¿Is Fortress Europe Crumbling? ¿or is it building new walls? :
Let's start this section with a very brief historical overview of Europe on migratory issues especially illegal transits, migrants fatalities and missing that have been the center of IOM reports when working on this region. Now during the late 90's and early 2000's there were very few fatalities for migrants and refugees (MRs) mostly tried to enter legally into the content and subjected themselves to the States controls, and irregular migrants were the product of overstays in their permanence, but things changed when the European States increasingly started to make it an obligation to travel with visas and fined companies if any of their passengers did have them, and this basically shut the door for potential refuge seekers to get on any flights, busses, boats... their options were severely reduced. This sets the trend for the next 15 years before the MRs crisis of 2015, where European countries did not know how to manage the influx of the mixed migratory flow of people risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean or Aegean seas from Africa or the Middle East, and things boil over generating a full-blown crisis with the Syrian refugee crisis that had a profound impact on migrant trying to enter Europe. From the year 2000 till 2014, it's estimated that 25.000 have perished trying to cross the Mediterranean (OIM 2015), in another report filed by the OIM called the Fatal Journey; Lives Lost During the Migration (FJ 2015), written by Tara Brain and Frank Laczko, affirm that 17.306 people have died trying to cross during the period of 1993 to 2012, and 14.600 of those were in the Mediterranean. Fatal Journey cites another report that establishes 19.812 deaths from 1988 to 2014, now way are there three reports with different death tolls because there are no official statics of how many people have died on the trek to Europe, the bodies are not identified, there is no death certificated made and families are not notified, there is no paper trail for the bureaucrats to follow or established policy, it almost like the problem isn't there, but it's a very visible invisible problem that pretty much smacked Europe on its face. The problem got so bad that municipalities and towns where many of the dead were being found had run out of space to bury the dead a need to allocate new terrain for cemeteries.
In 2015 IOM establishes that 1.011.712 million MRs have entered Europe during the crisis, and up to the 15 of august of 2016 they had 266.042 people arrived, with 3151 fatalities during that year. The Syrian crisis that is pushing Europe to the limits that have not been seen since the Boat People crisis after the Vietnam war.
Now from 2013 to 2015, a series of reports by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) diagnosed that the lack of a proper migratory policy was leading to a large amount of unnecessary migrant deaths and a possible crisis could be on its way. In a study called Migration Trends Across the Mediterranean: Connecting the Dots, written by the IOM's regional office MENA, explains how the lack of coordinated policies lead to the death of 3.500 people in 2014 and 3771 deaths in 2015, and this tragedy was owed to the fact that Europe had severe structural administrative, political and security failures, generating a situation where people have taken unnecessary risks out of desperation putting their lives in danger.
The European Union itself has a very particular institutional and legal situation, that we will not get into because it would be report all to its self, but one can affirm that the whole system buckled and almost totally collapses during the refugee crisis in 2015, that had a strong undercurrent of migrants mixed into the flow of refugees heading north through the Western Balkans, Dublin III had been suspended generating a push for MR into heart of Europe heading to Germany, since they did not have to stay in the first country that had arrived to. This was done to relieve the burden of Italy and Greece who had a large accumulation of MRs in their territories, and also reduce the cost of take back to force migrants back to the first State in which they had arrived to, which is established in Dublin III. The crisis also provoked that transit countries of the Schengen Area near the Balkan Corridor temporarily reinstated land border controls, Frontex was shown to have a lack of means and recourses in stopping the flow from reaching Europe in the first place and in early 2016 the EU/Schengen policy of non-foulement[1] was broken forcing refugees and migrants out of Greece and back to Turkey.
an important recurring issue in the migratory reports of the last three years the political void of the border deaths and missing, that isn't exclusive to Europe because it happens on a global level but most reports centers around the fact that the Mediterranean is probably the most dangerous place on the planet for migrants that are trying to cross it in a Study called Mediterranean Missing, Understanding the Needs of the Families and Obligations of the States, 2016, by City University, University of York and the IOM, the report establishes that there is policy vacuum produced by the fact the EU does not know how to handle the deaths of the people that try to cross the Mediterranean, there isn't a standardized protocol how to manage and dispose the bodies of the dead that are found in European waters and coasts. and mostly EU countries (like many other States) do not identify the dead or inform their families basically denying them solidarity and closure. Nor EU or individual State members have centralized database holding information on migrants missing, identified dead, unidentified bodies or DNA samples. Sometimes the only place where families can get information is from the smugglers which tend to lie, establishing that their love ones have crossed and are alive and well, because telling the truth that they have died is bad for business.
Now this also affects the capacity for the EU States to handle the issue, because not managing correctly this problem by not elaborating statistics, does not generate a paper trail so the authorities do not have the correct information to be able to fix the problem in the first place because they are operating blind wasting time and money with reactive policies. But it is to be seen what will change and impact in border security and control with Frontex that has converted into the official border security and cost guard of the European Union as of September of 2016 expanding its mandate, not covered in the first two quarterly reports of 2016, with the third and fourth yet to be published, to see this institution's impact on the migratory flow.
Something observable in Frontex's quarterly reports is that they go great lengths to not to use the term Irregular Migrants, but it does not use the term of Illegal Migrants either, they use the term Illegal Stay, these institutional documents walk the symbolic tightrope political correctness and the need to instill urgency of a threat very well.
Another term that is different in these reports is that uses the term facilitators and not traffickers/smugglers, and it doesn't define the concepts, now during this first and second quarter studies the Frontex informs that it had 568 cases of stopping facilitators operating in the Balkan corridor, but the report establishes that migrant movement during the refugee crisis was very self-organized in this region, not depending on smugglers to reach their destination.
In Frontex's second Quarter Report (Q2) of 2016 mentions that Afghans are becoming the most prominent group in the region being 34% of the of the total of the nonregional migrants while Syrians dropped to the second place with 16% (P8 WBQ2). One must note that Afghans and Iraqis seem to be a constant in Europe as irregular migrants, the EU will have to take proactive steps if they want to take control of these migrants that had taken advantage of the Syrian crises to piggyback their way into Europe.
Irregular migratory movement in 2016 has grown by 19% in the Schengen area from Q1 of 2015 with 127.000 cases, with Iraqis and Iranians, citizens being the most prominent and Frontex mentions the presences of Moroccans and Algerians that tried to enter Europe through the Balkan corridor and Hungry, and in some cases with Syrian IDs.
Frontex ranks refusals at entry with Ukrainians in the first place with 6.555, Albanian with 3.615 and Moroccans at 1.755, all of these cases at land crossings, while Brazilian had the highest refusal rate at European airports 878. Reports establish that the Syrian Refugee flow has mostly stopped, but we can observe the studies concentrates on how to stop Albanian, Kosovar, Afghan and Turkish migrants in the south-east, in the North East there seems to be worry over Russian movement and transits and illegal overstays of Iraqis and Iranians in the heart of the EU is cause of alarm, so we have to wait till Q3 and Q4 to see how these dynamic situations evolve.
EU member States that have had important migratory events in the past three years:
Czechia/ Czech Republic: Here is a case worth mentioning in how to handle human trafficking which isn't the only case in Europe, but it is a good example in how to combat this crime correctly. In the United States, Department State of TIP report of 2016 classifies this State as a tier 1 country having cases of debt bondage in the construction sector, forestry, manufacturing and the service sector, but is interesting to see how the report centers on the positive steps the country has taken combat these migratory crimes, like helping more NGOs engage and help victims, train and add more law enforcement exclusively dedicated to fight this crime and training judges and prosecutors in how to manage these cases to help victims out.
Germany: This country that has been the main destination for refugees with migrants that have piggybacked their way into the heart of Europe, trying to take advantage of the situation. So not only does Germany has to deal with the influx of Syrian refugees during the crisis of 2015 but also a strong flow of migrants from the Balkans that are also petitioning for Asylum, even though they are mostly are economic migrants, so the German authorities had decided to take the position on this issue, fast tracking and rejecting these petitions of citizens of this region adding their State to an official "Safe Country" list. In 2014 Germany had Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Ghana and Senegal on the safe country list and added in 2015 Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, and by lw anyone of these countries can only be taken off the list by decree for a maximum time of six months. For example out of 49.692 Albanian Asylum Petitions were taken by Germany from January to October 2015 , only 7 were given refugee status and 25.600 were rejected, we have another example with citizens from Kosovo that made 35.600 asylum petitions in the same time frame and also only having 7 acceptances for refugee status and 24.400 rejected. While in contrast 103.708 Syrian petitions were made in the same time frame and while still being processed only 0.02% were rejected (Asylum Information Data Base AIDA 2016).
Other EU countries also have safe countries lists like Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Ireland, Luxemburg, Malta, Slovakia... just to name a few however each country has a different lists, but Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia are on most of these lists. Now the European Commission has expressed the need to establish a unified list but the initiative has not materialized yet.
Greece: This country has felt the brunt of the Syrian refugee crisis, with a massive number of refugees and migrants using its territory for transit totally overwhelming its public services while trying to recover from an economic catastrophe. The MR flow crossed from Turkey through the Aegean sea, so in 2014 Frontex started Operation Poseidon was created to help lift some of the burdens the Greek officials were going through trying to manage the situation helping the country with border security, search and rescue missions, registration, identification and deportation. Frontex added with 19 vessels, 1 aircraft, 2 helicopters and 667 agents from around Europe, with a cost of 6.626.661 Euros (Frontex and European Commission 2016). NATO also collaborated with Frontex, adding 31 vessels and working intelligence to crack down on smugglers, working with the Greek and Turkish coastguards, and analyzing the possibility of extending its missions to other areas of the Mediterranean.
Italy and Malta: The surge of migrants arriving to Italy and the Lampedusa tragedy 3 of October of 2013, where 366 (OIM 2015) migrants from Eritrea, Somalia and Ghana that sunk off the coast of the Italian island. This tragedy was a game changer, there had been a before and after marking precedent of the incumbent crisis, the Mare Nostrum program was born as result, its principal mandate was to search and rescue, but it produce an unwanted effect on the migratory flux, it produce a pull effect, MRs would hit the seas knowing if they didn't make it there was a good chance that the Italian's would save them, the traffickers really took advantage of the program. Also during Mare Nostrum many of the possible MRs that could have arrived to this Island ended up in the Sicilia. After a year Mare Nostrum is replaced with a Frontex program called Triton, which had fewer resources and its mandate centered around the protection of Italian and Maltin territories. Frontex also added two more operations that would complement Triton: Hermes and Nautilus, these three programs to complement joined efforts to stop MRs from Tunisia, Libya and Algeria. Up to 80% of MRs that reached Italy in 2015 used Libya and Egypt as their platforms to cross to Europe, with the closure of the Balkan corridor the Libyan route started to become the most deadly way to Europe.
Now the EU itself also has created a special naval force working under the mandate of Operation Sophia which started in August of 2015 patrolling the Mediterranean to stop Smugglers vessel from reaching Europe, having arrested 89 smugglers and being handed over to the Italian authorities. This operation also worked search and rescue missions, having saved more than 26.000 migrants.
Spain: In a fascinating report by Altai/IOM from 2015 called Migration "Trends Across the Mediterranean: Connecting the Dots" starts off explaining that 90% of all irregular migrants entered legally to Spain and became irregular when their permanence expired and only 10% (10p. Altai 2015) entered through illegal boat crossings. Most of the flow the heads to Spain originates from Senegal, Cameroon, Guinea and Nigeria. And the report makes the observation that there has been a steady transition from migrants to Asylum Seekers.
The two largest groups of irregular migrants in Spain during 2014 were Syrians with 66.684 people and Eritreans 34.341 and it must be noted that both nationals cross the African continent from east to west, instead of trying to cross through Egypt or Turkey, these two groups were far ahead of the unspecified Sub-Saharans at 26.341. Spain had 5.941 asylum petitions made during 2014 with Syrians being around 28% , Ukrainian nationals at 16% and Malians at 10% (26p. Altai 2015).
Spain has three Frontex Operation working on its door step trying to stop illegal entries into its territory: Hera, Indalo and Minerva, patrolling its waters trying to stop smugglerss and working search and rescue missions.
Now what sets Spain apart from other European countries is that it has two enclaves in Morocco Cueta and Melilla, which that are completely fenced off from the African nation, and in the case of Melilla the IOM report mentions that migrants actually storm the fence in large groups and authorities from both sides try to stop them but some do make it through, and it must be noted that the Moroccan authorities have made a second fence perimeter on their side.
Now for Cueta because of its geographic position migrants try to access it by sea but are pushed back with force by the Spanish Guardia Civil and they have used in the past pellet guns to scary them off, but this particular practice has actually killed migrants in the past.
Frontex partnership Western Balkans ( Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia): There has been in the first quarter of 2016 a 84% decrease in illegal transits compared the previous quarter in 2015 with 215.000, with Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Iranian and Moroccans being 48% of the bulk of the flow while 51% are of unknowns nationalities (P 6. WBQ1 2016), while during Q2 there were 26.488 illegal transits with a 88% drop from Q1. The EU-Turkey agreement has effected that migratory and Refugee flow of the whole region, adding the coordinated efforts of the countries of the region and the EU since November of 2015 they start slowly blocking, filtering and funneling refugees and migrants back to Greece and after the agreement back to Turkey, the 9th of March the corridor was officially closed. Until the EU-Turkey agreement went into effect there was a large mass of Migrants and Refugees (M/R) accumulation in Greece putting stress on their infrastructure. In 2016 the number of arrivals to Europe dropped from 1.056.599 people in 2015 to 387.739 (IOM 2017), this in good measure is owed to the coordinated efforts of the EU with the Balkan States, Greece and Turkey.
Now in the first quarter of 2016 had 8.800 border rejections of migrants that could not enter the EU States next to the Balkan corridor and the Balkan partner countries, while in the second quarter they had 10.000 cases, with citizens from Balkan States that are not part of the EU are the most rejected group followed by Turkish nationals, the statistics of these rejections are not in the front part of the Frontex report like other data but in the annex because it a politically sensitive issue the rejection of Citizens that are part of the partnership and the rejection of Turkish nationals, country that has allowed Syrian refugees back in to alleviate Greece.
In the Frontex Q reports establishes that Albanians and citizens of Kosovo are most common cases of migrants that use fake travel documents using fake EU IDs and both of these nationalities also are the highest regional cases of overstaying permanence. The study also makes the observation of Turkish nationals that illegally establishing themselves in Bosnia-Herzegovina but does not give statistics on the issue.
Now referring to human trafficking the US TIP report give most of the Balkan countries a tier 2 classification, for example the study mentions that Bosnia and Herzegovina has a general lack of protection for victims in the country or these State have a lack of resources. But Croatia has a lower classification than the rest with a tier 2 watch list Cases of Bosnians and Romanians being forced to work the agricultural sector jobs and the countries judicial system that has a high level acquittals of perpetrators that force migrants to work, of now on the other hand the State is helping NGOs establish shelters.
Another country that must be mention from this region is Macedonia downgraded from a tier 1 in 2015 to a tier 2 in 2016, because of problems with border guards that have been involved with traffickers and even under the strain of the migratory crisis the government didn't put in enough effort in managing the situation, but the main problem for the TIP report was that the government discontinued its partnership with the NGOs that had outreach programs to help the victims of human trafficking.
Now while the TIP report criticized Macedonia while the Frontex studies only mentions that during the height of the Refugee crisis Macedonia built a two layered fence and added more border guards that were trained and given resources by the IOM and the European Commission to help the country manage the situation.
Frontex Eastern Partnership:
These particular reports focus on the European Union's eastern border and its partnership with neighbor countries Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, with Frontex.
The first two Quarterly reports of 2016 explains that most of the Illegal crossings at the eastern European border were not migrants but smugglers with contraband out of 840 cases in Q1 they were about 55% of the detained being Moldovan, Ukrainian and Russian nationals while 45% were migrants from Afghanistan and Vietnam (P 8. EE Frontex 2016). This scenario pretty much repeats itself in the second Quarter.
The report mentions an arctic route of migrants that enter through Finland with migrants from Afghanistan, India, Cameroon, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but this route has been closed, but the study does not explain how this route was closed.
Again we are confronted by the concept of facilitators, which have grown in presence in this region and the report establishes that smugglers are present in the region being mostly from Russia particularly from the region of the Caucuses, Ukraine and Belarus, but since of the closure of the Arctic route to Finland migrant smuggling has dropped significantly. Document fraud doesn't seem to be an issue in the region with very few cases and visa overstays do not seem to be much of a problem either but that 99% of the cases were discovered when leaving means that Eastern border countries don't actively search for irregular migrants, while the Russian federations during most of 2016 started to crack down on migrants and heightened their `policing of their western borders shared with Europe.
There have been 19.293 refusals during Q1 at eastern European borders mostly done by Poland, rejecting the entry of Russians, Ukrainians and Moldavians (P8. EE Frontex 2016). Now during Q2 there has strong increase with 25.640 rejections of entries again mostly by Poland rejecting citizens from the same State from the previous quarter.
Now let's focus on some of Frontex's partner States that have had some attention from migratory reports these past few years starting with Armenia, a transit country that is a tier I nation taking important step fight trafficking in person in its territory, but there it is still a source country for women and children for the sex trade and other forms of exploitation, mostly being sent to the UAE and Turkey, while Armenian men are subjected to force labor in Russia. It must be mentioned that George Armenia's neighbor and also part of the partnership is also tier 1 nation taking many of the same steps and suffers the same problems as Armenia.
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have taken a great efforts to disrupt the flow of foreign fighters transiting through and returning to their respective territories, they have invested heavily in their border security, for example using biometric and biographic ID control of people transiting through their respective borders, control passenger manifest on flights and establishing watch list, and this possibly could have a spillover effect in hindering or stopping human trafficking and smugglers, because tools are fundamental in catching these criminals. Now in a US State Debarment report on Terrorism published in 2015, it affirms that these countries put in all this extra effort on border and document security because these State wants to secure visa-free travel to EU countries. Heavy securitization can be a double edge sword for migrants on one hand it can weed migratory crime but can be an obstacle for migrants because State can use national security as an excuse to block migrant from transiting or establishing themselves in their territory.
Belarus a country that an interesting situation, that makes it unique in Europe, it is a tier 3 country almost the lowest ranking on the US TIP report, their citizen are victims of trafficker and being sent to Russia, Poland, Turkey and other Middle Eastern Nations, and also a hub for trafficking nationals of third countries, and another aspect that makes this State standout is that Belarus sponsors forced labor, unemployed people must pay a fee to the State or face compulsory community service, and this could be an import push factor for its citizen wanting to migrate to Europe.
[1] Non-refoulement is a policy which is not to deport or deny any petition of refuge, especial if it mean to send the person back to a dangerous place
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