Europe Will Never Solve Its Migration Problem
French parliamentary inquiry slams government's handling of British border
Since the 2003 Touquet Treaty, the report states, the United Kingdom has paid France in exchange for shouldering ever-increasing responsibilities to stop border crossings.
"The various agreements reached with the United Kingdom have not stopped the ongoing flow of migrants," writes Communist MP Elsa Faucillon, the inquiry committee's rapporteur.
Faucillon criticizes the near absence of democratic oversight in the bilateral relationship:
"Since February 12, 1986, 34 agreements have been signed between France and the United Kingdom regarding border control. Yet, the last time the Assemblée Nationale voted on one (...) was 23 years ago."
Le Monde 8 July 2026
The running tally of migrant drownings for the year so far is 661, according to the International Organization for Migration. That makes about 20,000 such deaths since 2014.
If there’s more dying, it’s because there’s more migrating again. Illegal entries into the EU, by land or sea, were up 64% in 2022 over the previous year, to the highest number since the refugee crisis of 2016.
The EU is at a loss. It doesn’t want so many people to come, but also doesn’t know how to stop them or what to do with them once they reach European shores.
Only 21% of the roughly 300,000 migrants told to leave the EU every year actually go.
The reality is that migrants will keep coming to Europe for the foreseeable future — and in growing numbers — just as they’ll also keep trekking from South and Central America to the US.
They’re doing what I would do too.
As the EU’s 27 leaders haggle about tweaking their dysfunctional asylum regime this year, let none of them peddle the illusion that the problem of migration can be either solved or ignored.
Such bleak assessments are hardly de rigueur in Brussels. But anything else is simply dishonest. The price of being European will include pulling bodies out of mare nostrum, “our sea.”
Andreas Kluth Bloomberg 29 april 2023
Mare Nostrum
https://www.internetional.se/romed.htm
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