Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron met on the fringes of Cop27 in Egypt on Monday and the Prime Minister emerged ‘confident and optimistic’ that a solution will soon be found to the Channel migrant crisis.
Sunak should be careful he doesn’t suffer the same fate as Boris Johnson, who made vigorous noises in 2019 about eradicating illegal immigration and then proved utterly incapable of fulfilling his pledges.
If the PM is serious about finding a solution to the migrant crisis he’ll require more than just the cooperation of the French President. He’ll need to hold talks with the EU, the Albanian government and Giorgia Meloni.
So far this year approximately 40,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats. More than twice that number have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy, and that number is likely to hit the six-figure mark before the year is out. As I reported in August, following a visit to Sicily, the numbers of migrants landing on Italian soil has increased dramatically this year thanks in no small part due to the efforts of German NGO vessels.
For several years they have ferried tens of thousands of migrants across the Mediterranean from Africa to Italy. In recent days two such ships Rise Above and Humanity 1, with several hundred migrants on board, have been demanding berth in Sicily, along with two Norwegian vessels carrying a further 800 migrants.
The ships arrived a fortnight after Meloni was officially sworn in as the new Prime Minister, with many voters backing her because of her pledge to restore order to Italy’s borders.
The NGO vessels also appear to have the tacit support of some of the more liberal EU member states, particularly Germany and France, both of whom voiced concern at Meloni’s victory in September’s election. ‘The EU can only work if you try to apply common solutions that fit everyone,’ was the response of Katharina Barley, a vice president of the European Parliament and a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats to Meloni’s election win. ‘That means compromise. Our experiences with this sort of government is that they do not engage in compromises at all.’
In recent days both Germany and France have demanded that Italy respect international law and accept the migrant vessels, and some of the world’s media have accused Meloni of ‘agitating’ her European partners by her refusal to accommodate the migrants.
That won’t go down well in Rome. As Meloni has pointed out in the past, France bears a large share of the blame for Europe’s migrant crisis, having helped remove Colonel Gaddafi from power in 2011, a regime change that threw the region into chaos. Angela Merkel then in 2015 made the unilateral decision to open Europe’s borders to an estimated 1.3 million refugees and migrants.
In the same speech in 2018 when Meloni referenced France’s interference in Libya, she also mentioned a series of incidents in 2018 when the French police were filmed returning illegal immigrants caught on their side of the border back into Italian territory. The Italian Interior Minister at the time, Matteo Salvini, despatched Italian police to patrol the border and issued a warning to Macron: ‘The umpteenth abuse by French authorities, who have also taken advantage of the good faith of our police, will have consequences,’ he said in a Tweet.
Last Thursday the humanitarian NGO SOS Mediterranee appealed to the governments of France, Greece and Spain to help find a port for stranded migrants. The same organisation made a similar plea in September 2018 but on that occasion France refused to allow the vessel in question to dock in Marseille. ‘There are European rules,’ said a government spokesperson in justifying the decision. ‘For the moment France has said “no”, because if we need to have a coherent policy on migration then we need to respect European rules.’
Four years on and, as Rishi Sunak will discover in the coming months, Europe is no closer to adopting a coherent policy on migration; it simply expects Italy to bear the brunt. There is neither the courage nor the will to address the decade-long crisis, and more significantly there is not even the intelligence within the EU to understand the consequences of their cowardice.
First it was Sweden, then Italy, which country will be next to shift to the right in an attempt to regain control of their borders?
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