On Migration, the EU Tries to Strike a Balance
Europe will struggle to limit migration while also filling labor gaps.
By: Ekaterina Zolotova
Russia’s invasion of its neighbor last year created strains, both financial and relational, within the EU over how to deal with yet another migrant influx.
Much of this friction has subsided, in part because many Ukrainians who fled the initial invasion have since returned to their home country.
Indeed, when it comes to Ukrainian migration, the bloc has avoided much of the friction that resulted from the 2015-16 migrant crisis.
Amid continued high inflows from the Middle East and Africa, the EU is now trying to manage the issue proactively, recognizing both the pitfalls of not doing so in previous waves and the long-term necessity of attracting workers to address labor shortages.
It’s unlikely, however, that the new measures will limit discord between member states.
Due to its relative prosperity and high standards of living, Europe has long been an attractive destination for refugees and migrants fleeing war and poverty.
Europe as a whole has benefited from this inflow – with low birth rates, many European countries need migrants to fill labor gaps and contribute to revenue bases.
However, the sheer number of migrants, both legal and illegal, who have crossed into Europe in recent years has caused challenges in terms of housing, training, employment and social services.
The EU allocates some funding on this front through its long-term budget.
Since the mass migration of Ukrainian refugees began last year, the European Commission has used almost all the reserves available in the fund to provide emergency assistance to countries that share a border with Ukraine, but resources are running out.
This has been a major source of discord among EU members, particularly because the burden of accommodating migrants hasn’t been shared equally across the bloc.
Point-of-entry countries bear the highest burden, socially and financially, of the migrant crisis.
A small group of wealthier countries that are preferred places of settlement for migrants also tend to carry a bigger share of the responsibility.
After a lull in migration induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe saw another big wave of refugees beginning in 2022.
The EU received nearly 1 million asylum applications last year, a 53 percent increase from 2021.
According to the EU’s border service, Frontex, more than 330,000 irregular crossings of the EU’s external borders were detected in 2022, an increase of 64 percent from the previous year.
In the first four months of 2023, 82,000 were detected, a threefold increase over the same period in 2019, before the pandemic began.
Some of these migrants came from the same regions as in previous years (i.e., Africa and the Middle East) driven by similar conditions – political instability, inflation, poverty – as the refugees who arrived after 2015.
Many reached Europe through the Mediterranean, using Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia or Libya as their starting points.
The Western Balkans is also a potential, though less common, route.
In this most recent wave, Ukraine became a new source of refugees to Europe.
Since Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the EU and the Schengen zone have received 4 million registrations for temporary protection and almost 37,000 asylum applications from Ukrainian nationals.
By the beginning of 2023, about 1.54 million Ukrainian refugees had arrived in Poland, 1.02 million in Germany, 472,000 in the Czech Republic, 173,000 in Italy and 159,000 in Spain.
However, these figures don’t capture the full number of Ukrainians who have entered the EU since the war began.
That’s because Ukrainians can enter the EU visa-free for 90 days and extend their stay by obtaining work permits or applying to study – meaning they don’t need to apply for asylum to remain in the bloc.
These numbers initially alarmed the EU, which feared a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis.
The bloc has struggled to build unity around rules for resettling refugees, with some countries refusing to accept burden sharing.
The migration issue has caused significant disagreements within the EU and was even a big driver behind the Brexit campaign.
Wealthier member states tend to attract more migrants because they can offer better employment opportunities and social guarantees.
In 2022, approximately 70 percent of asylum applications in the EU were submitted in five countries: Germany, France, Spain, Austria and Italy.
As a result, people of non-European origin have been concentrated in pockets of the bloc, which can over time lead to social disruptions in these regions as well as tensions between member states.
France, for example, has seen mass protests over systemic racism and police treatment of people with Arab or African origins.
This isn’t a problem facing only these communities, however.
Ukrainian refugees have also been the targets of anti-migration demonstrations.
Several protests erupted in Warsaw throughout 2022 due to the large influx of Ukrainian refugees.
The justice minister from the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg said in November that refugees were putting Germany in an “extremely stressful situation” and warned that it would only worsen as more displaced people were accommodated.
And in Ireland, residents protested in November against the arrival of 380 Ukrainian refugees in Dublin.
Some have taken issue with the substantial funds used to support Ukrainian refugees – 33 percent of whom are children, while 73.3 percent of those of working age are female.
Last year, the EU set up a Temporary Protection Directive to provide Ukrainians with support for things like housing, employment and medical care.
Member states were given between $400 million and $13 billion per year to accommodate Ukrainians.
Still, European countries seem confident that another migration crisis on the level of 2015 won’t happen today.
That’s partly because the number of migrants arriving from the Middle East and North Africa is less than it was in 2015.
In addition, the migrants who have arrived from Ukraine are more educated, better trained and easier to assimilate into Western European societies than those who came to Europe in the previous waves.
By 2023, almost half of Ukrainian refugees in the bloc were employed or self-employed.
Moreover, almost half of Ukrainians who initially fled the war have already returned to their home country.
This likely gives European governments hope that, with the right policies, they can regulate migration in such a way to attract people to fill their worker shortages and encourage population growth.
Thus, last month, the EU agreed for the first time in years to revamp its migration policy.
Previous attempts to regulate migration on the basis of the so-called Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that an asylum seeker must apply in the first member state in which they enter, didn’t work.
A revision to the Dublin rule that imposed mandatory admittance quotas on member states only deepened the divide within the bloc.
Under new proposed legislation, countries can choose not to accept migrants whom they would be responsible for under the quota system – but will have to pay 22,000 euros ($24,200) for each refugee they refuse to host.
This measure introduces some flexibility for governments that are hesitant to accommodate migrants, though some Eastern European countries are still dissatisfied.
For example, Poland objected, arguing that the charge amounts to a fine for not accommodating even more refugees than it already has.
Meanwhile, the EU is also trying to stem the flow of migrants into Europe from source countries.
The European Commission has proposed a series of measures to do just that, including improved border controls, speeding up repatriation and allocating money to source countries.
The commission also plans to allocate more investments to states that accept the return of migrants.
The bloc recently offered Tunisia more than 1 billion euros to help stabilize the country’s economy and curb migration.
It’s unlikely, however, that such payments will drastically decrease migrant flows, at least for now, considering the level of economic and political disruption in these countries.
At best, these new measures will take years to put a dent in migration numbers and stabilize relations between EU members on this issue.
It could even create more discord by diverting more EU funds to the migration problem, especially among Central European countries, which are the main recipients of subsidies from the EU budget.
Compounding these problems are other side effects from the war in Ukraine.
Kyiv has requested additional financial, military and humanitarian support from the EU.
The sanctions against Russia have complicated European energy supplies.
Inflation is elevated across the eurozone.
And European economies have seen contractions and declining business climates in recent quarters, most notably in Germany.
The EU may be forced to use budget funds to support some of these economies, which are still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
For now, the EU would be satisfied to just reach a compromise that removes the migration issue from center stage.
In the long term, however, it will struggle to accept enough migrants to meet economic needs without opening its doors to another inundation.
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