Europe is unable to deal with illegal immigration

This week saw the publication of a troubling report from the European Court of Auditors. This group of grumpy naysayers is based in Luxembourg. The court stands in a long tradition: one of Europe’s great empire builders, duke Philip the bold of Burgundy, established a similar court in Lille in 1386 to keep track of his sprawling empire. Nowadays the court is watching the European commission’s finances from the shadows, ready to strike at any opportunity to prove its value. Far from only looking at the books the court also judges the effectiveness and efficiency of European policy.

The new report makes brutally clear that the current policy for dealing with illegal immigration is not working. Since 2008 on average 500,000 people have been ordered to leave the European Union each year, that is 6,5 million in the entire period. Of those, only 29% effectively returned. For migrants from outside of Europe the score is even lower: 19%. The report states that the reason for this should be sought in the lack of cooperation by third countries. Countries are unwilling to take back their own citizens. In other cases countries are not willing to take back people who only passed through their country. Even though most states on the periphery of the EU rely on those same EU countries for trade, development aid and remittances the EU is somehow unwilling to bring this power to bear. As formal agreements have not been successful the report embraces “flexible agreements” such as the shady deal with Erdogan’s Turkey. A deal in which human rights cannot be guaranteed and are routinely disrespected.

I think this report further underscores the failure of the current policies. We are able neither to protect the integrity of our borders nor to prevent the human tragedy that migrants face when trying to reach the EU. We can no longer outsource responsibility to unreliable regimes. We cannot have a welcoming policy for illegal immigrants once they are here while at the same time doing everything we can to stop them. We have to take the only logical decision, one that the UK, US and Australia have already taken: an illegal immigrant should never have the opportunity to become a legal resident. Only then will we be able to agree on a credible solution to the migration problem

Correction: In the original post on September 15th we included the 500,000 migrants figure but did not make clear that this figure is per year. Updated on November 20th.