Signal Berlaymont: Outsourcing asylum processing is the key to ending migration chaos

A real debate on migration policy has finally started in Germany. It comes after the August 23 terrorist attack in Solingen. That night, an individual with reported ties to the "Islamic State" terror network allegedly murdered three people, injuring eight.

A Syrian asylum seeker was later arrested in connection to the incident. He allegedly entered the EU via Bulgaria in 2022 as an asylum seeker. His asylum claim was denied, and he was meant to have been deported last year.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition CDU party, demanded the EU’s “Dublin” migration rules be applied more strictly. Those rules say the country where an asylum seeker first enters the EU, in this case Bulgaria, is responsible for them.

Merz suggested overriding EU law if the Dublin rules are not enforced. He stated it may be necessary “to declare a national emergency with regard to refugees”, to enable national law to take precedence over EU law.

"I am convinced that we have the right to turn people back at Germany’s external borders,” he said.

If rejecting migrants at the border "is not possible for reasons of European law", "then it must be resolved […] to make it possible”, he added.

EU law and asylum  

Whether Germany would succeed here is debatable. According to migration law expert Daniel Thym, the European Court of Justice has blocked all previous attempts to invoke this exception clause, even though it is enshrined in Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The article rather vaguely says EU member states are responsible for "the maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security".

Even if is possible to send asylum seekers back to Bulgaria, Spain, Greece or Italy, this will not achieve much. With the Schengen area's lack of passport checks, they can easily travel back to Northern Europe, with its more lucrative black market and attractive social benefits. Even ending the Schengen arrangement, which would have a high economic cost, is unlikely to keep asylum seekers from moving north.

The Australian approach  

There really is only one strategy to stop the bulk of illegal migration. That is the one that Australia has been applying for two decades now. Anyone who enters illegally retains the right to apply for asylum, but gets moved outside of Australia. People have been sent to offshore-centres in Nauru, where they still apply for asylum, but not in Australia. Cambodia agreed to welcome those whose asylum claims are successful.

The conditions in these off-shore shelters are not especially comfortable. You could argue Australia should welcome a few of those whose asylum claims are successful. But overall, the Australian model is a great success. It stopped illegal human trafficking, with almost no one drowning in Australian waters now. This is a much better record than the Mediterranean, where 30,000 asylum seekers drowned over the last ten years. So much for Europe’s moral superiority complex.

Australia's border protection approach enabled its leaders to justify inviting genuine, vetted refugees, directly from refugee camps. So this system of border protection is unrelated to whether one you want a very generous or very restrictive asylum policy. It is just a way to apply either of those policies. A consequence is in Australia, immigrants tend to provide a fiscal boost to the country. This is unlike Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, where foreign-born people receive more from the government treasury than they pay in, according to OECD data.

Yes, it won’t stop people overstaying their visas. And Australia, like elsewhere, has seen a debate on whether too many people have been allowed to migrate to the country legally. But this kind of outsourcing of asylum processing has let Australia stop the migration chaos and implement democratically agreed asylum policies. Both the country's Left and Right support it.

Will Europe copy Australia’s policy? 

Ahead of June's European Parliament elections, at least 15 EU governments openly committed to outsourcing asylum processing. Of course, they still need to act upon that. This means starting negotiations with overseas partners. Perhaps with countries like Rwanda, which appeared ready to cooperate with the UK until the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (not an EU institution) blocked the initiative.

Perhaps Italy’s plan to transfer asylum seekers to Albania has more chance of succeeding. Albania, unlike Rwanda, is a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights. Also, Marc Bossuyt, a past president of the Belgian Constitutional Court and Belgian Commissioner General for Refugees, stated the UK’s now-defunct Rwanda plan may well have been compatible with the European Convention of Human Rights. The asylum seekers the UK planned to send there “have no reason to fear persecution in Rwanda”, he said. And “in the European Convention on Human Rights, there is not even a provision on asylum” in the first place, he noted. This should make us wonder how the European Court of Human Rights has had such a massive influence on migration policy in Europe.

Let’s see how Italy’s Albania plan fares. Like with Australia, only relatively limited transfers to an off-shore asylum processing location may end the border crisis. In fact, boats soon stopped arriving to Australia, so the country’s government did not have to send anyone offshore after 2014.

It wouldn't solve everything. People still can simply overstay their visa. This can be remedied by tightening up visa conditions for countries where this appears to be a frequent problem. Other aspects of EU policy still need to be changed, like EU rules on family reunification. These mean member states can't stop migrants from inviting relatives who often depend on the welfare state. We can only wonder why the EU should have any power over this.

Rethinking the Geneva Convention

At the international level, the Geneva Convention, enshrined in EU law, does not limit how many asylum seekers signatories must welcome. This must be amended, and a cap needs to be set. There are at least 100 million refugees in the world. European countries can't welcome all of them.

Recognising countries have an “absorption capacity” gives us a chance to bring countries' existing de facto limits in line with the law. Letting people apply for asylum in embassies worldwide also means they wouldn't have to risk their lives traveling across the world.

Another idea is creating “refugee cities”: safe havens for those on the run from the world's many authoritarian corrupt countries. This would offer a solution for people the industrialised world isn’t able to welcome.

Red alert

A new survey says 58 per cent of young Africans are keen to emigrate from their countries. At the moment, 420 million Africans are between 15 and 35. The continent’s population is expected to double by 2050. This alone tells us Europe’s current approach on migration is unsustainable.     

On September 1, Germany's President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the country can only stay open and tolerant if it isn't "overwhelmed" by what his Social Democratic party calls “irregular” migration. On the same day, the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured a massive proportion of votes in two eastern German state elections, even winning the ballot in Thuringia.

German finance minister Christian Lindner, head of the liberal FDP, exclaimed “people are fed up with the fact that this state may have lost control of immigration and asylum to Germany”. He added if the established parties did not implement a migration turnaround, citizens would “look for another system.”

If that is not a red alert, nothing is.