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Migrant Centers Aren't Solution for EU, UN Agency Says

by Reuters

   BRUSSELS --

   A U.N. agency tapped to run new migrant centers around the
   Mediterranean says the plan won't solve the European Union's
   immigration challenge.

   Irregular migration across the sea has been dramatically reduced; only
   about 45,000 people have made it to Europe that way this year. But the
   hot-button issue is driving the EU's political agenda.

   Last week, EU states agreed to tighten their external borders and spend
   more in the Middle East and North Africa to bring down the number of
   arrivals.

   Chancellor Angela Merkel, trying to save her coalition, on Monday
   agreed to set up migrant camps on the German border, highlighting how
   the EU is unable to agree on joint migration policies and how
   governments increasingly go it alone.

   One thing EU leaders have agreed is to look at setting up
   "disembarkation platforms" to handle those rescued from the dangerous
   crossing. Most are brought ashore in Italy, but more than 1,300 people
   perished this year.

   'Responsibility to govern'

   "The Mediterranean is a shared space, north-south. We have a joint
   responsibility to govern what happens in that space, including avoiding
   that people drown," Eugenio Ambrosi, the head of the International
   Organization for Migration's EU mission, told Reuters.

   The IOM and its sister U.N. agency for refugees, the UNHCR, would run
   the new sites.

   Ambrosi said 10 existing migrant centers in Greece and Italy could
   first be beefed up and new ones could then be added in Malta. But
   opening others on the southern rim of the Mediterranean, as some EU
   states want, would take time.

   "Before going outside of Europe, asking other countries to help, we
   have to make sure that enough European countries help each other,"
   Ambrosi said in an interview.

   Eventually, depending on where in the Mediterranean they were rescued,
   people would be taken to EU or African centers.

   The much-publicized idea of Mediterranean camps would work only if more
   legal ways to get to Europe from non-EU countries are opened up,
   Ambrosi said.

   Some deny admission

   EU states would have to share legitimate asylum-seekers from the
   centers, an idea that has divided them bitterly since 2015. As more
   than a million people entered the EU in 2015, overwhelming Italy,
   Greece and Germany, eastern nations led by Poland and Hungary refused
   to help by taking in a share.

   With this internal dispute still festering, the EU will turn to Tunisia
   and Morocco to host new sites. The African countries have a good
   opportunity to bargain hard.

   Ambrosi said he opposed locating migrant centers in strife-torn Libya
   and said populists in the EU had failed to recognize how far the number
   of arrivals had dropped since 2015.

   "It's not a migration issue, it's a political and functioning-of-the-EU
   issue," he said. "There is no quick fix -- there has never been."