Refugees: without peace in the Middle East they will keep coming
14 September 2015 | In the Media
“We have been surprised by the refugee crisis,” said Xavier Aragall, an IEMed migration expert, for whom the situation in the Middle East will sooner or later have direct consequences for the European continent. In an interview with Radio 4, Aragall explained that the war in Syria, the destabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan, the fragile demographic balance of countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, which host hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the conflicts in Africa and the Sahel, form the context that explains the increase in the flow of refugees to Europe.
The lack of European planning to manage asylum applications in an orderly and agile manner and the “imminent arrival of winter” are two other reasons that help explain why we are facing the biggest refugee crisis since the second World War.
Interviewed on the occasion of the extraordinary meeting on migration of European interior ministers today in Brussels, Aragall commented that it is important to clearly establish the distinction between economic migrant and refugee and to agree urgently on the distribution of refugees among member countries. “With the closure of borders, Germany yesterday sounded the alarm about the need for all countries to take in refugees.”
However, he believes that negotiations with the European Commission will not be easy as there are countries, such as Germany and Sweden, with a longer tradition of asylum and better prepared to accept the arrival of refugees, than European Mediterranean countries, who believe that in recent years they have received a large contingent of economic migrants.
For all this, Aragall considers that the EU and the international community, in addition to dealing with the current humanitarian crisis, must make difficult decisions, at the diplomatic and foreign level, to contribute to the stabilization of the Near East.