A year on from a deal with Turkey, Europe still struggles with migration

LOUNGING in a smoky café in Aksaray, a rundown part of Istanbul, Ahmed, a 23-year-old Palestinian people-smuggler, expresses confidence in the future of his industry. “People come here, they have sold everything, they will find a way to get smuggled,” he shrugs. Business has got harder since March 18th 2016, when the European Union struck a deal with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, to send asylum-seekers back from Europe. But people are still trying to make the journey. Indeed, Ahmed boasts, before the deal smuggling was “too easy”.

Ahmed’s bravado contradicts European politicians’ claims that the deal with Turkey has broken the smugglers’ business model. Going purely by the numbers, the Europeans would seem to be right. Before the deal was struck around 50,000 people crossed the Aegean to Greece on flimsy boats each month. Between December 2016 and February this year, only about 3,500 made the journey.

But on a closer look, the deal deserves criticism. Although it has been a political success, seemingly demonstrating that the EU can control its borders, its humanitarian impact has been far murkier. And it leaves the EU uncomfortably dependent on less-than-fully democratic governments elsewhere to manage migration.

In Turkey it is not hard to find people-smugglers still plying their trade. Mohammed (not his real name), a 37-year-old Palestinian who claims to have given up smuggling after he was caught and jailed for four months, estimates that around 100 smugglers are still operating in Istanbul. Their tactics have changed: some asylum-seekers fly to Europe from Turkey using passports—bought or stolen—belonging to similar-looking EU citizens. A few have been sent from Kas, farther south on the Turkish coast, to Kastellorizo, a tiny Greek island. Others are smuggled from Syria to Sudan, then up through Libya to Italy, Mohammed claims.

As the numbers show, however, since the deal many more migrants are staying put in Turkey. Some 2.9m Syrians and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis live there. Around 10% are in camps; the majority live in Istanbul or towns in the south-east, near the border with Syria. Turkey has the largest refugee population globally (see chart).

The fortunes of these migrants are mixed. Many are attempting to make a life in Turkey. Because of a quirk in Turkey’s accession to the UN refugee convention of 1951, only Europeans fleeing war or persecution are considered “refugees”; instead, the 2.9m have been offered temporary protection. Since January 2016 it has supposedly become easier for Syrians to get work permits, but only around 10,000 have succeeded. Many migrants’ houses are overcrowded, says Metin Corabatir, the president of the Research Centre on Asylum and Migration, a think-tank in Ankara. Although around half a million refugee children have been sent to school, nearly as many remain out of it. Child labour is not unheard-of, nor are child brides.

Yet in some ways refugees are faring better in Turkey than in other parts of Europe. Each Syrian refugee is given a temporary guest card and free access to public health care. Since the deal came into place €3bn ($3.2bn) in aid from the EU has been agreed, with €750m already disbursed. Another €3bn has been promised. Along with a food programme, a cash-card scheme has been set up; by February over 200,000 people were being helped by it. The EU has also increased legal resettlement: since the deal came into force 3,565 Syrian refugees have gone to a dozen EU member states.

On the other side of the Aegean, however, the deal has been far less successful. With the flow of migrants halted, Greece and EU countries were supposed to process those who had already arrived. “Today there should not be more than a handful of asylum seekers on the Greek islands,” says Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative, a think-tank. Instead 62,000 are still in Greece, with around 13,000 on the islands in overcrowded, squalid camps. Once the numbers of new arrivals fell, EU politicians became complacent, thinks Mr Knaus. Emergency assistance to Greece was boosted by €357m, of which €70m directly supports the EU-Turkey agreement. Yet Greece’s asylum system remains sluggish. The rate at which rejected applicants are sent back to Turkey has actually fallen since the agreement came into place.

Similar problems occur up through the Western Balkans. Around 7,000 asylum-seekers are stranded in Serbia, with about 1,000 staying in abandoned warehouses next to Belgrade’s main railway station. These makeshift camps have no running water or electricity; to escape the cold, migrants burn leftover railway sleepers, creating a suffocating stink of oil. Some sleep in derelict cars stuffed full of blankets instead.

Such conditions are shameful. So is the EU’s record on shifting refugees from Greece to other members: only 7,280 were moved between September 2015 and January 2017. The target set in 2015 was to relocate more than 63,000 in two years. Intransigent politicians have been a problem, particularly in eastern Europe. Bureaucratic backlogs have done the rest.

The saving face that stopped 1,000 ships

Meanwhile, the deal has left Europe dependent on Mr Erdogan’s goodwill. Officials in Turkey have repeatedly vowed to cancel it if Europe does not fulfil the promise of visa-free travel for its citizens. Europeans accuse their governments of downplaying Mr Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism for fear that he might “open the gates”, as he threatened to, in November. The threat is mostly rhetoric: with borders closed across Europe, it has become far harder for migrants to make the journey.

Yet the EU is vulnerable to worsening relations with Turkey and political chaos in Greece. Many politicians are just pleased the deal turned the migrant crisis from a situation of “intolerable dysfunction to tolerable dysfunction”, says Elizabeth Collett of the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank in Brussels. It would not take much for it to become intolerable once more.