Beatrix von Storch, of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, offers the assembly’s 220,000-square-meter complex as shelter to the thousands of migrants expected soon in the Strasbourg area. She said: “I call for an immediate practical contribution of the EU Parliament and its members for the refugee crisis. The vacant Strasbourg buildings and the local infrastructure can be used immediately to alleviate the lack of refugee centers in the Euro district.”
The European Parliament is used only four days a month for plenary sessions. For the rest of the year it sits mostly empty. Von Storch’s idea is to accommodate migrants in the 750 offices of the Strasbourg headquarters, all of which are equipped with folding beds, showers and toilets.
Unsurprisingly, the self-regarding gesture was greeted with applause during the plenary on Monday.
And as tens of thousands of migrants are flooding a porous, borderless Europe, questions are now being asked as to what is stopping these young Muslim men – because that is overwhelmingly who they are – from going wherever they fancy once their claims are processed? Well, not much really.
Described as the “Achilles heel of the migrant relocation plan”, people are now starting to worry about “secondary movements”, with the European Commission also alive to the fact that very little can stop those settled in Germany, Hungary, or elsewhere, shifting across borders.
A factsheet on the European Commission website states:
“How will ‘secondary movements’ be avoided? Will people not just move on to another EU Member State?
“When someone is relocated to another EU country, they only have the right to legally reside in that country and cannot move on to another EU country.
“If they do, and are apprehended, they will be transferred back to the country of legal residence under the rules of the Dublin Regulation.
“No person will be relocated from frontline Member States without first having had their fingerprints taken, meaning a person’s country of legal residence can be quickly verified.
“The fact that a relocated person will only be entitled to the rights attached to international protection in the Member State of relocation will also serve as a disincentive for secondary movements.
“The Commission has also recommended to Member States that they consider imposing reporting obligations on relocated persons applying for asylum and only providing material reception conditions (providing food, housing and clothing only in kind).”
But as you will have already worked out, their solutions are broadly unworkable. Firstly, it behoves the European Court of Human Rights to uphold the same privileges for all European citizens. Telling some they can move around while others have to stay put is highly unlikely. Secondly, how do you check people in and out of nation states in a borderless Europe, and “remove” their [human] rights if they do move? It doesn’t make sense.
Germany alone expects 800,000 asylum claims in 2015. The government is talking of taking 500,000 migrants annually until the end of the decade while Chancellor Angela Merkel calls the migrant invasion “the next great European project.”
The rest of Europe might be saying “good luck with that” but in reality nobody can put a figure on the influx. As Breitbart London reported, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has warned that migrants in ‘uncountable millions’ from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa are on the way.
But what is at first blush a German act of misguided magnanimity to offer each and every one asylum could soon become everyone else’s problem because, as plenty of commentators have pointed out, what you reward you get more of.
There is nothing on earth to stop these young men moving wherever they want. Maybe they’ll go where the weather suits their clothes. Perhaps they’ll seek out like-minded souls or Muslim co-religionists. More certainly they’ll do as they damn well please because Germany has let them by turning its back on the accepted conventions of the Dublin Agreement and self-regulation is a pre-condition of migrants agreeing to stay where they are processed.
The United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR) is a little bit more practical. It is acutely aware of what lies ahead and this week published figures that should chill you to the bone. It revealed that the migrant stream is comprised of 15 per cent children, 13 per cent women and 72 per cent young males coming from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia and Pakistan in that order.
They all ride the human conveyor belt from their landing points on the shores of the Mediterranean in Italy and Greece before heading through Serbia then Hungary and on to Germany.
Such is the appeal that the Wall Street Journal has pointed out that Iraqis are now joining the flood prompting airlines to add three more daily flights to Istanbul—on top of five packed flights a day already departing Baghdad for the Turkish city.
All brought to you by Angela Merkel and a spineless EU.
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