Europe’s astonishing drop in illegal migration

https://archive.is/4hAnN

From the article:

In the first eight months of this year 112,000 people crossed illegally into Europe, down 21% from a year earlier. The drop is an even more impressive 52% from the comparable period in 2023, when 231,000 people landed on its shores or jumped its borders.

Numbers are falling not because the underlying causes of migration have changed. Places like Afghanistan and Eritrea remain repressive. Others, such as Sudan and the Sahel, are still wracked by civil wars or violent insurgencies. And there is still plenty of poverty in Bangladesh and Egypt, two of the most common nationalities of those crossing illegally into Europe, many of them in search of jobs.

Instead, it is because the bloc is experimenting with new ways of heading them off. The results will please many, but some of its methods are unsettling. The EU is showing that harsh policies far from its beaches are keeping migrants out.

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The EU’s strategy has in effect been to build a big, invisible wall far from its own borders where migrants can be intercepted and turned back well before they have a chance to set foot on European soil and lodge a claim for asylum. This has been done through a complex patchwork of agreements signed by the EU and separately by its member states with countries through which migrants try to pass. In exchange for cutting migration, transit countries get large sums of aid and investment. Egypt was promised €7.4bn ($8.1bn); Tunisia €1bn. In addition, the EU or its members train and fund their coastguards, border officials and police forces.

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As the EU has struck deals with more countries, abuses have been pushed farther from European shores. Tunisia’s repressive regime has been accused of dumping thousands of detained migrants in the desert near its border with Algeria, and Mauritania of pushing people back across its border into Mali and Senegal.

Rights groups claim that cruelty is built into the EU’s plan, since it relies on repressive regimes using brutal tools to deter migrants from even trying to cross their territory. Julia Schafermeyer of SOs Méditerranée, a search-and-rescue NGO that brings survivors to European shores, complains of a “campaign of administrative harassment” that is intended to weaken the oversight of abuses and to hamper rescues.