Refugees Welcome? | A New Frontier

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Stories of bloated dinghies filled with desperate souls going down in the Mediterranean appear less and less these days. It’s a blessing, of course: when the refugee crisis that has gripped Europe’s shores for the past few years arrived with horrifying tumult in 2015, the shock, misery and uncertainty it bought with it set the zeitgeist for the rest of the decade. Now it’s 2019, and those three words still linger, albeit manifested in the comparable nonsense of European politics, the equally bizarre antics of our friends across the Atlantic, and the pernicious, spreading tumor of the climate emergency. Europe’s refugee crisis—if it is indeed still called that—is now more of a spectre, a shadow on the fringes of the continent, threatening to return, not yet fully resolved.

Why is it no longer making headlines? In the main, because the crisis appears to have been stymied. The number of people making the perilous sea journey to Italy and Greece⁠—once the two key points of entry to Europe⁠—has fallen dramatically since 2015. Greece, which saw some 850,000 refugees cross the Aegean four years ago, has received 43,683 migrants by sea so far in 2019. Italy, meanwhile, has received just 9,427 this year, down by over 170,000 compared with 2016. Death tolls have fallen in turn, from 3,771 in 2015 to 1,080 by October this year.

The overall impression is that the crisis has drifted away as the tide has washed in “bigger” stories⁠—Brexit, Orban, riots on the streets of Paris and Barcelona. If we can’t see it, it’s not happening.

Numbers, however, don’t tell the whole story. The fall in the figures above has been, in part, down to a right wing, nationalist backlash at the arrival of people who look different. Populists—from Austria to Andalusia—have been on the rise, the most notorious being the leader of Italy’s far-right Northern League (and until recently also Italy’s Deputy PM and Minister of the Interior), Mateo Salvini, who has pursued closed port policies against migrant rescue ships, drawing ire from humanitarian groups across the continent, and local organizations here in Barcelona, too.

“Some of the other European states are absolutely xenophobic,” says Ignasi Calbó, when I spoke to him earlier this year. Calbó was until recently the head of the Ajuntament de Barcelona's "Ciutat Refugi" project, launched in September 2015 in response to the crisis to support the city’s efforts in receiving and assisting refugees and asylum seekers. “The thing is that politically in Europe, even if they are not in power, the ideas of the right or of the xenophobic states have prevailed. Everyone is scared of what they are going to say, so on this topic, things are going more to the right.”

Closed ports and an unwillingness from the EU to get involved in the policies of sovereign governments has meant that migrants now look for new routes into Europe, or are stopped on their journey before they even get the chance to take to the sea. As such, new frontiers for the crisis have emerged.

In order to stop the flow of immigration into Europe, one of the EU’s recent strategies has been to hide the visceral, boats-on-shores images by keeping migrants at arm's length. The problem has been buried rather than truly addressed—like a gambler their debts—confining refugees to grim camps as far afield as Niger and Rwanda. This follows the EU’s morally dubious deals with both Turkey and Libya, through which it paid vast sums of money in aid in return for stricter border and coastal security. The latter has been one of the key factors in the drop in migrant numbers, even if the situation for those now housed in camps in North Africa, Turkey, and, increasingly, Greece is as dire as it ever was.

Calbó is particularly critical of EU measures, stating that much of his work at Ciutat Refugi is to try and work around the EU to ensure a humanitarian response is enacted. “We try to overcome all the oppressive slash racist policies done by the EU,” he says. “They don't grant rights to refugees and asylum seekers in the EU, so we try to join forces with other cities to discover their experiences and to try to put their voices into policies, because the state doesn’t care about them. They only care about influxes, big trends, and they are forgetting about the most important part which is integration and how we work with these people so that they can become regular citizens.”

Such vitriol is not reserved solely for the EU, however. Calbó is also critical of the Spanish state’s inaction, especially since Spain has become, somewhat unexpectedly, one of the main European frontiers of the migrant crisis. While the numbers arriving to other entry flashpoints have fallen year on year, in Spain they rose dramatically to 2018, when a record number of refugees arrived here by sea. A reported 58,569 landed last year, primarily in Andalusia, making up roughly half of the total number of refugees who arrived in Europe by sea in 2018. Spain is now (after Greece, where the numbers of people arriving on Lesbos and other Aegean islands have begun to creep back up), one of the major gateways for migrants traveling to Europe across the Mediterranean, a phenomenon which has somehow been lost in the milieu of politics and tension in Madrid and Barcelona.

The reasons for this are manifold and far reaching, its tentacles stretching down into West African conflicts and the root causes of sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty. Some, though, point to a shift in the routes which migrants are taking to reach Europe. As Salvini has closed Italy’s ports and borders, and the EU deal with Turkey has slowed the flow of people into Greece, statistics from 4Mi in 2018 show that refugees from West Africa have become more likely to cite Spain as their final destination, using a western route across the Mediterranean rather than the central one towards Italy.

“The people going this way,” Calbó explains, tracing a route from the Middle East and East Africa to the Mediterranean on a map, “are going through Libya, or they are going through Greece. Some of them changed routes, but it is very difficult to go from there [Libya and East Africa] to here [Morocco and, subsequently, Spain]. The nationalities going to Greece tend to be Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians and Pakistanis. In Libya going to Italy, you find Somalis, Eritreans, Kenyans and Yemenese. And here [Morocco traveling to Spain], you find West African countries like Guinea, mostly French speaking countries. So it’s not that people are communicating to change routes.”

The statistics, discussed here by the Mixed Migration Centre, support Calbó’s assertions, showing that people traveling from West Africa and Morocco are now more likely to choose the route to Spain, when in 2015 and 2016 they were more likely to head for Italy.

There is also a suggestion that Morocco, whose coast lies a mere 14.3 km from Spain at its narrowest point and contains two Spanish enclaves in the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, is attempting to extort a better economic aid deal with the EU, like Turkey and Libya’s. Some claim that Morocco’s lax border controls—turning a blind eye to smugglers launching from the coast around Tangiers—are a deliberate attempt to put Spain under the political strain of housing asylum seekers, causing similar unrest as seen in Italy and Greece, and thus forcing the EU into giving Morocco a more economically fruitful trade deal. 

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s initial refugee-friendly proclamations upon arriving in office also characterized Spain’s new position as a frontier in the crisis. Just two weeks after taking office in June 2018, Sanchez allowed the 630 passengers on the rescue ship Aquarius, which had previously been turned away by Italy and Malta, to come ashore in Valencia. A humanitarian move? On the face of it, certainly. But subsequent policies, and the falling numbers of refugees who are landing in Andalusia by the second half of 2019, have told a story which doesn’t quite live up to Sanchez’s “espíritu solidario” credentials. “They are now acting in a similar way to the other European states,” says Calbó. “First we were allowing Aquarius, and now we are not allowing the other Spanish boats⁠—the Open Arms and Aita Mari—to go and save people. There is something different.”

The grim fate of the Open Arms rescue boat (run by a Barcelona based non-profit NGO, Proactiva Open Arms) that Ignasi references is a fitting case study for Sanchez’s change in tack. After allowing the Open Arms to dock in Barcelona with 60 asylum seekers on board in 2018 (just two weeks after the Aquarius), the Spanish government later decided to ban the Open Arms from carrying out rescue missions in January of this year, on the grounds that it failed to meet the safety requirements to carry out long sea voyages. Here in Barcelona the Open Arms stayed, until it defied the ban and continued the work it was set up to do in June 2019. After picking up 121 stranded migrants in the middle of the Med, it became embroiled in an international dispute about which country should allow it to dock while anchored off the Italian island of Lampedusa. While Salvini predictably turned his cheek, Sanchez struggled to come good on his earlier humanitarian assurances.

The impasse remained unresolved for 20 days as conditions for all those on board became increasingly squalid—reports and videos showing the psychological strain of spending this amount of time on an overcrowded vessel are a difficult watch. Sanchez was stuck, as El Mundo so well put it, “entre la espada y la pared”—between a sword and the wall, a rock and a hard place—given the weakness he would blatantly intimate if he went back on his Open Arms ban. Furthermore, Open Arms is facing a fine of up to €900,000, and foisting such a penalty upon a humanitarian NGO whose work he claims to champion is not the best look for a supposedly socialist Prime Minister up for yet another election. The authorities in Lampedusa eventually brought a case through court to let the Open Arms in on August 30, and the refugees were then taken to Cadiz. 

For Sanchez, the migrant issue has been particularly trying, as he tries to square his socialist, humanitarian tendencies with political expediency and what some perceive as overreach from the EU. This, at least, is the feeling within Ciutat Refugi, where exasperation at the cost of the Spanish state’s indecision is palpable. Calbó was quick to criticize what he sees as Sanchez’s cynical use of the crisis to his political advantage:

“Sanchez was very smart on this, because this single act with the Aquarius put him on the international scene very fast. Normally people do this over time in soft diplomacy or hard diplomacy, but he spent two million on one boat and boom! He was on the first news of Europe. And this is what he wanted, to be there shaking hands with Macron, to become known.” 

However, criticism of the Spanish leader’s preference for good optics pales in comparison with what Calbó sees as an EU unwilling to view the crisis as a humanitarian disaster and thus welcome all migrants attempting to make it across the Mediterranean. He continues: “Then they [Sanchez] saw that Europe was telling them to stop, not to grant those refugees. So now they are not allowing the boats to go out, they are punishing the NGOs, but it is not the NGOs that they need to punish. There are people dying on the sea, so they are acting as murderers, not directly, but indirectly.”

Harsh criticism maybe, but it’s a reflection of the frustration and fury felt by those doing their best to keep a structure, which is under resourced and sinking, afloat. “The problem,” Calbó says, “is that the system has absolutely collapsed—it’s not working. So you need to change the regime. The system was made for about 1,000 people per year, but last year we had 50,000, 60,000 people. Even the software they are using is always breaking because it cannot hold that much information.”

“It is absolutely stupid,” Calbó continues, “Because we need people, we need skilled workers. In Spain, we don't have people to work in our companies, so at the end of the day we are employing people that are irregular. Once you are irregular in Spain you have to do all your stuff in “black”: you have to get your health in “black”; you have to use “black” money; work in “black”; spend your money in “black.” So it makes absolutely no sense to not try and regularize these people. They will stay here, they aren’t going to return to their countries. In Europe we spend a lot of money on returns, and it's absolutely useless: it's very expensive and everything could be saved. It is absolutely not right to be not granting rights to these people.”

The benefits of integrating asylum seekers shouldn’t be as tough a sell as it is. The opposite leaves people without documents, without income and more likely to fall into illegal work. An analysis of the “collapsing” systems Calbó mentions—the ones that Barcelona has in place in order to take in, look after and finally integrate asylum seekers into society—sheds light on a process that is functioning but pushed to its limits, fighting against a jammed up rudder to stay on its course.

In the second part of this series on Spain’s experience of Europe’s migrant crisis, we’ll look at what Barcelona specifically is doing to combat the issue which continues to trundle desperately along. We’ll hear more from Ignasi Calbó and others working within governmental structures and NGOs to aid in the integration and safeguarding of rights for refugees, as well as real stories from an asylum seeker who has himself been through the system.

You can read more about the work that Ignasi Calbó and Ciutat Refugi do here.

You can learn more about Open Arms and donate via openarms.es and follow on Twitter: @openarms_found, Facebook: @proactivaservice and Instagram: @proactivaopenarms.

Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond.