The Guardian view on the Calais migrants: Europe’s shared challenge
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Version 0 of 1. Tuesday’s scenes from Calais feed the prevailing narrative of fear about illegal immigration to Europe in general, and to Britain in particular. As French ferry company strikers lit fires and confronted riot police at the mouth of the Channel tunnel, hundreds of migrants attempted to break into lorries that were stacked up on the roads approaching the tunnel entrance. Such scenes are likely to rekindle British public anxiety that Europe is not on top of its migration crisis, that border controls are inadequate, that unacceptable numbers of migrants are heading for Britain and that continental governments are not doing enough to help protect UK borders. Do not dismiss the political potency of the scenes or the use to which they may be put. Yet the facts are significantly at odds with the fears that brought the home secretary to the Commons on Wednesday to answer an emergency question about the disorders in France. In the first place, the migrants outside Calais are overwhelmingly fleeing war, oppression and poverty in search of opportunity and security. More than 3,000 have been living in increasingly squalid conditions in a makeshift camp outside the French port. But they are there because they are unable to get to Britain, not because Britain is easy to enter. Millions of pounds have been spent on tougher security fences around the tunnel and the port areas of Calais. And Tuesday’s chaos was caused by a one-day strike that is now over and was never out of hand. As both David Cameron and Theresa May made clear, France and Britain have cooperated well. There was no mass break-in to Britain. More important, the scenes at Calais are very untypical of illegal migration into the UK. Most illegal migrants do not hide under trucks, throw themselves at passing Eurostar trains, submit to being locked in airless containers or conceal themselves in the baggage holds of airliners. Instead they enter Britain legally and openly on flights into Heathrow airport on visas that they then breach by overstaying. Nevertheless Europe – and the world as a whole – faces a genuine upsurge of illegal migration across and around the Mediterranean caused by the instabilities and dangers in countries stretching from Syria to Mali, and from Libya to Eritrea. Nor can it be disputed that the spike in migrant numbers at Calais is in part related to this wider pressure across Europe. That is precisely why, rightly, this very issue will be at the top of the agenda at Thursday’s Brussels summit of European leaders – above even the Greek crisis and far above the UK’s self-absorbed Eurosceptic grievances. At the summit, Europe’s leaders should rise to the occasion. They have not remotely done this so far, largely from fear of domestic political consequences that cannot be simply dismissed. The British government, for instance, is entitled to be anxious that its hesitant efforts to sell continued membership of the EU are at risk of becoming tangled up in a migration panic in which the EU is depicted as midwife of the problem. Nevertheless, it is time for Europe both to admit the scale of the migration tragedy and to accept greater responsibility towards some of its victims. The human misery and people smuggling in the Mediterranean demand concerted action. According to the United Nations, the world faces its largest number of displaced persons in modern times, with nearly 4 million refugees from the crisis in Syria alone, mostly in Turkey and Jordan, and of whom only tiny numbers have been allowed to reach many EU countries, including Britain. According to the UN, the EU could easily take 1 million of these refugees. This is true in theory if not in political practice. Yet this week, the EU’s leaders will agree to accept a mere 60,000. Britain prioritises hunting and destroying the smugglers’ boats in Libya to searching for and rescuing the smugglers’ abandoned victims. Yet there is a place for both a coercive and a humanitarian approach. There must also be a recognition that this is a shared challenge for Europe, and that a shared solution is the only realistic approach. The events at Calais have belatedly forced even UK ministers to acknowledge this. Now they should accept a fairer share – something of the order of 10% – of the refugees the EU summit will accept today. |