PARIS — On June 11, the bodies of 18 African migrants were found in the Sahara. According to Giuseppe Loprete, Niger’s chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration, they had died more than a week earlier — most likely from dehydration. Caught in a sandstorm between Arlit, in Niger, and Algeria, they lost their way, he said, and “the heat and lack of water did the rest.” A few days later, the remains of 30 more migrants were discovered in the desert.
This sad news didn’t reach the front pages in Europe: The Continent has been too busy trying to grasp the scale of the wave of migrants landing on its southern shores to pay attention to 48 unlucky Africans. Nobody here will see those bodies; no one will tell their stories. This particular tragedy will remain an African one.
The other tragedy, the drama of hundreds of thousands of people on the move, risking their lives on the Mediterranean, is now a European story. And as it unfolds before our eyes, we have no clear idea of what to do.
It’s not that we couldn’t see it coming. A year ago, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published some staggering statistics: At the end of 2013, the world counted 51.2 million displaced people — six million more than the year before. Last week, the refugee agency said the number rose to 59.5 million in 2014. This is truly historic: Not since the end of World War II have so many people been uprooted against their will.
Yet the 2013 figure went almost unnoticed. Millions of Syrians had already fled their war-torn country and taken refuge in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. The hardships of family life in refugee camps weren’t on our radar screens, and hardly on our TV screens. A number of refugees, from as far away as Afghanistan, did reach the European Union through Turkey to Greece and Bulgaria; so we built walls and sealed frontiers.
Then in the spring everything changed. Finding land borders locked, refugees had taken to the sea. Overwhelmed and frustrated by a lack of European solidarity, Italy had ended its Mediterranean rescue mission in December. Suddenly, the human tragedy was there for all Europeans to see: rickety boats capsizing every day; refugees drowning by the hundreds. So far this year, at least 1,868 people have died or disappeared in the Mediterranean, compared with 448 in the same period last year. Forced to do something, European Union members sent some ships to help with the crisis.
But then what? Those who reach dry land alive now face Act III of the tragedy — Act I being the first leg of the long journey from home, before they reach the sea. The Greek island of Lesbos and the Italian island of Lampedusa are swamped with migrants. The refugees are anxious to go North, but nobody wants them.
With summer here, life on the run turns from chaotic to surreal, as well-fed European tourists flock to Mediterranean beaches. The French police push migrants back to Italy; dozens of families sleep on the floor in the Ventimiglia rail station. In Nice, undocumented migrants are prevented from boarding trains to Paris. In the City of Light, police evacuate makeshift camps of African migrants, only to find them back, with newcomers, the next day. Local people and NGOs feed them and clothe them, even though Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, demands that they be given “neither shelter nor medical care.” The town of Calais, last stop before the Channel, now has a “jungle”: a camp of about 3,000 migrants who in their desperation try to jump on trucks bound for Britain.
The Continent is now the premier destination for the world’s migrants. Last year, 626,000 people requested asylum in Europe, a 45 percent increase over 2013. (North America also registered a 42 percent increase but deals with far smaller numbers: 134,600 asylum seekers.) These figures go beyond the already high levels of legal and illegal immigration — an inflow of people that has spurred a populist and anti-immigrant backlash among voters across Europe. Further confusing the picture, the difference between refugees fleeing war or persecution and economic migrants has blurred, as the latter suffer grave human rights violations on their odysseys, especially at the hands of traffickers in Libya.
Faced with this rapidly expanding crisis, the European Union has reacted as it often does: slowly, burdened by the lack of a common immigration and asylum policy.
A few leaders in Brussels seem to have understood the scale of this massive movement of people and the challenges it poses to Europe’s identity as well as to its ideals of solidarity and shared human values. In May, the European Commission belatedly came up with “A European Agenda on Migration” that asked Union members to share 40,000 refugees among themselves according to predetermined quotas. The idea of quotas was quickly rejected by several countries, including France and some Central European nations. Instead, Brussels is now talking about a relocation scheme based on the somewhat more palatable notion of a “distribution key” that sets out the criteria under which member states would absorb the migrants.
Some of the Commission’s proposals amount to positive steps in the right direction, but most of its agenda remains focused on preventing people from coming to the European Union in the first place. This human wave cannot be stopped. The sheer nature of the conflicts raging in parts of Africa and in the Middle East, along with the powerful demographic dynamics of Africa, means that migration will be a European feature for many years to come. This is an exceptional situation — in need of an exceptional response.
Experts know that solutions exist, but changing the political discourse on immigration requires courage and long-term vision, something not widely shared in Western capitals these days. When they gather this week in Brussels, the Union’s 28 heads of state and government may be reminded of a tragic precedent: the Évian conference of July 1938. Convened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was intended to address the plight of hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews desperate for refuge after Hitler had expelled them. As Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote in late May: “The Évian conference was a catastrophe. … The outcome of the meeting was clear: Europe, North America and Australia would not accept significant numbers of these refugees. In the verbatim record, two words were uttered repeatedly: ‘density’ and ‘saturation.”’
May this catastrophe not be repeated.
Sylvie Kauffmann is the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde.