The migrant crisis in Calais shows the EU’s failure to see the big picture

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/05/migrant-crisis-calais-eu-europe

Version 0 of 1.

A scene both horrifying and heartening is unfolding across the Channel in Calais. There are hundreds of tired, hungry young men in makeshift camps, skulking in corners, massing with intent, playing a dangerous, occasionally violent game of cat and mouse with the authorities. Given the slightest chance, they will squeeze themselves into cars and airless lorries. Just this week more than 200, from the 1,200 in the vicinity, attempted to storm a passenger ferry. No plan is too outlandish, no wheeze too risky. Anything to get to Britain.

It’s a tale of misery, for the men and the authorities. Many of the migrants massed in Calais have travelled hundreds of miles, from Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea, through north Africa to mainland Europe, often through Italy. Others are fleeing conflict in Syria, poverty in Pakistan. What food they have, they obtain from charities. There is danger, for this is a life and death competition, where one man’s triumph is another man’s failure and that is manifested in spasms of violence. And can anyone be surprised that, having to deal with all this, Natacha Bouchart, the mayor of Calais, is at her wits’ end. She says Calais’s ordeal is intolerable; and she’s right. She says Calais has been abandoned to face its plight alone. She’s right there, too.

One of the most basic instincts of our species is to better itself. In their own desperate way, the migrants in Calais are seeking to better themselves. That they see Britain as the place to do so says something heartening, when the popular narrative – jointly constructed by our media and our politics – says we are a declining nation going to hell in a handcart. One message we should take from the disturbing pictures from Calais is that large swathes of the world’s population will do anything to get here. We are a people blessed, and in an increasingly connected world, with competitive markets, we’ll need the energy, resourcefulness and youth of many of those migrants.

Still, the challenges of Calais need addressing. When Mayor Bouchart suggests moving border control from Calais across the water to Dover, she deploys the argument that most of the migrants are merely passing through her country en route to the UK. Calais is therefore unduly penalised for its status as a crossing point and its geography. She has a point. Our strategies to deal with the people flowing from the poor to rich countries make a crisis such as that we see in Calais almost inevitable. We greet each new influx with shock and incredulity and, in the absence of a viable long-term plan, places like Calais, and Dover and Lampedusa, in the Mediterranean off the southern coast of Italy, and the Aegean islands of Greece, bear the brunt of our indolence. If ever a situation required the rich countries of Europe to work in tandem to draw up a viable plan, this is it.

But, as we know, the EU as a vehicle for banging together heads and devising solutions is dysfunctional. Regulations state that the first EU port a migrant encounters becomes responsible for that migrant. The rest breathe a sigh of relief that it isn’t their problem and leave those entry points cursed by geography to get on with it. The number of migrants arriving in Italy this year has already exceeded 100,000. Greek police say the number arriving by sea that they have been forced to deal with, in the first six months of this year, doubled to 25,000. Many were families fleeing the murderous conflicts in Syria and Iraq. This may be inevitable, but it needs to be handled with care and it requires resources. Those resources aren’t being made available and what money there is isn’t being adequately shared. According to the Economist, Frontex, the EU’s border-management agency, has an operational budget for the year of €55.3m. Mare Nostrum, the Italian sea-rescue operation costs €9m a month. No wonder there are cries for help from the equivalents of Mayor Bouchart around the pressured border points of Europe. They carry our load, and they can’t cope.

The result is dreadful for everyone, for migrants who starve and die, for the authorities facing a hopeless task, and for cohesion in Europe. Amid the crisis at the ports, can we be surprised at the rise of the racist right in Greece and Italy, and closer to home, the popularity in Kent border towns of divisive entities such as Ukip?

These are big problems. The world is getting richer, but also more unequal. There are conflicts around the globe, many of which stem from our own Machiavellian role in geopolitics and the careless historical drawing of lines on a map. We know that people will flee danger towards safety and move from poverty towards prosperity. And yet every influx is a surprise, exposing lack of strategy, lack of preparedness and a failure to see the big picture. We see that again in Calais.