THE REFUGEE CRISIS IN 2016

The debate so far in Europe about the refugee crisis is characterised by a failure of leadership; by a failure to act together; by a failure to properly engage with the scale of the crisis. The refugee crisis is now the biggest challenge facing the EU. The failure of Europe to find agreement and to act decisively on the issue has the potential to dismantle the EU from within.

The European Commission, expects the number of migrants to soar to 1.5 million in 2016 then decreasing to half a million in 2017. If this is true, Europe will explode. This is 150% of the 2015 inflow, and the 2015 yearly rate of about a million was an over three-fold increase from the 282,000 that came in 2014. The current rate has already led to the rise of the far right, serious stresses on national and local governments, and the partial breakdown of the Schengen system. So far, many of these stresses have been manageable and perhaps reversible—but if things spike up even further this year, that will all change. Schengen hiccups could become an outright collapse of the system; and both inter- and intra-national tensions will skyrocket.

What’s perhaps most worrying is that the Continent’s leaders by and large still seem to be in a bubble on the issue. But most of all, the thinking from Brussels ignores European political realities. Refugees are coming without popular support and not much in the way of legal sanction. Europe is poorly set up to receive them, culturally as much as economically, and European citizens can see that the line of people in Africa as well as the Middle East who would like to get into Europe stretches as far as the eye can see. If Europe’s leaders do not present their constituents with a credible plan to address popular concerns, things are going to get very, very ugly in 2016.

This issue will not go away just because the waters of the Mediterranean turn cold at the onset of winter. People will still come to Europe. They will find new routes and even more dangerous journeys to take.