The immigrant crisis in the European Union (EU) is not a matter for individual member states to solve. Italy and Greece on their own cannot control the huge flow of immigrants coming in from north Africa. France and the United Kingdom need to cooperate to end the scandal of the huge camps in Calais. Other EU member states need to take their fair share of the in-coming refugees from mayhem and violence.
It would be wrong for the EU to simply close it doors to non-Europeans seeking a better future for themselves and to its credit it has not done so. But it has failed to develop a coherent European policy to which all member states agree, and the EU remains over cautious about the numbers that it says it is able to handle. It should move quickly to agree to larger numbers, and then allocate them across the whole of the EU.
There are some practical steps that could start immediately. The mass charge of 1,500 immigrants into the Eurotunnel in a foolhardy attempt to get to Britain highlighted the desperate conditions in Calais, where the French Interior Ministry recently identified a series of problems, including ambiguous border arrangements between France and the UK, poor information-sharing between the two countries and inadequate border controls that allow a significant number of illegal immigrants to get through.
It would be a very useful breakthrough if the UK and French governments could cooperate on interviewing the 3,500 to 4,000 people in the camps in Calais and finding out to their mutual agreement if the immigrants are genuine asylum seekers who should be given asylum or if they should be deported back to their country of origin.
Some genuine cooperation across the interior ministries of the member states would greatly help the situation. This is not the time for EU governments to allow the border control forces to perpetuate their mutual suspicion and they should be required to cooperate fully, and so help reduce the human tragedy the EU is facing.
