currently extending the Schengen Agreement to Bulgaria and Romania. The EU has no answer to its own problem of mass asylum seeking and other illegal migration. I predict that, within a few years, Europe will embark on a much larger equivalent of the Rwanda programme, perhaps operating in several non-EU countries at once.