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EUObeserver | 17.03.2017

By ANNA TRIANDAFYLLIDOU

It has been a year since the signing of the EU-Turkey agreement. The flow of asylum seekers and migrants through the Turkey-Greece corridor has been reduced to a trickle.

By contrast, flows from Libya to Italy continue at a sustained pace, a testament to political and economic hardships on the African continent. The increased movement over the last three years has put the EU under pressure, and has often led to drastic political and policy responses.

Public debate tends to focus too much on criticism and forget the important steps taken to strengthen European governance of asylum and migration. Yet, there have still been at least ten notable developments.

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MPI | 03.2017

By Demetrios G. Papademetriou

This commentary first appeared in Europe’s World, the policy journal of Friends of Europe.

Since the early spring of 2016, the number of people migrating across the Mediterranean has stabilized, to about 200,000 people. This is largely due to the closure of the Western Balkan route and the EU-Turkey Statement of March 2016, which sought to end irregular migration from Turkey to the European Union.

Underlying both actions is the newfound willingness of key European governments—Austria, Germany, and Sweden, among others—to ensure orderly procedures and „reasonable“ levels of openness. The resulting policy „recalibration“ has gradually changed both the terms under which asylum seekers are received, and the expectations of them; it has led to an increasing determination (albeit still mostly rhetorical) to remove both failed asylum applicants and outright economic migrants. The message to would-be migrants and each country’s general public is that illegal migration will no longer be tolerated.

Of course, people are still trying to reach Europe, both by land and by sea. Land routes include travelling to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, while the sea routes mean continuous small-craft traffic toward Spanish shores, large numbers of crossings through the Central Mediterranean, and a small (but incessant) number of journeys across the Aegean.

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