Europe's Migrancy Problem Gains Urgency

At least 13 people were found dead in a small wooden boat adrift in the Mediterranean between North Africa and Italy, and many more are believed to have died during a strenuous three-week odyssey to Europe’s shores.

On Monday a spokesperson for the Italian coastguard, which fished out the 40-foot vessel southeast of the island of Lampedusa, said that the pile of decaying corpses and severely emaciated survivors was like something straight out of Dante’s Inferno.

Captain Stefano Valfre, who first sighted the ship drifting near Sicily, told reporters that the 15 surviving refugees had said that as many as 100 people had originally boarded the boat, and that they had thrown the bodies of the dead overboard, until they had become too weak to do even that.

The incident, the second to have hit Italy in just a few days, draws attention to the plight of illegal migrants heading for Europe. Although Italy has been most recentlyaeffected by the ceaseless wave of refugees lapping at its door, the problem is one that all of Europe faces.

Europe dogged by migrant problem

Last week, Spanish authorities detained over 550 migrants trying to reach European shores in 12 boats. And in September, seven illegal migrants thought to be from Pakistan were killed by landmines as they attempted to cross from Turkey into Greece -- where every year tens of thousands are smuggled over to Europe from countries such as Turkey, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The recent surge in illegal arrivals along Europe's southern shores brought the question of migration control into especially sharp focus at the meeting of EU interior ministers currently being held in La Baule, France.

During the talks which focussed on migration and terrorism, Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu described the latest incident as "a human tragedy that weighed, above all, on Europe's civil conscience." But he also urged African states to do more to stem the flood of migrants in search of a better life in Europe, adding that "it puts in the spotlight African governments who are doing nothing to control this exodus."

A non-quantifiable figure

Bodies such as the International Center for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) estimate that the population of Europe is rising by up to one million a year, including illegal migration, but stress that the phenomenon is not statistically quantifiable.

Each year, hundreds of thousands slip through Europe's borders and wash up its shores, unobserved and uncounted. And as the EU expands eastwards and its borders touch those of states such as the Ukraine and Russia, where human trafficking is already a known problem, many in the European Commission fear Europe will be overwhelmed with even more illegal migrants.

"Fortress Europe"

With seemingly more urgency than ever, the interior ministers from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain forged ahead with their plans for toughening up their border security.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy proposed the creation of a "European security zone" for protection against illegal immigration via the Mediterranean Sea, which would be patrolled both along the European and African coast.

The five ministers discussed a "three plus three" cooperation deal involving France, Italy and Spain sponsoring efforts in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia to halt the exodus of clandestine migrants.

The "Big Five" also announced they had agreed to boost police cooperation, reforming the collective EU police agency Europol, clamping down on gangs dealing in human trafficking, and putting microchips on visas for the EU's Schengen area that would include fingerprints and face-scans in digital form.

Nicolas Sarkozy rejected suggestions the EU was being turned into "Fortress Europe," reducing the numbers arriving by making migrants' chances of entry less and less likely.

National sensitivities

Last week, a number of EU states resisted a plan to introduce quotas on legal immigration, expressing doubts about how it could work in practice. The scheme foresaw decisions made at a national level on how many people to admit and from which country, with the European Commission assuming a coordinating function.

For now, the Amsterdam Treaty, which came into force on May 1, 1999, provides the legal basis for a common European Union immigration policy. The deadline for a new common asylum and migration policy is set for May 2004.

But with EU states still wrangling over the border management agency which would coordinate existing centers responsible for border control and the migration issue still a sticking point in the first European constitution, it seems that when it comes to migration, most countries are unwilling to hand over the decision-making to Brussels.

The pressure on governments to cooperate is considerable. Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes pointed out in La Baule that "we will be forced, sooner or later, to share a part of the cost, because if a member of the European community does not defend its borders, then we will all pay for the consequences."