The vast majority of boat migrants are not refugees, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has admitted.
Vincent Cochetel, the UNHCR special envoy for the illegal immigration situation in the Mediterranean, demanded EU member states give private NGOs unimpeded access to ferry migrants to Europe.
In an interview with InfoMigrants published on Tuesday, the French official claimed that so-called sea rescue is a “basic principle of humanity”, likening open borders NGOs to the emergency services, such as fire brigades.
“If European states do not want to take responsibility for rescue at sea, let them make way for civil society actors,” he said. However, he failed to comment on the fact that European taxpayers — rather than mass migration-backing NGOs — are left housing and footing the bill for migrants who are picked up in the Mediterranean.
“Only 30 per cent of those who set sail from Libya are in need of protection. This, therefore, means that 70 per cent have no intention of seeking asylum in Europe,” Cochetel told InfoMigrants, before going on to suggest that EU nations should step up deportation of illegal immigrants.
Noting that the mass importation of people continuing as it has been will lead to a credibility problem in future Cochetel continued:
“A fair and equitable return mechanism must also be put in place. Because otherwise the whole asylum system will be called into question by European states and their peoples.”
Asked about an increasing number of Algerians headed to Europe, Cochetel said he believed the “exodus” of North Africans was due to a lack of economic opportunity, “worsened by restrictions imposed by coronavirus”.
While pro-open borders NGOs — an industry which has exploded in growth in recent years — demand EU nations be forced to take in a limitless number of migrants from the third world, native Europeans are also suffering tough economic times as a result of the novel coronavirus.
Breitbart London recently reported how populists in Italy have been infuriated by the liberal government’s decision to grant a ‘temporary’ amnesty to up to 600,000 migrants earlier this month, as nearly a third of Italian businesses are set to close permanently and while millions of people are out of work due to the country’s coronavirus shutdown.
According to UN data collected since January, the most common nations of origin of Mediterranean migrant arrivals this year are Afghanistan and Syria, followed by Morocco and Algeria.
Regarding other routes into Europe, the UN Migration Agency/International Organization for Migration (IOM) has previously estimated that “80 to 85 per cent” of migrants attempting to break into EU nations via the Balkans are “economic migrants and not people who need international protection”.
More than a third of these migrants are from Pakistan while around one in five purports to be Syrian, according to IOM coordinator for the region, Peter Van der Auweraert.
“But concerning the Syrians, I have doubts because we also have a number of people from North Africa who say they are Syrian,” he told euronews in 2018.