Paris Terror Attacks Transform Debate Over Europe’s Migration Crisis Attacks fuel political calls for closing borders, revamping open-door policies toward refugees By Anton Troianovski in Berlin and Marcus Walker in Athens
http://www.wsj.com/articles/paris-terror-attacks-transform-debate-over-europes-migration-crisis-1447608944
The Paris attacks are transforming Europe’s migration crisis into a security debate, spurring calls for a clampdown on free movement across borders, and putting proponents of an open door for refugees on the defensive.
France’s firm belief that Islamic State militants planned the attacks—and the possibility that at least one assailant may have posed as a Syrian refugee—are fueling arguments over whether Europe is doing enough to protect itself from terrorists who might infiltrate the thousands of migrants arriving daily from the Middle East and elsewhere.
Evidence that some of the attackers crossed internal European Union boundaries to get to Paris have also brought more demands from EU-skeptic politicians to abolish the continent’s system of open borders.
To proponents of European integration, the attacks highlight the need for more EU cooperation on security and better joint protection of the bloc’s external frontier. But those voices, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are now likely to face even stronger opposition from politicians who want to show they are taking national security more seriously than lofty European ideals.
More border controls within the EU might follow, each of them undermining Europe’s Schengen accord—which provides for passport-free travel across the borders of 26 signatory countries—said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Pressure is growing on countries to act,” Mr. Janning said, “but the ability to do so in a European framework is not.”
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen said President François Hollande’s move to impose temporary border controls in the wake of the attacks was insufficient. Instead, she said, the Schengen freedoms should be abolished and France’s protected borders re-established.
“Without borders, neither protection nor security are possible,” Ms. Le Pen said.
An early sign of the attacks’ political repercussions came from Warsaw, just hours after the shooting stopped in Paris. Poland’s incoming minister of European affairs, Konrad Szymanski, said the country’s new, conservative government, to be sworn in Monday, wouldn’t honor its predecessors’ commitment to take in about 7,000 asylum-seekers as part of an EU-wide plan to redistribute migrants across the bloc.
The EU agreement to spread refugees around Europe is still legally binding, Mr. Szymanski wrote in an article posted online. “But faced with the tragic events in Paris, we don’t see political possibilities for its enforcement.”
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, whose country has long been on the front line of mass migration, is also facing intensified criticism from anti-immigration parties such as the Northern League, whose leader Matteo Salvini called over the weekend for increased restrictions on migrants’ entry and the closure of European borders.
“The security concerns raised by the attacks could put the Schengen open- borders policy under pressure in the long term, given the likely intensified criticism coming not only from radical populist parties but also moderate center-right forces” such as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, said Antonio Barroso, an analyst at research group Teneo Intelligence.
Ms. Merkel and others who want to keep European borders open now face an even steeper challenge. Politically, they must convince the public that openness works despite the cross-border movements of the Paris attackers. Practically, they must find ways to improve joint European security mechanisms that have proved to be of limited efficacy.
At an international summit meeting in Turkey Sunday, Ms. Merkel characterized the need to secure the EU’s external borders as “decisive” and said illegal immigration by refugees needed to be replaced as quickly as possible by a legal mechanism. She has been seeking a far-reaching agreement with Turkey in which the EU would agree to resettle a set number of refugees living in that country.
A key ally of Ms. Merkel in Brussels, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, also spoke on Sunday of the urgent need to protect Europe’s external frontier. But in the case of Greece, where most migrants from the Middle East enter Europe, it isn’t clear what that means. Few European leaders are willing to say that Greece should stop migrant-filled boats from landing, condemning more people to drown.
Europe has tried in recent months to reduce the migration flow by lobbying Turkey to stop migrants from taking to the Aegean Sea. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pressed for a string of concessions in return, including visa-free European travel for Turks and a broadening of EU membership talks, which EU leaders have been reluctant to grant. The mounting political pressure on European governments to contain the migration flow could increase Mr. Erdogan’s leverage.
Existing EU policies to control who is coming to Europe appear in tatters. Ms. Merkel and the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, have staked much on the idea of registering migrants at processing centers, dubbed “hot spots,” in Greece and Italy, and in distributing them around the EU under a quota system. But the distribution idea now looks even harder to implement in the face of political doubts from many countries. And the registration of hundreds of thousands of migrants’ personal details, even their fingerprints, appears in the wake of Paris to be an ineffectual way to identify or stop Islamic militants.
In Germany, the attacks quickly galvanized opponents of Ms. Merkel’s open-door refugee policy. Critics said that it had become clearer than ever that the migrants from the Middle East represented a grave security threat.
“It cannot be that we are not protecting our borders and that immigrants from Syria are arriving without being registered,” Alexander Gauland, a deputy chairman of the populist Alternative for Germany party, said in an interview. “Ms. Merkel’s policy of opening the border for everyone from this region simply cannot stand anymore.”
German police who have been deployed along the border in recent months already take fingerprints scans of migrants and cross-check them against international criminal databases. But critics say the process still leaves too many loopholes, and the sheer scale of migration increases the risks that terrorists will enter.
Jürgen Hardt, a foreign-policy specialist and lawmaker with Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, said the attacks would complicate the government’s efforts to keep its borders open for refugees—even if the Paris attacks highlight the plight of people in the Middle East.
“People’s empathy for the fate of the refugees will increase,” Mr. Hardt said in an interview. “But so will the fear that a few terrorists will slip in unnoticed among the hundreds of thousands who are coming.”
If security fears now lead to a lasting closure of national borders around Europe, the result could be a rapid buildup of migrants in Europe’s frontier countries, Greece and Italy, as well as in Balkan countries. Countries’ lack of resources for accommodating migrants in wintry weather could lead to disaster, analysts warn.
“Greece stands to get really badly hurt if borders do start closing seriously in Western and Central Europe,” said François Heisbourg, a leading French security expert. If huge bottlenecks of genuine refugees form in Greece and its Balkan neighbors, he says, “You could have a humanitarian crisis on top of everything else.”
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