The European leaders, including those who once mocked and jeered former President Donald Trump for pushing ahead with a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, now appear to be clamoring for tough border controls as a fresh migrant wave hits Europe. “EU leaders call for tougher migration controls amid border surge,” the German public broadcaster DW News reported on Friday.
The demands come as the European Union witnesses a rise in illegal border crossings on its eastern borders. Thousands of migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, and other Muslim countries have entered Poland and other eastern European countries through Belarus.
Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s outgoing government is proposing joint border patrols with Poland to curb illegal migration in the East. “German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has suggested that a “significant” increase in support on the Polish side of the border could identify illegal crossings and arrest people smugglers,” the French TV channel EuroNews reported on Wednesday.
While many European leaders are apparently waking up to the threat of resurging mass-migration, the Brussels-based EU bureaucracy remains opposed to building border walls or other measures to repel illegal border crossings.
Germany’s DW News reported the EU leaders’ call to curb the current migrant wave:
The divisive issue of refugees and migrants was top of the agenda as the 27 European Union leaders met in Brussels for the second day of their summit. Their meeting came amid a surge of migrants and refugees trying to cross the Belarusian border into Poland, Lithuania and Latvia from countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran.EU leaders have accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of flying in illegal migrants to send them across the border, in an effort to destabilize the EU. Germany’s federal police said last week that more than 4,300 people had entered the country from Poland after traveling from Belarus since August, compared with just 26 registered from January to July.Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said Lukashenko was “weaponizing” migration by pushing people into bloc, and called for the EU to urgently revisit its migration policies and build a “physical fence” to control the border.”Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. Maybe there will be three, four, five thousand migrants staying at the border at the same time or trying to cross the border in different places,” he told reporters. He was backed by Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg, who said the EU should help pay for any possible border wall.But speaking after the summit, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen ruled out any barriers on the bloc’s external borders, telling leaders that “that there will be no funding of barbed wire and walls.” She spoke out against the instrumentalization of migration by Belarus, saying that “no one’s life should be used to put political pressure on the European Union.”
Poland recently approved plans to build a fence along its 400-mile border with Belarus. “The lower house of the Polish parliament voted on Thursday in favour of a government plan to spend more than [$400 million] on building a wall on Poland’s border with Belarus in a bid to stem the flow of migrants trying to cross, Reuters reported last week.
The EU leadership, which mainly comprises of unelected officials, favors an open door immigration policy and opposes Poland’s bid to build a border wall. “The EU will not fund “barbed wire or walls,” the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said, in defiance of calls from some governments to build protective defences against migrants seeking to enter the bloc,” the British newspaper Guardian reported on Saturday.
The migrant surge comes as Afghanistan’s jihadi militia Taliban has threatened Europe with a migrant wave if the Western powers do not lift sanctions on its newly formed, but cash-strapped, Islamic Emirate. “Afghanistan’s new Taliban government has warned US and European envoys that continued attempts to pressure them through sanctions will undermine security and could trigger a wave of economic refugees.” the French news agency AFP reported last week.
With the jihadi forces once again on the rise in the Muslim world, Europe is fearful of the repeat of the 2015 migrant wave. More than a million migrants, mostly young men from Muslim countries, swarmed the shores and borders of Europe six years ago. Germany, France, and other European countries saw an upsurge in crime and Islamic terrorist attacks in the wake of that migrant wave.
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