CFR Update 9/8 EU to Unveil New Plan to Address Migrant Crisis

September 8, 2015 Daily News Brief

TOP OF THE AGENDA EU to Unveil New Plan to Address Migrant Crisis EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is expected to unveil details of a new plan to relocate migrants across the European Union on Wednesday. Brussels will reportedly spend 1 billion euros to distribute 160,000 migrants, and Germany, France, and Spain receive more than half of the migrants, according to a draft proposal seen by the Financial Times (FT). German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said that the country could accommodate half a million asylum-seekers (Guardian) annually for the next several years and called on other EU members to share the burden of the migration crisis. Meanwhile, the Greek government and the UN's refugee agency sent (BBC) additional staff and ships to attend to twenty-five thousand migrants stranded on the island of Lesbos. Migrants in Hungary clashed (Irish Times) again with police over the weekend.

ANALYSIS "The nations of the world need a more robust multilateral mechanism to develop and promote common global standards for the processing and treatment of migrants and refugees. The building blocks of such a system already exists, including in the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But the IOM is mainly an assistance body rather than a forum for negotiation, and UNHCR is stretched thin by multiple humanitarian crises. However, rather than seeking to create an entirely new international organization, UN member states should look to strengthen these existing ones so that they can do more to assist countries and regions coping with unexpected spikes in refugees and migrants," write CFR's Steward Patrick and Theresa Lou in this blog post. "It is true that the legal distinction between refugees and economic migrants often fails to capture the complex mixture of motives that drive migrants to make their epic journeys. War may be the catalyst for a journey that refugees will then seek to make as economically beneficial as possible. But in dealing with large numbers of migrants who, the data show, have fled countries stricken by war or the caprice of dictatorship, European politicians should strive for a more generous approach," writes the Economist. "The rise of the smugglers to central figures in the refugee drama is a direct result of the EU's failure to adequately address the crisis. Europe still has no plan or strategy for dealing with the rising numbers of refugees. Instead, they blame each other for the humanitarian disaster that has slowly moved from Europe's periphery to its heart," writes Der Spiegel.