The EU has new migration rules. What does that mean?

BRUSSELS — After years of political deadlock, false starts and dead ends, a major overhaul of EU migration policy kicks in on Friday.

The reforms are the EU’s response to an upsurge in arrivals back in 2015, which revealed shortcomings in the bloc’s migration policies and cracks in its ability to coordinate policy. The aim is to increase control over who enters the EU and divide responsibilities between member countries — while boosting trust between those same countries.

Here’s what you need to know:

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When more than one million people traveled to Europe in 2015, many of them fleeing violence in Syria, the EU scrambled to respond. Countries dragged their feet over emergency support plans; criticized frontline countries such as Greece over the way they were handling arrivals; and reintroduced border controls. That started a decade-plus process intended to fix those issues.

“We must give the people the feeling back that we have control over what’s happening. Because 10 years ago, we took a lot of responsibility as a European Union, but we didn’t have a system, we didn’t have rules,” Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner told reporters after negotiators agreed new EU rules on deportations from the bloc last week.

With a new migration framework in place, the Commission and MEPs are hopeful that countries will remove remaining controls on borders in the bloc’s free-travel Schengen area. Currently, 11 countries have checks on internal borders, and seven of them mention migration in their justification to the Commission.

“Member states have no more excuses,” Slovenian Socialist MEP Matjaž Nemec said this week.

The pact’s aim? More control…

The migration rules aim to reduce irregular arrivals, speed up procedures (including for deportations), and limit the number of people who fall off the radar and travel within the bloc.

The Pact for Migration and Asylum — a collection of 10 reforms — introduces screenings at the border and fast-track procedures for people who are unlikely to be successful in their application, for example because their country of origin is considered safe.

The new Eurodac database — the “digital backbone” of the pact, according to one Commission official, granted anonymity to speak freely, as were others in this piece — will be used to register asylum seekers’ information, such as travel documents and fingerprints, which will allow their movements to be tracked.

… and more solidarity

The rules also mean support for EU countries that receive the most migrants. That support could take the form of cash, the relocation of migrants from one country to another, or other assistance.

Under the first attempt at this so-called “solidarity pool,” countries set targets to either take 21,000 migrants from Italy, Spain, Greece and Cyprus or pay €420 million to those countries — or some combination of the two.

This is a particularly tricky part of the deal. Several countries ruled out taking any migrants — even as countries such as Cyprus stressed that this was essential. Hungary and Slovakia pledged neither financial support nor help in taking migrants. 

But Commission, Council and Parliament officials stressed that the mechanism was still a big leap forward, with one Commission official saying that the pact had allowed countries to “overcome mistrust.”

It’s a fragile balance

Solidarity is a scarce resource when it comes to migration policy. For it to hold up, the various parts of the pact have to click, said Lukas Gehrke, director of the International Organization for Migration’s office in Brussels. “If the border procedure does what it’s supposed to do, then secondary movements over some time could indeed be lower, and then the solidarity mechanism might have the breathing space to actually work,” he said.

But if the burden on countries that are under pressure isn’t eased, “we’ll again come back to the situation in 2015,” Swedish MEP Tomas Tobé, a member of the European People’s Party, warned.

False start?

The application of the new rules looks set to be patchy on its first day.

In its last progress report, which came out in May, the Commission pointed out that several countries were lagging behind in their preparations.

“Today is not the end of the process, it is the start. And Member States have made a lot of progress to ensure that the foundations for the new system to work are in place,” Brunner said in a written comment.

But refugee groups are worried that the new rules will undermine safeguards for people arriving in Europe seeking protection.

The pact has “harsher rules” and limited access to regular asylum procedures, and safeguards such as an independent monitoring mechanism and vulnerability checks “have not received the necessary attention and resources from member states,” Julie Lejeune, director of European Council on Refugees and Exiles, said.

She warned that “it seems highly unlikely that they [member countries] will be ready to absorb the shock to fundamental rights that the pact will bring.”

Votes and cash

Hungary rejected the pact under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, but Brussels is hopeful that the country will fall in line under Péter Magyar. At the same time, there are concerns that the migration overhaul could become campaign fodder for the far right in elections across Europe, including next year’s French presidential ballot.

IOM’s Gehrke also warned that the EU’s next long-term budget could also chip away at the bloc’s attempt to get to a more “unified, coherent approach” to migration, if there are “too few guardrails for spending on the common standards.”

Gerardo Fortuna contributed reporting.