EU, France deliver migration crackdowns as populists surge

The Netherlands’ firebrand populist Geert Wilders recently won an election there, and has a shot at becoming prime minister. Ms Le Pen’s party is leading French opinion polls, and Germany’s far-right AfD outpolls all but the centre-right CDU.

The EU deal comes before a bloc-wide parliamentary election in early June, at which parties with a tough stance on immigration are expected to increase their vote share.

“Migration has to be solved, otherwise it will dominate the political landscape in 2024,” Manfred Weber, leader of the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, told the Financial Times.

EU detention centres

The bloc has been brawling over immigration policy for almost a decade, but the problem has become more acute as the number of irregular migrants swelled to 250,000 this year. Just a few years ago, there would typically be 100,000 or fewer.

Most of the irregular migrants arrive in Mediterranean countries, and EU law requires that they be processed in the country of arrival. Greece and Italy say this puts an unfair financial burden on them, particularly as most migrants are ultimately aiming to get to north-western Europe.

Attempts to share out the migrants between countries, either for processing or settling, have foundered because some eastern European countries refuse to accept a share.

The so-called New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which is likely to come into effect next year, requires every country to take a share of the 30,000 to 150,000 migrants whose applications are expected to be approved each year.

The share would be based on a country’s economy and population size. But a country could opt out of this, instead offering €20,000 per migrant as cash, equipment or personnel to an EU fund that would support the frontline countries doing the processing.

Those countries, such as Italy and Greece, would build detention centres to which arrivals from certain countries would be sent automatically. Their claims would be processed within 12 weeks. If they were turned down, deportation would occur within another 12 weeks.

The people who would be funnelled into this system would be from countries deemed a security risk, or from countries with low asylum recognition rates in the EU, such as India, Tunisia and Turkey. It would also potentially apply to anyone intercepted at sea.

The rules do not cover the 800,000-plus asylum seekers who make legitimate applications before they try to reach the EU.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said the deal was “a great success” for Europe and Italy, and could re-establish co-operation and solidarity on the issue between EU members.

But it attracted the ire of human rights groups, who branded it as “a dark day for Europe”. And the Hungarian government signalled it was still unhappy: “No one from Brussels or anywhere else can tell us who we can let in,” said Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.

The EU has also been working in source countries such as Tunisia to try to prevent the would-be migrants from setting out across the Mediterranean in the first place, and is pushing harder for source countries to accept deportations more readily.

Tough French rules

In France, Mr Macron managed to pass his immigration law only with the support of Ms Le Pen and her populist National Rally party, after a significant chunk of MPs in his own coalition refused to back it.

Under the changes, which will be scrutinised by the country’s constitutional council, migrants would have to have legally reside in France for five years, or have worked for 30 months, to qualify for some key social benefits.

The law also removes the automatic right to French citizenship for children born in France. Instead, teenagers will have to apply for citizenship when they are between 16 and 18. And any dual national convicted of a criminal offence could potentially lose their French citizenship.

Mr Macron’s prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, tried to quell a sense of fracture in the governing coalition.

“We’ve done our job, we wanted a text with useful measures that our citizens were calling for,” she said. “Now let’s move on.”

Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau quit after the parliamentary vote. Mr Macron’s second and final presidential term runs until 2027, and the fallout from this political crisis risks crimping his ability to govern.