Why the Workers Party is against the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum.
“Fortress Europe”, with its closed borders, fences, quotas and prison camps is no solution. . These issues can only be resolved when the workers of each country overthrow the system that creates wars, poverty and refugees.
Introduction
The EU Asylum and Migration Pact is a set of new European Union rules concerning migration set to take effect in June 2026. It will compel member states to more evenly share the cost and efforts of hosting migrants and reform European Union asylum and border security procedures, among other provisions. While some governing powers, notably those of Hungary and the Netherlands, have declared that they want to opt out of the pact, most EU leaders have lined up behind it. Taoiseach, Simon Harris declared, “I'm absolutely of the view that the most important way to make progress on managing migration is the asylum and migration pact," Harris said, adding that the purpose should be to ensure "fair but also firmer" systems, while Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis similarly stressed the need for an ‘efficient’ return policy for migrants.
Critics of the Pact have said that it puts the human rights of asylum seekers at risk. A group of human rights organizations including Oxfam and Save the Children have criticised the deal in an open letter stating that it would create a "cruel system". More than 200 academics belonging to 66 predominantly European universities have called the Pact "inhumane" and demanded that the European Parliament and the Council to reconsider how they view the Pact.
In the following article, Gerry Grainger, International Secretary of the Workers Party, analyses the motivations behind the pact and its likely effects. This is the transcript of a speech delivered to an online to a meeting of European Communist Action, 20th October 2024.
Background
The position of the communists on the question of the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum must be considered within the framework of our Marxist-Leninist principles of solidarity and proletarian internationalism.
Following adoption by the European Parliament and Council, the new rules on migration introduced by the Pact on Migration and Asylum entered into force on 11 June 2024 and will be applicable after two years. The language of the EU emphasises “strong and secure external borders” and ignores the harsh realities of people’s needs. The Irish government has slavishly agreed to opt-in to the EU Pact.
The displacement of people is not a new phenomenon, however, the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented. It is currently estimated that there are more than 82 million people globally who have been forcibly displaced from their homes. Each year, thousands of people fleeing violence, insecurity, and persecution at home attempt a treacherous journey across the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Each year, countless lives are lost on these journeys.
These upheavals and the current displacement of huge masses of dispossessed people are not an accident. They are attributable to a social system which profits from expropriation and exploitation. The European Union, together with its allies in the US and NATO, have created the conditions where people are forced to flee their own countries. Imperialist war and interventions, poverty, exploitation and oppression have forced people to risk their lives and safety to seek a better life which they cannot achieve at home. Many of those people are fleeing war, displacement and hunger from countries rich in natural resources.
Capitalist exploitation, globally and nationally, has plunged the workers and poor of many countries into poverty, with a lack of access to healthcare, education, water, food, housing, the oppression of women and the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change causing misery and despair. The crises in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon and further throughout the Middle East, caused and manipulated by the imperialist powers and their proxies intent upon foreign intervention, has created a situation which through conflict and war has forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. It has been estimated that between 7,000 to as many as 21,000 people are dying each day from hunger in countries impacted by war.
Aggressors also actively weaponize food itself by deliberately targeting food, water and energy infrastructure and by blocking food aid as we see from the genocidal actions of the Israeli state in Gaza.
The EU: an Inter-state Imperialist Alliance
The EU is an inter-state imperialist alliance which acts in the interests of big capital and the monopolies. The European Union and its member states have considered the forced movement of displaced people purely as a problem of “legality” and “public order” that can be solved by stricter police and military control. The EU’s new plan through its Pact on Migration and Asylum follows in the same direction.
Since the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force, the EU has developed a Common European Asylum System, a vital part of which is the “Dublin Regulation” which lays down the criteria for determining which EU member state is responsible for examining an asylum application, with the default position being that such responsibility lies with the first EU state of entry, thus placing a disproportionate burden on a small number of countries such as Greece, Italy and Malta in terms of reception of asylum-seekers and examination of their claims.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has made clear that the EU proposes tougher laws, more deportations and harsher migration policies, deliberately ignoring the causes of mass migration and simultaneously increasing the EU’s militarisation and appetite for imperialist intervention and exploitation.
The Pact will facilitate deportation of people to countries of origin or transit. It requires that the same procedures apply to all asylum applicants across EU member states. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum will lead to greater suffering, human rights violations and weakened protections and access to asylum for people fleeing for their lives.
These proposals will subject dispossessed people, including families with children, to detention at EU borders; denying them a fair and full assessment of their protection needs and open the door to further emergency measures that will put countless people at risk of delay, arbitrary detention, and destitution at European borders.
Externalising Migration
An “irregular migrant” is described as anyone who is traveling without the correct documentation such as a passport and/or a visa. This is likely to be the case for anyone fleeing for their lives. Under this Pact, those who are deemed to be unlikely to be granted protection on the initial check will not be allowed to enter a state and will be accommodated at a "designated location" until their application is ruled on. These locations may vary, from holding areas in third countries to unspecified
accommodation within a state in cases where people have reached European soil. Migrants in such a position are disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination, exploitation and marginalization.
The EU Pact stipulates that undocumented migrants entering the EU will undergo identity, health and security checks, including biometric readings of faces and fingerprints with this information being stored on a newly created Eurodac database.
People seeking asylum will have to apply in the EU nation they first enter and remain there until the country responsible for their application is determined. A deportation order is set to be issued automatically if an asylum request is refused.
Every day, families around the world are being forced from their homes. In search of safety and a better life, risking everything to escape conflict, disaster, poverty, or hunger.
Externalising migration is one of the solutions the EU developed in order to control migration flows. The objective of the EU is not to provide safety and assistance to vulnerable people in need of protection but to shift responsibility for migration and asylum to countries outside of the EU, for example, Tunisia, Egypt and Mauritania, or attempts to externalize the processing of asylum claims to other states. These practices risk trapping people in states where their human rights will be in danger.
What they mean by 'solidarity'
When the Pact refers to “solidarity” it means joint action and collaboration between states to deal with migration and not towards asylum seekers and refugees.
The main consequence of these developments is further externalisation of the EU’s migration policy, leading to the violation of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, more detentions and expedited expulsions. This includes a denial of civil and political rights such as arbitrary detention, torture, or a lack of due process and a denial of economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to health, housing or education.
Even before the current proposals many EU member states tightened border controls and limited access to asylum procedures abandoning asylum seekers and refugees to be stranded (and death) at sea or detained in overcrowded and inhumane camps with violations of the human rights of asylum seekers by the EU border agency, Frontex, which has been complicit directly and indirectly by failing to rescue people from boats in distress and by engaging in illegal pushbacks aimed at preventing asylum seekers crossing the sea.
Article 31 of the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees 1951 and the 1967 Protocol prohibits states from penalising refugees for illegal entry when the purpose of their entry is to claim asylum. While recognising that no-one should be forced from their country by poverty, oppression and fear we have to recognise the realities behind migration. It is an outrage that when faced with thousands of desperate people fleeing wars and crises, the European Union wishes to close borders, forcing people in search of protection to risk their lives and perish. People who are the victims of war, interventions, oppression and exploitation by reactionary regimes have the right to seek a safer life in other countries.
“Fortress Europe”, with its closed borders, fences, quotas and prison camps is no solution. Refugees must be treated with dignity and respect for the Geneva Convention and international law and repressive, coercive measures against refugees must immediately cease. The Dublin Regulation, Schengen, Frontex and all the repressive mechanisms of the EU must be abolished.
States must provide immediate comprehensive humanitarian assistance for refugees including decent and suitable facilities to ensure appropriate accommodation, medical care and documentation with proper funding for infrastructure and rescue personnel These duties cannot be outsourced to third countries where refugees and asylum seekers will be faced with social, economic and linguistic problems and exposed to the risk of exploitation and abuse.
The communist and workers parties must continually expose the exploitative system which gives rise to mass migration and work unceasingly to end it. These issues can only be resolved when the workers of each country overthrow the system that creates wars, poverty and refugees.
Our parties, through our commitment to workers’ unity and proletarian internationalism, must also challenge the narrow, chauvinistic, nationalist position of the reactionary bourgeois governments in Europe and the irresponsible posturing of fascist and racist organisations, which utilise ignorance and myth to manufacture a climate of fear and xenophobia in an attempt to carve out a political space for themselves. The Workers Party of Ireland also rejects the opportunist dissimulation which, lacking a clear class analysis and internationalist perspective, reduces the phenomenon to a question of mere “hospitality” and “charity”, deliberately avoiding exposing the real causes and responsibilities for this mass exodus.
It remains a necessity to highlight the role and responsibility of imperialism and the negative interventions of the US, the EU and NATO. While imperialist intervention and war underlies the current refugee crisis, mass migration is also the result of systemic exploitation. The history of imperialism demonstrates that intervention, the subjugation of peoples and nations and the exploitation of their resources has profound consequences and exists for no other purpose than the dominance of the monopolies, the preservation of the capitalist system itself.