12.17.2022 10:13 (act. 12.17.2022 16:26)
For border fences and maritime blockades: Karl Nehammer, Giorgia Meloni. ©Portal/AP
Despite new fences and controversial cooperation to keep migrants away, illegal border crossings into the European Union increased significantly in 2022. What Nehammer and Meloni are demanding now.
In the first eleven months of this year, EU border protection agency Frontex reported around 308,000 attempts to enter the EU without permission. Frontex announced this week that this was a 68% increase compared to the same period last year. This is the highest figure in the first eleven months since 2016.
Fortress Europe?
Europe is reacting to the trend and trying to isolate itself. Human rights activists accuse the continent of having double standards: while war refugees from Ukraine are taken in voluntarily, others in need of help are turned away at external borders, sometimes with brutal measures. “Tragically, many are still dying at sea seeking protection,” the UN refugee agency said in an appeal to the EU. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) complained: “Rejections and abuses at land borders continue and many people seeking protection are not allowed to enter Europe”.
Many reasons to seek a better life
The increasingly dramatic consequences of climate change, the global effects of the war in Ukraine, including energy and food crises, armed conflict, poverty and persecution: many reasons have driven people to leave their homes in Africa, the Middle East or Southeast Asia in 2022 and look for one to pursue a better life.
“Breaking Taboos”
Some European heads of government want to further close the EU’s external borders. Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni earlier this year proposed a naval blockade in the Mediterranean and camps in North Africa where migrants are taken to check their chances of asylum in Europe. Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) calls on the European Union to fund border fences in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary in order to prevent illegal immigration. “Finally we have to break the taboos,” he said on Thursday at the EU summit in Brussels.