(JNi.media) The UK is urging the European Union speed up the deportation of migrants who are being refused an asylum, in response to the EU’s biggest refugee emergency since WW2. Only this year, well over half a million have arrived in search of shelter and work, threatening the very stability of the 28-state Union. But, according to AP, fewer than 40% of migrants who are rejected return to their home countries. The UK views this as a failure of EU countries to apply the law, which chips at the effectiveness of Europe’s immigration policy.
The UK Home Secretary Theresa May has announced on the eve of Thursday’s meeting in Luxembourg of the EU interior ministers to deal with the migrant crisis: “We need to see Europe upping its game” with regard to the hordes of migrants at its shores. She insisted that the EU “should be sending economic migrants back to their countries of origin. It’s why we need to crack down on those who are abusing our asylum system.”
Britain has committed to accepting 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years. Britain’s policy is to accept genuine refugees directly from camps on Syria’s border, rather than assisting the EU relocation plan for mogrants who have landed in Greece and Italy.
Meanwhile, a senior UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) spokesman in Greece said on Wednesday that human trafficking had begun to decrease as winter weather conditions are making the Mediterranean dangerous for seafaring. “The number of the people arriving in Greece is now going up and down, it is fluctuating from day to day, depending on the weather, because now autumn is here, and winter is approaching, the weather is going to make things more difficult and dangerous,” he said.
An estimated 400,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Greece in 2015. Frontex, the EU border control agency, believes at least 600,000 migrants have crossed the EU external borders in 2015. It is believed that more than 2,500 drowned trying to reach Europe.
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn has stated this week that “the control of external borders, immigration generally, and returns — it’s all a package. We have to get to work on it.” On Thursday, Asselborn will chair a meeting European interior ministers to deal with the crisis.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right bloc wants a limit on the number of refugees allowed into Germany. But the Chancellor has told the public broadcaster ARD on Wednesday that such limits would not be legal. As the head of a Christian party, Merkel insists she won’t “take part in a competition of who can be the least friendly to refugees.”
But Merkel recognizes that the Dublin regulations, which oblige the Mediterranean states—Greece and Italy—to manage the asylum applications, because the migrants first land on their soil. The Chancellor said those regulations were “obsolete.”