Migration in Eu

The topic of migration was brought more seriously in Romania in 2015, when the refugee crisis began and the country was started to be seen as a county destination. This situation occurred because of the massive wave of people from Syria and Afghanistan who tried to find a safe and secure place, people that were trying to reach developed European countries through the Balkan Route. The large number of refugees in the European Union Member States situated in the Mediterranean (Italy and Greece) and the transit to the West through countries such as Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary, generated tensions between the local population and the immigrants. Because of this situation, in September, the Romanian Government applied The National Immigration Strategy 2015-2018 and the Action Plan for 2015 which are trying to promote legal benefit for Romania and the immigrants, to improve the national asylum system and rise it to international standards and to take part in the EU discussion about the solution for people in need of international protection and social integration.

Migration and asylum in Romania

In order to reduce the difficulties that immigrants encounter when they want to get asylum and most asylum applications have been submitted by foreigners found living illegally at the Serbian border, who were requesting a form of protection on Romanian territory. The desire to move towards Western Europe motivated them to choose Romania as a migration route, especially considering the restrictive policy of Hungary regarding immigrants in 2017, according to Sustainability.

The asylum procedure in Romania is not a complicated one, Romania being one of the countries that have an easy procedure, but the time spend on the measurements transposed into national legislation is up to 2 or 3 years because the amendments weren’t clear enough, making the process take too long.

European Agenda

The basic perception is that most of the migrants moved from poor countries to wealthy countries (from south to north). A report from 2013 made by IOM World Migration shows that the south – north route for migration is the most used path. As for the north part, EU has the most foreign-born people,  10.4 compared to 3.2%, which is three time more the global average, is forecast to grow steadily in the future, to almost 18% in 2031. According to Eurostat data, 626 hundred persons applied for asylum in the EU in 2014, a 45% increase over the previous year and a 140% increase over 2010. The 2014 total was the highest since the previous peak of 672,000 in 1992 (when the EU had 15 Member States).

Because of the influx of immigrants rising each year, the European Union came up with a solution called  ‘A European Agenda’ which was triggered by the need to respond to the tragedy from the Mediterranean. This agenda emphasize the boarder need to develop opportunities for legal migration and in the same time, reducing the incentives for irregular migration and improve the management of borders. This migration policy is well based but there are new problems arising such as petition to EU for more resources to help Italy, Malta, Greece and Hungary cope with the influxes of migrants from Africa and Middle East. Germany is so far the country with the most asylum-seekers since 2015. Receiving more than eight thousand million migrants.

Beyond the immediate objective of saving lives at sea, the European Agenda proceeds to nominate four pillars for a more effective management of migration. These are, firstly, reducing the incentives for irregular migration. Key objectives under this pillar are addressing the root causes of irregular and forced displacement in third countries, cracking down on the smugglers and traffickers of migrants, and encouraging the repatriation of irregular migrants. The second pillar is about border management. ‘Smart borders’ will enable a trade off between increasing the efficiency of border crossing for border third-country travelers whilst, at the same time, strengthening the campaign against irregular migration by better use of IT systems such as Eurodac (the EU first multinational biometric system)and the Schengen Information System. The third pillar, a common asylum policy, requires a more coherent application of the current Common European Asylum System and a re-evaluation of the effectiveness and fairness of the Dublin system, which has seen 72 per cent of all asylum applications EU-wide being submitted to just five Member States. The fourth pillar (a new policy for legal migration) moves towards the ideal of fostering migrants’ integration in Europe and maximizing the benefits of migration, initially for the EU in terms of helping to plug labor-market needs, but with an increasing focus on development in migrants’ countries of origin. This initiative builds on previous Commission communications, dating back more than a decade, in which the EU has started to frame a debate about the positive relationship of migration to development.

This article was made by Oana Teodorescu