During a visit to Italy late last month, Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, demanded €5 billion a year from the European Union to curb illegal migration to Europe.

Standing next to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, Qaddafi said: “Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European and might even be black, as there are millions who want to come in. We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

Many observers took this as further evidence of Qaddafi’s eccentric ways and voiced alarm. Not so the European Commission, which sees “great scope” for further co-operation with Libya on migration, according to a spokesperson. And Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister and a former European commissioner for justice, said that the EU would look at the request. “I imagine it will be considered at a European-African summit in Libya in November,” he said.

Stemming the flow of illegal migrants, mostly from the wider Middle East and from Africa, is a core interest driving EU policy towards the frontline states of north Africa and the main source in countries further south.

Successful policy

The policy appears to be successful: according to the latest quarterly report from Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, only 150 detections of illegal migration were reported in the first three months of this year in Malta and Italy, down from 5,200 in the same period in 2009. Frontex attributes the sharp drop to a bilateral agreement between Italy and Libya that has made it possible for Italy to return illegal migrants to Libya without screening them for asylum claims.

The dramatic decrease in apprehensions is probably not due solely to more
aggressive interceptions. Weaker pull factors, including a fall in demand for cheap labour in recession-hit Europe, are also likely to have had an impact – although difficult to quantify – on economic migration.

Italy’s tough approach is not an EU policy. But it highlights the pitfalls of a migration policy focused exclusively on preventing people from reaching Europe’s shores regardless of whether they might have credible claims of persecution.

In years past, most of those who made it to Italy applied for asylum or temporary status, and close to half of the requests were granted. That means that a large proportion of the migrants were genuine refugees. Of the five largest groups of asylum-seekers in Italy in 2008, four were from Africa – Nigeria, Somalia, Eritrea and Ghana. (Reflecting the geography
of migration routes, in Greece in the same year the main groups were Pakistanis, Afghans, Georgians, Bangladeshis and Iraqis.) Across the EU, Somalia and Nigeria are among the top ten countries of origin for asylum-seekers in 2009.

Control tool

One consequence of the EU’s control-focused approach is that even initiatives that the EU views as a service to potential migrants and countries of origin and transit appear to their presumed clients as another tool of control. That was the finding of a delegation of MEPs visiting a pilot project in Mali in May. The Migration Information and Management Centre (Cigem) was set up with funding from the European Development Fund to support the Malian government in policymaking on migration issues.

The centre conducts statistical analysis of migration flows and remittances, and registers Malians who wish to emigrate or to return to Mali (last year it registered 2,800 persons, 70% of whom wanted to work abroad). But Agustín Diaz de Mera, a Spanish centre-right MEP who visited the centre, noted a “problem of trust on the part of the Malian authorities” and had to correct the impression that Cigem was a “Frontex on Malian soil”.