Has the EU's open border policy caused mass migration

[JoanOfMarch]

I was reading about Italy's state of emergency today and it got me thinking does freedom of movement/open borders work?

Europe is facing a huge influx. Schengen allows illegal migration as no one checks to see who is entering/exiting. People gain access to a country and can walk through Europe unfettered and a country has no idea who is living within it's borders.

If there was better protection on a country's border would the problem exist to this extent it is now?

Should the EU step up and take action and close borders, even if it's short term - say for 5 years to try and halt the problem.

Or is it a harmless, tiny pain-in-the-ass problem we all have to live with, but worth it to enable us to access these countries without checks?

YABU - no, open border policy has not caused mass migration
YANBU - yes, open borders are a massive problem and it needs addressing

It’s policy though not a mistake. It’s part of the UN agenda 2030 that we were signed up to without being asked.

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181014143356/www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20181014143356/www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm

What's your opinion on this OP? What's your personal experience that's got you thinking about it all? When's your deadline

When you say 'enable us to access these countries' WTF are you on about? Even before Brexit we were never part of Schengen.

No. Freedom of movement within Schengen can only lead to mass migration from within its borders and this is by definition NOT illegal.

The real issue is mass migration from outside the Schengen area and that won't stop until we can find a way to make it more attractive for people to stay in their countries of origin than to come to Europe.

You can put in all the border protection you like but it won't work. Just as the UK's non Schengen borders show.

It’s a really interesting question that I hadn’t thought could be a genuine future occurrence, of closed borders in Europe, in the near future. Weirdly before Brexit and the pandemic I was chatting to someone and said how I thought it would be really difficult to “go travelling” through Europe in the future, by that I meant interrailing. Now with everything that has happened and seems to be happening now I can see my future vision of difficult travel becoming a reality, it certainly was temporarily during the pandemic.

I find a lot of the anti migration rhetoric to be problematic, and like Gary Linekar I am concerned about the similarities with what people were saying in the 1930s.

If Europe does close up I’d want to go to the USA for a bit of freedom…

You are asking two different questions. Is Europe’s open border policy a cause of mass migration? And is Europe’s open border policy a problem?

It definitely is a cause of mass migration. Whether it’s a problem depends on who you talk to. People feel uncomfortable with the changing demographic in their countries but they need to accept this policy is deliberately designed by the government to deal with the population crisis. Europe simply does not have enough people to sustain the ageing population, and risks being faced with the same dire situation in Japan.

The problem is that our politicians are too spineless to admit that this policy is a deliberate. White Europeans are not having enough children - see the ongoing thread about grandparents being expected to provide childcare. Posters on that thread are outraged that people should expect grandparents to hell out with childcare and the same sentiment keeps re appearing - don’t have children if you can’t afford childcare.

So Europe has to import people, especially from cultures with high fertility rates, to have workers of the future. If people took off the blinkers, they would see this is deliberate.

I'm not a journo - I'm too educated 😂

I've watched the issue for a while because I have a family member who lives in Sweden and there's lots of issues where she currently lives, lots of anger and I suppose it's made me question why this is happening, not just for Sweden, but most of Europe.

I read about Italy today on the BBC site :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65235579

and it seems like Italy are desperate for the EU's help.

What happens to all the new arrivals? Do they walk freely into any country of their desire until they decide to settle in the best one?

My opinion from being with my friend in Sweden is freedom of movement causes the problem. I know lots of people like FOM, but there is a bad side to it too.

I wondered what other people thought and I'd like to get a better prespective than listening to the likes of the UK press - although I do read Euronews and they have mentioned the Italy crises.

The EU borders are only open within the EU to those who live within the Schengen zone though. So yes, there can be a lot of movement, but only within a defined area. If you want to enter from a non-Schengen country, you usually need a visa, so it hasn't contributed the migration from countries outside the EU.

The EU borders are only open within the EU to those who live within the Schengen zone though.
Yes, sorry I realise this. I should have said in my original post I am thinking of my friend in Sweden and the issues she faces. I visited not long ago and there was violence right out on her street, not once but three times and it used to be a quiet area. Plus a short walk away, lots of no-go areas which have sprang up from nowhere.

I had taken a break from seeing her due to covid and was shocked at what I saw and what she told me. She obviously kept a lot of it from me when we talked online and put a brave face on it.

She wants out and she wants to come to the UK, but that's a whole different story.

Open borders sound like a good idea in theory but don't work in practice because to work they require a more-or-less equal movement in each direction. In the real world this is never the case, more people want to move from a less desirable location to a nicer one than vice-versa.

I used to have a regular argument with a colleague who thought there should be no global restrictions on movement. They could never answer my question as to what happens if a huge number of people decide to move to a relatively small location, they just seemed to have blind faith that this wouldn't happen.

Migration within the EU is more about a political decision than current practicalities though. If the EU were a single "country" then there would be no borders. Removing border controls is a way of getting people used to this idea so that over the next few decades more power can be transferred to the EU.

I agree with you Dot and it's worrying if that's the direction of the EU. Time will tell I suppose.

I am going to watch with interest what happens with Italy to see if the EU respond.

Do you mean that fewer people would try crossing the Mediterranean if they knew they could reach only Italy or Greece and be unable to move to another EU country because of tightly controlled borders within the EU?

I don't think you realise how porous land-based borders are - there aren't designated guarded crossing points and a big fence through the length of the countryside.

"Europe is facing a huge influx. Schengen allows illegal migration as no one checks to see who is entering/exiting. People gain access to a country and can walk through Europe unfettered and a country has no idea who is living within it's borders."

Completely incorrect. The Schengen area checks everyone entering - as Brits stuck in the 14-hour queues last week will testify - and the new ETIAS and EES will record everyone entering and exiting.

As for countries having no idea who is living within its borders, this too is incorrect and it is actually far stricter in the EU countries than in the UK. In most EU countries, people are required to register their presence with the local town hall or police, carry ID and can be stopped and asked for ID at any time. This is a complete anathema to Brits, with the result that it is the UK that has no idea who is in the country, where they are and what they are doing.

I worked for a while for a UK water utility company, which based on what they could see in terms of domestic water consumption and sewage production worked on the assumption that the government was underestimating the UK population by something like 8-10% (or 6 million people).

Exactly. I want to see OP try to enter the Schengen area without a passport and come back to tell us all how easy it was to swan in.

So all the rough sleepers in France in Paris and in tented communities along the coast are they all documented people ie France knows exactly who they are?

yeah that's right, Mass irregular migration has nothing to do with... poverty, war, civil war, invasions, colonisation, political instability, oppression, 150 years of interference in Afghanistan, criminal smuggling gangs, persecution, natural disasters, genocide. It's all done to Schengen and nothing else. For sure.

The EU doesn’t have an open border policy. Every border between an EU country and a 3rd country is a hard international border.

Within the EU, some of the EU countries are part of Schengen and this means that people can move internally within the EU between those countries without needing any visas. But countries DO know who lives within their borders and who is moving where because you still have to file for residency.

It’s more strict than the U.K., where we can move internally between four countries with no visa and we do not have to file for residency (not including British overseas territories).

So these are refugees in boats coming across the Mediterranean from North Africa. There is no “open border” into the EU for them. The type of international border is exactly the same as for the refugees coming across the channel to the U.K.

What happens to them? They are met by authorities and housed while filing an asylum claim for a refugee visa. The EU has a centralised refugee agency staffed with representatives from all EU countries. Refugees can request any EU country to settle in and the agency then takes this into consideration as they fairly decide how many refugees go to which EU country.

The EU face the exact same problem we do when it comes to refugees in boats trying to reach our shores. They just handle it in a collaborative manner.

So “freedom of movement” cannot be the cause of this problem or even an influencing factor for it. Freedom of movement only ever applied to citizens of the EU countries anyway, it’s never applied to 3rd country citizens.

Yes. Barring any who have false documents or no documents. They will all be known insofar as much as they can be to the French.

We know our rough sleepers. We deport any who are foreign after a time. We put the right name on the death certificates when they die of starvation or hypothermia in a gutter.

Oh FFS. Freedom of Movement =/= friction free travel within Schengen =/= "open borders".

Neither Europe nor the Schengen zone have open external borders - just ask the Bulgarians, Greeks or Lithuanians for that matter who've been doing the opposite in fact and are increasingly militarizing their borders. Obviously no border is ever completely closed - ever watch the videos from Ceuta and Melilla?

Free travel within Schengen. Nothing much to do with migration, the only ones we'd be shooting in the foot by suspending Schengen is ourselves! Take a look at your own problems in Dover if you want to understand why. Sure there might be a few more irregular migrants nabbed on the internal borders if we closed them, but all they need to do is ask for asylum once apprehended, no pushing back. They can still be sent back to the first country of entry under Dublin regulations, but that's the case whether or not they're found on the border or just walk into a police station by themselves.

"Freedom of movement". All THAT means is the freedom of European workers to relocate across borders and hence be treated equally with capital and services that can also operate across borders in rhe Single Market. No job after 3 months of residence, you can be expelled. None of that has anything to do with whether or not somebody checked your passport when you entered the country. And no migrants from outside the EU have Freedom of Movement - citizenship and asylum are in the sole purview of member states.

I'm not a journo - I'm too educated 😂

If you were so educated you wouldn't conflate freedom of movement in the Schengen area with immigration from outside the area. I don't buy the faux naive questions, sorry.

"...migrants from outside the EU have Freedom of Movement - citizenship and asylum are in the sole purview of member states."

Even Brits living in the EU for years have lost their Freedom of Movement. Those who applied for residency in the country where they were living when the UK left the EU have been granted limited residency rights, but they no longer have the freedom to move around the rest of the Schengen area, being limited to 90 days in 180, and can no longer just move to another EU country for work, study or to retire as their residence permits are now only applicable to one country.

For an educated person this is a very British centred approach, isn't it? Europe has a migrant issue, but everybody is checked going into Schengen. I'm not sure why you think free movement within Schengen makes it worse? It's like the US, not everybody who crosses the border stays in Texas. Incidentally though, I travelled round Europe by train last year and the only place that I had my passport checked was coming into France from Italy, and they took somebody off the train there.

Oops - "no migrants from outside the EU have Freedom of Movement - citizenship and asylum are in the sole purview of member states."

Yes it is a massive problem OP but not many will admit it on here. Look at what happened to the UK before Brexit. We had no clue how many East Europeans were on our shores.