The deaths of 71 men, women and children trapped in a lorry in Austria last week has sent shock waves through the world. The plight of thousands fleeing towards a better life and ending up in death traps underscores the real nature of the humanitarian disaster the migrant issue is turning out to be.
The Express Tribune writes in its editorial: “The European states are all trying to dodge and weave as the flood rises, but there is no end in sight and equally no pan-European solution on the horizon. The state without internal barriers — the EU — is today busy erecting new walls to replace those dismantled a generation ago. Hungary is erecting a razor-wire barrier along its border with Serbia. Bulgaria is building a wall between itself and Turkey. Ukraine wants to build a wall on its Russian border. And they keep coming across the sea. The UN refugee agency estimates that 300,000 have crossed the Mediterranean by various routes this year, and around 3,000 are arriving daily in southern Europe. And who now thinks that Western intervention in Libya was such a good idea?”
The New York Times has been continually critical of European Union’s (EU) policies regarding the migrant issue. Its editorial says: “Unusually calm seas in the Mediterranean and stagnant European economies are contributing to a perfect storm over migration. Part of the problem is the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, which makes the country on which an asylum seeker first sets foot responsible for processing that person’s claim. Southern European countries are on the front lines, forced to deal with a disproportionate number of migrants arriving from North Africa.
“Only an end to terror and conflict in Syria, Iraq and Libya and a significant improvement in African living standards would stem the flow of desperate people from Africa and the Middle East who are reaching Europe. The European Union needs to reform a migration policy that clearly is not working. Besides more and faster search-and-rescue operations at sea, Europe must provide legal avenues to safety, lest more migrants lose their lives on deadly journeys,” the editorial concludes.
The Telegraph opines that the migrant crisis has reached “astonishing proportions”. Says its editorial: “Germany is now expected to receive 800,000 asylum seekers in 2015. This amounts to roughly 1 per cent of the country’s population or a little more than the population of Leeds. Free movement seemed attractive and logical during the Cold War, when western Europe was more isolated from the world’s poor by the Iron Curtain. But in the 21st century, poverty and war have driven millions to seek a new life within an expanded EU.”
The Economist looks at the crisis from the point of view of people smuggling that has turned rampant as a global menace. “... this year,” its editorial says, “many more are entering Greece from Turkey and travelling up to Hungary and beyond via the Balkans; their numbers create demand for organised smuggling services. (Most are Syrian, as the migrants discovered in the lorry are presumed to be.) The EU essentially exists to regulate a free market. At Calais it has failed: The free movement of people has been stymied by the migrant crisis. In Germany, poor control of the continental border has led to a population explosion that may prove grist to the mill of extremist parties who want to destroy the EU altogether.”
_resources1_16a31069e4e_small.jpg)
