On unsettling methods – The Economist:

‘Europe is in serious trouble,” Donald Trump thundered on September 23rd in a speech at the un. “Illegal aliens are pouring in.” Listen to other politicians, too, and it would seem that the flow of migrants illegally crossing Europe’s borders is an unstoppable tide.
Yet the latest data show the opposite. In the first eight months of this year 112,000 people crossed illegally into Europe, down 21% from a year earlier. The drop is an even more impressive 52% from the comparable period in 2023, when 231,000 people landed on its shores or jumped its borders.
Numbers are falling not because the underlying causes of migration have changed. Places like Afghanistan and Eritrea remain repressive. Others, such as Sudan and the Sahel, are still wracked by civil wars or violent insurgencies. And there is still plenty of poverty in Bangladesh and Egypt, two of the most common nationalities of those crossing illegally into Europe, many of them in search of jobs.
Instead, it is because the bloc is experimenting with new ways of heading them off. The results will please many, but some of its methods are unsettling.’

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‘As these deals have steadily expanded across north and west Africa, however, they have become increasingly successful by making it harder to skirt around blockages. In 2024, the year after the eu and Tunisia signed such a deal, crossings over the central Mediterranean route fell by 58%. Last year the bloc struck an agreement with Mauritania, cutting flows on the west African route by 52% this year.
Their effectiveness has also been increased by the second prong of the eu’s strategy: better surveillance of its external borders and waters. The coastlines of north African states are long and sparsely populated, making them hard to police. New technologies are changing that. Frontex, the eu’s border agency, now uses drones to patrol the skies above Libyan and Tunisian waters. When it spots a boat, it notifies the authorities in those countries. In the three years to 2024 Frontex shared the locations of migrant boats with Libya’s authorities more than 2,000 times, according to Lighthouse Reports, a non-profit investigative-journalism group.
Yet Europe’s successes are coming at the cost of some suffering. In some cases the so-called coastguards in Libya that the eu is guiding to boats are little more than militias. Some of the migrants detained in or returned to Libya are abused, raped or enslaved, according to human-rights groups. Malta has been accused of helping a deadly Libyan militia force boats back from its waters.’

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‘This year at least 456 migrants have died and more than 420 have been reported missing in boat accidents in the central Mediterranean, says the un’s International Organisation for Migration. Ulf Laessing, the Mali-based head of the Sahel programme at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, worries that closing off shorter routes, such as from Western Sahara to the Canary Islands, may make people take longer, more dangerous ones, such as from Senegal or The Gambia.’

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‘Turkey and Morocco have already used their ability to open or close migrant flows as ways of putting pressure on Europe to release more funds or to soften its criticism of their foreign policies.’

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‘And rising incomes in poor countries may simply increase the number of people who can afford to pay smugglers for passage.
For all these pressures, though, the eu has now proved the thesis that harsh policies can reduce illegal migration. The genie is out of the bottle.’

Read the article here.

The genie is out of the bottle.

Indeed, let not so liberal countries (I try to phrase it very politely) detain and harass the migrants for you.

Let them use the migrants to blackmail you. We won’t harass and enslave the migrants, so you don’t have to do it, unless you offer more money.

All, in an attempt to turn the electorate away from the extreme-right. To no avail of course.

Unsettling methods will be followed by more unsettling methods.

The deadly theater will continue.