The evolution of European migration policies with respect to North Africa

Since 2015, the irregular immigration situation in Europe by citizens from West Asian and North African countries has worsened as a result of instability in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria and elsewhere. In that year, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 900,000 immigrants and refugees arrived in the region, and according to the European Statistical Office (Eurostat), more than 1.2 million people applied for asylum in the European Union (EU).

Among the routes used to reach the continent, those that exist in the Mediterranean Sea are the most dangerous. Also in 2015 at least 3,500 people lost their lives during the voyage, the majority in shipwreck incidents in this region. As a result, the governments of both European and North African countries have had to resort to different policies, either to control the migratory flow or to control its social, economic and political impact.

Since then, many of these policies are still in force or have been transformed to adapt to changes in the migratory phenomenon and are the subject of study due to the consequences they could have in all areas of life for people on both shores of the sea, both in the short as well as in the medium and long term.

Between the two continents, according to the European Council, there are four general routes that irregular migrants take to reach the coasts of southern Europe, the Western Mediterranean and the Central Mediterranean being the most used by people from North Africa. . In this context, the countries of the region known as the Maghreb, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, are the main countries that regulate crossings on the southern shore, while Spain, Italy, Malta and Greece are the ones that do so on the north shore.

The causes of migration are varied since not only the citizens of these African countries are the ones who emigrate to Europe, but they come from many other regions of the rest of the continent and rather use these as a place of transit. Thus, political instability and questionable economic conditions could be considered as the general causes of large-scale emigration in Africa (either within the continent or to other regions of the world, mainly Europe), which materialize in coups of State, civil wars, insurgencies or national liberation struggles, among other phenomena. All of this results in widespread insecurity and rights violations and, in the medium and long term, creates informal systems of migratory flows to more developed and less unstable regions.


Illegal migration routes to Europe. Source: https://www.espon.eu/topics-policy/publications/maps-month/territorial-and-urban-aspects-migration-and-refugee-inflow

How has Europe handled it?

Since the first countries signed the Schengen Agreement in 1985, which abolished the internal border controls of the European Economic Community, today the EU, and the free movement of people was established, irregular immigration to countries not bordering the Mediterranean Sea, as more states joined it. In the 1990s, when Spain and Italy established visa requirements to enter their territories, the phenomenon began to deepen to establish itself as a trend since the early years of the new century.

In 2015, with the wave of refugees, the Integrated Political Crisis Response Device (RPIC) was activated in order to politically coordinate responses to the situation, reestablishing border controls in many EU countries and establishing new ones with third parties countries such as Serbia or Turkey, at the same time as the first transfers of migrants to Member States not bordering the Mediterranean, such as Sweden and Germany, within the framework of the EU relocation program.

In that year, the Valletta Process was also created, which established a framework to deepen actions to address the problem of irregular immigration to the region, in addition to the approval of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, focused in improving job opportunities on the continent, as well as in increasing the resilience of communities, improving migration management and supporting governance and conflict prevention.

By 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic already at the center of the international scene, there was a reduction in mobility at a global level, which affected irregular migrants. This became evident in the drop in asylum applications in the same year, with just over 470,000, compared to more than 630,000 in 2019, with a reduction of around 33%, according to figures from Eurostat and the European Commission.

Currently, although migratory flows have leveled off since 2015, partly as a result of the health emergency, they are consistent with the global upward trend of irregular migration. In 2021, asylum applications rose again to a total of 535,000, just over 60,000 than the previous year, with Germany, France and Spain being the countries that received the most.

In the specific case of migration in North Africa, on the Western Mediterranean route, the receiving country most involved is Spain. Its southern coast, located 14 kilometers away from Morocco, is the closest point between the two continents, in addition to the fact that the country has two small territories located directly on the northern coast of the African country, the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla.

Both Morocco and Algeria are transit countries for this route, which reached its maximum influx of irregular migrants in 2018. Since then, the number has been reduced year after year due to the restrictive policies of the Moroccan government in the context of negotiations with the Spanish government and the EU, including the so-called Operation Indalo, commanded by the European Coast and Border Surveillance Agency (Frontex) and whose objective is to reinforce maritime surveillance to limit and supervise the arrival of irregular immigrants and register and stop criminal activities such as drug entry or human trafficking.

For their part, the receiving countries most involved in the Central route are Italy and Malta. The Tunisian coast is located less than 200 kilometers west of the Italian island of Sardinia, while Malta is located less than 80 kilometers south of that island and around 300 kilometers away from both the Tunisian and the from Libya. From 2017 to 2019 the use of this route was reduced, however, it increased again in 2020 as an alternative to the Eastern route, derived from the closure of the Greek borders due to the covid-19 pandemic.

In 2016, Operation SOPHIA began work to combat human trafficking and improve security in Libyan waters. This would last until 2020 when Operation IRINI was implemented, whose main mission is to monitor the United Nations (UN) arms embargo on Libya, but which also carries out training tasks for the coast guard. and the Libyan army.

In 2017, the Malta Declaration was signed, in which the countries involved in this migratory route undertook to support the Libyan authorities in coastal surveillance tasks, as well as deepen support for the country's coastal communities, improve conditions in the that migrants travel on this route and increase efforts to combat human trafficking, among other points.

In the same year, a working group between the EU, the UN and the African Union (AU) was established to deepen cooperation on the issue. Finally, in 2019, the EU approved five new programs focused on migration in North Africa worth 61.5 million euros, which were implemented under the aforementioned EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa.

With these strategies, the EU hopes, as far as possible, to guarantee security on the continent, regulate and supervise the entry of irregular immigrants and protect them and support their transit with a humanitarian approach, all based on the experiences learned since 2015. In this sense, the most tangible result is undoubtedly the reduction in the arrival of people in this situation, from more than one million in 2015 to just over 130 thousand in 2021.