The Migration Crisis

3.2.1 The Beginning of the Migration Crisis

In order to look into the events of and responses to the crisis in Europe, it is important to understand how the so-called crisis came about. Though there are always migrants coming into the EU, the numbers started to increase around 2013 as a result of continued unrest in Syria and its wider region

138. European Commission, “The Global Approach to Migration and Mobility,” 12-15.

139. Niemann and Zaun, 10.

140. European Commission, “The Global Approach to Migration and Mobility,” 15-17.

141. European Commission, “The Global Approach to Migration and Mobility,” 17-18.

142. European Commission, “The Global Approach to Migration and Mobility,” 18-20.

and in parts of east and west Africa. The beginning of what would later be called the migration ¹⁴³ crisis in the EU started with multiple shipwreck emergencies of boats full of migrants on their way to Europe. In September 2013 a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy shipwrecked south of Lampedusa, which led to Italy deploying Search & Rescue operation Mare Nostrum. Inadvertently, this operation led to more migrants coming to Italy on unsafe dinghies, as word got out that they would get rescued and taken to Italy. Therefore, 2014 turned out to be a difficult year for Italy in terms of incoming migrants. The EU, in response to Italy’s call for help with the finances of the operation launched operation Triton in autumn 2014. It had a smaller budget and mandate, but worked in the same area. However, migrants kept coming and, as two consecutive shipwrecks ¹⁴⁴ near Lampedusa in April 2015 proved, kept dying on the way to Europe. This can be understood as the moment the growing number of incoming migrants became a concern of the entire European Union. Migrants started moving from Italy and Greece to further into the EU, member states who had previously been against EU led naval operations suddenly signed off on one, declarations were made in favour of common EU actions and great media interest and subsequent public outcry over the shipwrecks shows that a crisis was being framed. Thus, from this moment on the normal way ¹⁴⁵ of doing things in migration management were overlooked in favour of crisis management. Indeed, the European Council called for urgent action in response to the shipwrecks and a new maritime security operation was launched. Operation Sophia was established in June 2015 and was meant to deal with (suspected) smuggler vessels on their way to Europe in the Central Mediterranean. ¹⁴⁶ However, this operation did not mean the end of the crisis. Aside from the stream of migrants coming from Libya to Italy, the stream from Turkey to Greece also kept growing and in the summer of 2015 migrants also started to try to get to Northern European states over land through the Balkans. By autumn 2015 some Greek islands were receiving up to 5000 migrants every day. ¹⁴⁷ Additionally, some EU member states who had initially been very welcoming of migrants started to revise this stance as well as numbers kept growing. Thus, from summer 2015 onwards the EU as ¹⁴⁸

143. Triandafyllidou, 200-1.

144. Triandafyllidou, 201.

145. Agustín José Menéndez, “The Refugee Crisis: Between Human Tragedy and Symptom of the Structural Crisis of European Integration,” European Law Journal 22, no. 4 (2016): 394; Ruxandra-Laura Boșilcă, Matthew Stenberg and Marianne Riddervold, “Copying in EU security and defence policies: the case of EUNAVFOR MED Operation Sophia,” European Security 30, no. 2 (2021): 223.

146. Boșilcă et al., 220; Triandafyllidou, 201.

147. Triandafyllidou, 201-2.

148. Triandafyllidou, 203.

a whole as well as member states individually began to respond to what had been framed as a crisis, initially with internal measures.

3.2.2 Internal Response

Operation Sophia can be understood as the first EU response to the migration crisis. During the summer of 2015 the EU took a number of supranational measures to deal with the large number of incoming migrants. Interestingly, none of those fit within the CEAS framework. This can be explained by the fact that one of the first things that was affected by the large number of migrants coming into the EU was the CEAS. Specifically the Dublin Regulation. As explained above, April 2015 was the start of the crisis, partially due to the massive secondary movements of migrants. As explained in section 3.1.2, secondary movements should be prevented by Dublin III. However, as the national Italian and Greek asylum systems overloaded, migrants had no option to request asylum and thus moved on further into the EU. Since all the other Regulations and Directives of ¹⁴⁹ the CEAS rely on migrants having requested asylum in their country of arrival, the failure of Dublin III meant the failure of the CEAS as a whole. Still, there were many migrants in different EU member states and they had to be dealt with some way or another. As explained in section 2.1.3, the crisis mentality that lived in the EU from Spring 2015 onwards meant quicker and less democratic decisions were taken to ensure quick action. So very soon after the shipwrecks, in May 2015 the European Commission published the European Agenda on Migration. The Agenda sets out how the EU wants to work towards more coherent and comprehensive migration policies, but also calls for some immediate measures to deal with the migration situation at hand. Five out of the six ¹⁵⁰ immediate measures proposed are part of the EU’s internal response to the crisis.

The first of these relates back to the shipwrecks, it is saving lives at sea. The action they proposed was to triple the budget of Operation Triton and Operation Poseidon (more or less the equivalent of Operation Triton but in the Aegean Sea instead of the Mediterranean). On the one hand, over 120,000 lives have been saved by these operations. On the other hand, their mandate is still limited, only working near the EU’s external borders. This means that further on sea more towards Turkey and especially Libya, the operations cannot help people in need. ¹⁵¹

149. Menéndez, 397.

150. European Commission, “A European Agenda on Migration,” COM(2015) 240 Final, Brussels, 2015, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52015DC0240.

151. European Commission, “A European Agenda on Migration,” 3; Niemann and Zaun, 11.

Operation Sophia, due to its aim of disrupting smuggler networks falls under the second priority established in the Agenda on Migration: targeting criminal smuggling networks. The EU called for Common Security and Defence Policy Operations, which Sophia is, to disrupt the ¹⁵² smuggling practices especially along the central Mediterranean route. However, with only a 9%

decrease in use of the route, Operation Sophia has not been especially successful. ¹⁵³

The third course of action the Agenda advises is an emergency relocation system to alleviate the pressure of the asylum systems of frontline member states. The proposed scheme came into ¹⁵⁴ being in September 2015 and aimed to relocate 160,000 asylum-seekers in need of international protection among the EU member states by September 2017. However, some member states opposed the scheme and implementation was sorely lacking, with only 25% of the aimed 160,000 people relocated 2 months before the deadline. There were also concerns about reception standards in some member states (which also constitutes another CEAS implementation failure) and the lack of consideration for the circumstances of individual asylum-seekers under the scheme. ¹⁵⁵

Next to relocation within the EU, the next priority of the agenda was to resettle displaced people outside the EU within the EU, to prevent the use of dangerous migrant routes altogether. The scheme to resettle 20,000 people was set up in July 2015, but unlike the relocation scheme, this one was voluntary. This made the scheme more successful, with a resettle rate of around 66% of the goal as opposed to the 25% relocated, but it did mean that there were big differences in effort by the member states—both in numbers of migrants taken in, as well as in procedures to do so. ¹⁵⁶

The last priority internal priority is the EU’s Hotspot approach. In order to help Italy and Greece with the large numbers of incoming migrants, the EU sent Migration Management Support Teams to set up hotspots in busy locations to assist with relocation, return, border management and reception capacity. The hotspots have improved registration and finger-printing rates, but they have not taken off as much pressure of Italy and Greece as intended and in some cases they created insecure situations for migrants who had no access to the correct asylum procedures. Additionally, implementation of the approach happened slowly as it depended on the member state’s CEAS

152. Boșilcă et al., 218.

153. European Commission, “A European Agenda on Migration,” 3-4; Niemann and Zaun, 11.

154. European Commission, “A European Agenda on Migration,” 4.

155. Niemann and Zaun, 6-7.

156. European Commission, “A European Agenda on Migration,” 4-5; Niemann and Zaun, 7-8.

infrastructure to work. However, such infrastructure was lacking, meaning both a delay in the hotspots, as well as yet another crack in CEAS. ¹⁵⁷

The measures the EU has taken each clearly only had limited effects. Operation Triton and Poseidon lacked mandate, operation Sophia was not very successful, the relocation and resettlement schemes were not completed and the hotspot approach was slow. Yet, migrants were still coming into the EU, so its member states started taking matters into their own hands, stepping away from the Common European Asylum System altogether. Germany was the first member state that took action and it subsequently affected most other member states to take action as well. In July 2015 Germany stopped using Dublin III on Syrian citizens. This meant they could request asylum in ¹⁵⁸ Germany, even though they had passed through other EU member states to get there. This resulted in Italy and Greece letting migrants pass through to other countries without registering them, which then led to at least tens of thousands of migrants requesting asylum in Germany. This overwhelmed the German system so much that only two weeks after the suspension of Dublin III, Germany imposed border controls with Austria. In response Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hungary, Malta, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden also imposed border controls to stem migrants flows. As ¹⁵⁹ explained in section 3.1.1, the need to cooperate on migration matters came from the suspension of internal borders. The reintroduction of border controls during a migration crisis shows that migration cooperation had failed.

Hungary took its response to the crisis is the direct opposite direction as Germany initially did. In October 2015 Hungary build a fence along its borders with Croatia and Serbia, to physically stop migrants from coming into their territory. As time went on, more member states—even those ¹⁶⁰ who had initially been welcoming of migrants—started to revise their policies. For example, Sweden imposed stricter rules for asylum seekers from November on and Austria put a cap on the number of asylum-seeker applications from 2016 onward. ¹⁶¹

Even with all the EU measures, the increasingly unwelcoming member states and the upcoming winter the number of migrants did not slow. Thus, the EU started looking beyond its borders for solutions to their crisis.

157. European Commission, “A European Agenda on Migration,” 6; Niemann and Zaun, 5-6.

158. Menéndez, 399-400.

159. Lavenex, 1197; Menéndez, 400.

160. Niemann and Zaun, 4.

161. Triandafyllidou, 203-4.

3.2.3 External Response

The last immediate measure in the Commission’s Agenda on Migration concerns working with third countries to tackle migration flows before they reach the EU. This meant mostly increased support for existing programmes in countries of origin. During the Valetta summit of November 2015 ¹⁶² specific actions were agreed upon between the EU and African Heads of State/Government. During this summit the EU Trust Fund for Africa was set up, mostly with the goal of preventing migrants from migrating altogether. ¹⁶³

But the EU’s external response to the crisis went further than just what was outlined in the Agenda on Migration. In September 2015, so still quite early on the response process, the European Commission decided to create a list of safe third countries, to which migrants could be sent back.

The common list was meant to speed up the asylum application procedure. However, due to the individuality of that procedure, it was questioned how much this would speed it up. Additionally, Turkey was on the list of countries, despite it being highly questionable whether migrants could safely be sent back to Turkey (see section 4.3.1). ¹⁶⁴

Still, cooperation with Turkey was very important in the EU’s external response to the crisis.

This makes sense, given its geographical location and the fact that most migrants were coming from Syria. On 15 October 2015 the European Council met with Turkey and they discussed a Joint Action Plan (JAP). The EU wanted Turkey to cooperate on dealing with the crisis and in return the EU would put renewed energy into Turkey’s accession process, as well as in discussions on lifting visa requirements for Turkish citizens. The JAP was activated after another meeting between the European Council and Turkey in November. Turkey would be financially compensated for its cooperation with the EU and to manage the large number of Syrian migrants in its territory. In ¹⁶⁵ March 2016 the EU and Turkey had a follow up meeting, because the number of migrants coming from Turkey into Greece remained high. This meeting resulted in the EU-Turkey Statement, under which migrants coming from Turkey to Greece would be returned. The Statement will be ¹⁶⁶ discussed extensively in the next chapter. After the activation of the Statement, the number of migrants coming from Turkey into Greece dropped significantly. However, what is important to note is that the implementation of the Statement coincided with Turkey building a fence along its

162. European Commission, “A European Agenda on Migration,” 5-6.

163. Crawley et al., 140; Niemann and Zaun, 5.

164. Niemann and Zaun, 9-10.

165. Gürkan and Coman, 279.

166. Batalla Adam, 45.

border with Syria and with Balkan countries, following Hungary’s lead, closing their borders along the Balkan route. These measures meant that, even without the EU-Turkey Statement, arrivals from Turkey to Greece would likely have dropped considerably as well. ¹⁶⁷

Despite the questionable success of the Statement, as well as the other controversies around it (see section 4.3.1), the EU initially deemed the Statement an example to follow. In June 2016 the European Commission established the Migration Partnership Framework (MPF) to use in managing migration, with the intention to recreate the effectiveness of the EU-Turkey Statement with other third countries. Thus, the EU’s external response to the migration crisis is largely based on ¹⁶⁸ keeping the migrants out of the EU. The Valetta summit is an attempt at stopping migrants from migrating altogether. Naming countries as safe third countries means asylum-seekers can be sent back to those. The Joint Action Plan and EU-Turkey Statement are largely based on keeping migrants in Turkey as much as possible, and the MPF wants to replicate the Statement further. Thus, when the internal response of the EU to the framed crisis was deemed to be lacking, rather than fixing the problems with the internal system, the EU looked beyond its own borders at third countries to deal with their problem instead.

Clearly the EU’s response to the migration crisis had some issues. Even the eventual move to external migration management was riddled with problems and imperfect solutions. It has become clear that the EU-Turkey Statement was made quickly and as a crisis response but that alone does not say a lot about EU external migration management agreement making in general.

Additionally, this alone does not help in answering how the EU’s approach to external migration management agreements changed with the crisis. Therefore the next chapter will move to comparing the Statement to the Moldova MP.

167. Batalla Adam, 45-46.

168. Liguori, 66-67.