EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (EUC Report)

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, we read every day that immigration has become the central issue in the referendum, and perhaps it will determine the outcome of the vote. This is hardly surprising because it is probably the biggest and most urgent challenge to the West. I think that the British people have little confidence that anybody has a grip on it, and the two reports that we are debating indicate that they are right to feel that way.

Of course, the problem is huge. Conflict has displaced 12.5 million people in Syria alone. The present situation in Greece, Italy, France and probably Germany, which now has a backlog of 460,000 asylum cases, is already unsustainable. The UNHCR expects a further 1.2 million in 2017. The migration challenge is an issue that EU policymakers, which means the EU Commission, have failed to meet.

First, the EU did not recognise that it is a global challenge and not primarily a European one. Command and control should be in the hands of the UN, as the noble Lord, Lord Soley, has indicated.

Secondly, the EU has failed to make, let alone implement, practical but crucial distinctions between asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants. Nor has it produced reliable methods of identifying Islamist jihadists who have been infiltrating the present crisis.

Thirdly, the EU Commission has been focusing on the symptoms: the people smugglers who have caused so many deaths with unscrupulous methods by both land and sea. As we now know from my noble friend Lord Tugendhat’s report, although the EU’s Operation Sophia has, wonderfully, been saving 1,000 lives a day, it has failed to reduce illegal migration or deter the criminals who facilitate it. In practice, it has, from the start, merely offered a safe passage to destination for those in peril on the sea. Therefore, it is, in itself, a huge incentive to take the risks. Indeed, for the coming summer surge of migrants across the English Channel, it would probably be cheaper and more humane to issue them with Eurostar train tickets if, when intercepted, they cannot be returned directly to the country from which they set sail.

Fourthly, the EU Commission has laid down for each Schengen state unenforceable and unenforced quotas for the number of immigrants to be received. These quotas have, quite predictably, been ignored.

Fifthly, the Turkish deal is collapsing. In part, that is because the Turks are demanding visa-free entry into Europe, which EU Governments will not grant; added to which they have also been given the prospect of EU membership. However, both sides on the referendum campaign have made it absolutely clear that that will not happen for decades, and the Turks rightly recognise it to be a bogus offer. Also, from last week, the repatriation of migrants to Turkey is being challenged in the European Court of Justice on multiple human rights grounds, ironically by two Pakistanis being held on the Greek island of Lesbos. This strikes at the heart of the legal architecture of the Turkish deal.

In place of conscience-salving tokenism, surely it is better to face up to the horrors of reality. There has always been pressure for economic migration, but it is now magnified a thousand times by the spread of knowledge of world conditions through social media and by the current military conflicts. In practice, economic migrants will not be deterred until the standard of living in the countries to which they wish to move is only marginally higher than what they have at home. This is not a social issue: it is simply the operation of market forces. It can be controlled only through economic assessment by the recipient Governments of the numbers they need. Ultimately, that is a national political judgment—it is certainly not one for the EU Commission to make.

Last week, the EU Commission proposed a €62 billion investment fund, mainly for Africa, as an inducement to co-operate in curbing migration. I am afraid that in most African countries, a lot of that will end up in the bank accounts of the “big man” and his cronies. I am not sure that that is a clever use of EU funds.

I hope very much that the migration partnership framework, which the EU Commission announced one week ago, and which I gather could include a UN-led global resettlement scheme, may mean that it is at last moving towards what I proposed in this House a year ago. I return, therefore, for the third time, to my proposal for a holding area, probably in Libya, to which migrants would be transferred. Libya is huge—it is three times the size of France, and with only 6 million people, it is sparsely populated. It is in a state of chaos with an expanding ISIS presence, for which the international community bears quite a bit of responsibility, and where military intervention, probably by the West, will soon become necessary.

I have no time to repeat all the details, except to say that it envisages using solar power for desalination of the sea, thus making the desert bloom, and the use of NATO forces in blue helmets under UN mandate to establish, administer, protect and guard the holding area to which all migrants can be taken. There they would be sustained, cared for and processed, with some going where they want, and others returning home, with perhaps the eventual establishment of a permanent population in a new state, which I have called Refugia.