The beaches of Calais, France, are currently packed with sunbathers, many of them Britons who have taken advantage of Europe's open borders to pop across the channel on the Eurostar train for a cheap beach getaway.
Immediately behind those bathers, in a thick bramble between beach and highway, another group of non-permanent migrants lies hidden. For more than a dozen years, thousands of people, mostly unaccompanied men, have concealed themselves in a squalid encampment of forklift pallets and improvised tents known as the Jungle, hiding by day and then, by night, launching desperate and often violent attempts to smuggle themselves through the Channel Tunnel aboard trucks and trains.
Last week, this simmering population burst into the headlines, when perhaps 1,000 of them made a mass rush for the tunnel, battling hundreds of riot police and shutting down this vital trade corridor. British Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to respond; there is talk of dogs, military raids, walls. There is an atavistic response, deep in the British imagination, to the ancient threat of strangers from northern France, and the Calais crisis seems to have triggered it.
This Calais threat, however, is not caused by outside forces and foreign populations, but rather by British policy and European neglect.
When I've stepped into those bushes, as I've done a couple times over the past few years, I've found a disturbing, dangerous environment, always poised on the edge of violence, which has no good reason to exist.
This assault on Britain's sole land border crossing is not, despite what headlines say, caused by a flood of desperate people pouring into Europe and overwhelming borders. Quite the contrary: The Jungle came into being and caused its first mass-assault crises in the mid-2000s, after a legal and managed refuge-processing centre down the coast in Sangatte was closed – at a point when refugee flows to Europe (and around the world) were at a historic low.
Refugees were very limited in number and very manageable in the years after the Balkan crisis of the mid-1990s and before the Syrian refugee crisis began to affect Europe significantly in 2014. It was during those years, when this problem could have easily been pre-empted by creating legal pathways, that Europe's great capitals gave up even trying to organize a policy.
In 2004, there was an attempt, led by Britain, to create a unified European asylum policy, in which asylum seekers would be distributed to agreed-upon places, countries would share the settlement burden by economic and demographic need, and deportation and return of non-qualified applicants – a crucial part of any humane migration system – would be handled quickly and efficiently by sharing the burden across national authorities.
As a consequence of that failure (which was repeated this year, when a German refugee-sharing proposal was largely rejected by European states), there are now countless people – mainly unaccompanied men – knocking around Europe without a way in or a way out. Many have been accepted, by one state or another, as legal refugees, but aren't recognized in other countries.
The people I've met beneath the bushes in Calais are a troubling group of mixed (and sometimes deliberately vague) nationality, from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Some are quiet, long-suffering victims of some great indignity – perhaps endured in a conflict at home, perhaps during their long, expensive journey. Some are bold and calculating opportunists. Some are doing everything they can to help their family back home. Some are career criminals on the lam or mentally troubled people prone to violence – the other Jungle dwellers are quick to acknowledge this. Many are some combination of all these things. None of them should be there – and none would, if there were an unambiguous legal path to settlement.
The Mediterranean boat crisis came into being when European countries stopped issuing seasonal work visas to Africans, thus turning a short-term, legal migration pathway into a permanent, illegal pathway. The abandonment of safe, legal refugee entry systems created explosions of dangerous, illegal border pushes.
"The number of migrants arriving is absolutely manageable for the European Union, given its vast size and resources," Eugenio Ambrosi of the International Organization for Migration pointed out on Tuesday. Indeed, the 200,000 people should be a little-noticed – and largely temporary – movement to economies that are in need of new people. But by avoiding a simple legal solution, Britain and its allies have created a complex and violent mess. Rather than making places such as Calais more violent and confrontational, they ought to sit down and make a deal.
Doug Saunders