Over 2,000 asylum claims since 2015 in Malta, MEPs warn of rise in far-right movements

Malta has received around 2,300 first-time asylum applications since 2015, a signficant increase over previous years despite a drop in boat arrivals of claimants without travel documents.

Home affairs minister Carmelo Abela said that around 1,100 people applied for asylum in the country in 2015, a 33% increase over the previous year. As of September this year, the authorities received around 1,200 first-time applications.

Speaking at a conference at the Valletta University, ahead of Malta’s upcoming stint at the head of the EU’s rotating presidency, Abela warned that migration has proved to be a more divisive issue among EU member states than the 2008 financial crisis.

“We are not yet good enough at returning migrants who fail to qualify for asylum, largely because most of them are undocumented and because their home countries reject them back,” he said. “We must make use of the bilateral agreements that member states have with third countries, and grant Frontex a more major role when it comes to the return of migrants. If migrants see their fellow nationals being returned, then they will think twice on whether to spend all their money and risk their lives to travel to Europe.”

Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela (Photo: Chris Mangion/MediaToday)

Abela warned that the erection of walls across Europe to physically keep asylum seekers out will only aggravate the problem, and urged EU member states to accelerate their take-up of 98,000 refugees from Italy and Greece that they had pledged to last year. Only 6,900 have been relocated so far, and Abela said that Malta is ahead of schedule in relocating the 131 migrants it had pledged to.

“If I were to only take the natonal interest into account, then Malta would not be participating in the relocation programme,” he said. “We [European leaders] must not be guided by what the general public have to say, but rather take a leadership stance ourselves.”

Abela also argued that refugees are actually an untapped resource of labour that Europe has not yet started to exploit.

“We speak a lot about the need for more workers, but we are not exploiting enough the human element that is coming to us or discussing how we can best make use of this resource.”

‘Trump and far-right movements – a catastrophic year’

Nationalist MEP Roberta Metsola and Labour MEP Marlene Mizzi sounded similar warnings over the growing popularity of far-right movements in the West.

Citing the election of Donald Trump as US President, she said that 2016 has been a “catastrophic year” and urged EU countries not to go down the route of far-right populism.

“As cliché as it sounds, we must take a holistic approach. We could either go extreme right and seek the populist track, ignore the issue migration entitrely, or seek the middle route. While the third choice isn’t the most popular, it’s the one we must take if we want to be realistic,” she said.

She called for the strengthening of the EU’s external borders and the establishment of a system to screen the legitimacy of asylum seekers in transit countries, but warned that the abolishment of the Schengen would represent “a victory for the terrorists”.

“We have worked so hard to ensure the free movement of citizens across the EU, and the permanent destruction of Schengen will mean that we would have failed our citizens,” she said.

Similary, Marlene Mizzi cited Trump’s election and last June’s Brexit referendum as signs that the US and the UK are undergoing profound changes that will have ripple-effects across Europe.

“We have seen a rise in anti-immigration parties, who have come up with the crudest of solutions to immigration – from building walls to letting them die,” she said. “Instead of uniting ourselves in a time of crisis, the migration debate is tearing Europe apart and creating strong tensions among and within EU member states. Failing to deal with migration could be the beginning of the end of Europe as we know it.”

She warned that asylum seekers will continue to risk their lives to travel to Europe, regardless of the amount of borders and fences that are erected, and that the migration crisis has exposed the weakness of the EU’s asylum regulations.

“The EU’s inability come up with a concrete solution has led to global mistrust and growing tension between the need for border control and security and Europe’s human rights commitments. We must not underestimate the fears, mistrust and frustration our citizens feel or we will be short-changing our own citizens.”