“Here comes another,” a law enforcement official at the port of Crotone said one recent morning, watching a vessel with 80 people come into view, just four hours after the arrival of a boat with 81 others.
The European Union’s desire to obstruct migration on multiple fronts was reflected in a collection of deals cobbled together in the aftermath of a 2015 mass-scale wave from Africa and the Middle East. And, for a while, the strategy appeared to be working: Mediterranean crossings dipped dramatically. The issue lost political primacy, depriving nationalist parties of kindling.
But an increase in arrivals this year is showing the limits of a Fortress Europe strategy — and reviving the highly contentious issue of how to handle and divvy up those who make it to the E.U. and its borderless travel zone.
“Europe’s expectations were based on a wrong assumption — that mobility across the Mediterranean could be stopped or limited, so it would no longer be politically relevant,” said Roberto Cortinovis, a migration specialist at the Center for European Policy Studies. “And that is impossible.”
This year, 170,000 migrants have reached the continent, according to the United Nations’ migration agency — with the majority of them crossing the Mediterranean. Such a level is still vastly reduced from the more than 1 million who arrived in 2015. But it is approaching the same level as in 2017, when Europe was only at the beginning of its fortification. The migration surge is most pronounced in Italy, which this year has received almost 100,000 people by sea. Over the prior four years combined, it received 135,000.
“We cannot handle by ourselves a flow that has grown to an unmanageable size,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said recently.
She and her new far-right coalition have latched on to the renewed salience of migration as a problem in Europe. After running on a hard-line platform, they have sought to limit the unloading in Italian ports of migrants rescued by charity vessels. That position is accelerating a clash among European powers — and has had France and Italy trading accusations about moral responsibilities.
Many groups that deal with immigrants see hypocrisy in Europe’s response to people coming from poorer — and less Christian — parts of the world. The flows across the Mediterranean are still tiny compared with the influx this year of 7 million Ukrainians, who’ve been offered automatic legal status and given freedom to choose the E.U. country where they settle.
But European policymakers say there are grounds for differentiating. In contrast with Ukraine, and even with many of the people seeking to get to European shores five or six years ago, more people are now arriving from countries untouched by war. The deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan has been a push factor, and people are still coming from war-torn Syria, but others represent nationalities with low odds of successful asylum claims in Europe.
“We see an increase of nationalities that are probably not in need of international protection,” said Ylva Johansson, the E.U. minister in charge of migration. “This is not a proper way to come to the European Union.”
There are a few broad explanations for why migration might be rising. Diminished pandemic restrictions and fears mean that more people, everywhere, can be on the move. And new economic turmoil in two northern African countries — Egypt and Tunisia — have deepened the pool of people looking for a way out.
Europe is also reckoning with the inherent riskiness of depending on an unstable country to stop migrants along the way.
In one of its most important initiatives, the E.U. has tried to compel Libya — the biggest jumping-off point for migrants — to cooperate on intercepting smugglers. European and Italian money revitalized the Libyan coast guard fleet, and Italy even tried to curry favor by brokering peace deals among feuding tribes. But this year, departures from Libya have risen. And the country’s coast guard, which has been intercepting vessels bound for Europe, is letting them pass at an increased rate.
One migration official familiar with Libya, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continued need to work with the country, said that “suddenly there are all sorts of holes in the wall.” He theorized that one or more groups could be trying to win concessions from Europe, using an increased flow of migration for leverage.
“The fact that this is so divisive in Europe is the Achilles’ heel,” the official said. “If somebody wants to put pressure on Europe, this is how you do it.”
Compared with the flow from Libya, the route to Italy from Turkey is less traveled: Roughly 17,000 migrants have arrived on Calabria’s shores this year. But law enforcement officials here say that route is crucial, because it shows just how hard migration is to suppress. It emerged in direct response to Greece’s crackdown — a widely documented practice, denied by Greek authorities, in which the coast guard blocks migrant vessels, drags them back to international waters, and sometimes sabotages their boat engines. Pushbacks are considered a violation of international law. Greece is alleged to have pushed back thousands of migrants over the past two years.
So the migrants are trying another way.
From Turkey, the route to Greece takes a matter of hours. To Italy, it takes five or six days, with smugglers charging somewhere between $8,000 to $12,000 per person, making it the most expensive pathway to Europe without documents.
The smugglers charter used or stolen motorboats and sailboats — vessels that are more seaworthy than the flimsy dinghies departing Libya. The boats are cleared of their interior furnishings and packed with people. Then, blending in with the boats of vacationers, they make their way across the Aegean and Ionian seas.
Because of its cost, the route is known as a pathway for the middle class; poorer migrants end up taking a land route out of Turkey through the Balkans, encountering a labyrinth of border closures. But even the relatively upscale route is still precarious. At this time of year, it can mean spending nearly a week in the cold. One of the passengers who recently arrived in Italy was a 10-day-old boy. There have been several recent deadly migrant shipwrecks near Greece, though it is unclear what route they were traversing.
The Washington Post witnessed a landing in Calabria one recent morning, with migrants first helped off their own boat — and onto an Italian coast guard vessel — just outside of the port.
As the vessel docked, an Italian official tried to figure out the nationalities on board — Iranians and Afghans, he was told — and workers from a slew of agencies measured body temperatures, passed out water and juice, and systematically took photographs of everybody aboard, giving them numbers and then ushering them onto a bus.
One man, wearing a Yale University hoodie, said his head was spinning from the journey. A woman, who said she’d worked at Afghanistan’s central bank before the Taliban takeover, said they’d been at sea for six days.
Several police officers stood back, watching body language, trying to discern who among the new arrivals might have served as captain.
Italian authorities have arrested dozens of boat captains — including, before the war in Ukraine, a slew of Ukrainians and Russians. But officials say that many groups are involved, not just one, making it harder to thwart.
“There is not just one mastermind,” said Giuseppe Capoccia, the head prosecutor in the port city of Crotone. “It’s an entire phenomenon.”
The prosecutor in the nearby town of Catanzaro, Nicola Gratteri, said the operation appears to be carefully organized by criminal groups, noting that migrants unfailingly arrive in one of two ports. “That’s not a matter of chance,” he said.
Unlike the Tunisians and Egyptians coming from Libya, those arriving from Turkey — often Syrians and Afghans — do not want to stay in Italy, preferring to move northward, principally to Germany. But European rules stipulate that those seeking asylum must go through the process in the country where they land. So the Syrians and Afghans choose not to begin the process. Italian authorities give them a paper obligating them to leave Italy within seven days. Then they carry on northward.
“The police know they’re not leaving Europe,” said one aid worker who deals with migrants in Crotone, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive issue.
Even with the flow that moves north, Europe’s Mediterranean countries — Italy, Greece, Spain, Malta and Cyprus — say they bear a disproportionate burden from migration. And their grievances are getting louder.
For years, northern European countries have resisted the idea of establishing quotas for redistribution. In 2015, an E.U. plan for the mandatory relocation of some 160,000 refugees fell apart amid quarreling before it was ever implemented. More recently, France drew up a much smaller voluntary program that Mediterranean countries say has obvious drawbacks. The deal emphasizes the redistribution of people in need of “international protection” — in other words, excluding the scores from countries like Egypt and Tunisia.
Since that deal, European countries have shown the capacity to squabble about even the smallest quantities of new arrivals. Italy and France exchanged insults last month when Italy refused a charity rescue ship with 234 migrants aboard and then prematurely thanked France for taking it in. And according to an internal document leaked by the civil liberties monitoring watchdog Statewatch, countries have been exceedingly slow in meeting their relocation pledges.
Belgium, citing overstretched capacity, doesn’t think it will begin taking in 100 migrants until 2023.
Bulgaria says it prefers Syrian citizens, “ideally families.”
Ireland has postponed its initial pledge of 80 people.
The document says that only about 1,000 transfers are expected to take place this year, short of the 3,000 the E.U. had been hoping for — a number that, itself, is a tiny fraction of overall arrivals. (An E.U. spokeswoman did not address the specifics of that document. The E.U. says that, so far, 207 people have been transferred from Italy to France, Germany and Luxembourg.)
“So you can call the outcome a joke,” Notis Mitarachi, Greece’s migration minister, said in an interview. He said that any program should guarantee relocation of a fixed percentage of arrivals.
Meanwhile, in what is normally one of the slowest times of the year for sea arrivals, people keep showing up on Italy’s shores. One December day, 882. Another day, 317. Another, 708. The country is on track for its busiest December since 2016.
At a camp for asylum seekers not far from the Calabrian port, a 38-year-old Egyptian said he thinks the phenomenon is “snowballing.” In his country, he said, the economy is in turmoil. Even people who work don’t necessarily receive paychecks. He has two children, he said, and felt there was no other choice than to head out alone and seek work outside the country.
“Better here than there,” he said.
Elinda Labropoulou in Athens contributed to this report.
