Migration and Asylum: Time for Member States To Take Back Control

According to the principle of subsidiarity, the European Union should only act if it is better placed than member states to achieve a specific objective. Does this hold true for migration and asylum? Thirty years after the establishment of a common migration policy, can one genuinely assert that the EU is better positioned to control borders, return illegal migrants, conclude readmission agreements, or manage asylum policy? 

These questions are, unfortunately, rhetorical. As the last three decades have shown, the EU’s migration and asylum policy is an abysmal and absolute failure. EU policy has failed so spectacularly that the migration crisis, along with its security implications, financial burdens, and cultural impact, has become the most pressing European political issue and has developed into an existential threat for Europe. 

The figures speak for themselves. While the EU’s birth rate has been collapsing for decades, its overall population has inexorably grown, driven by ever-increasing migratory flows. According to the European Commission, “since 2012, the negative natural change (more deaths than births) in the EU population has been outweighed by positive net migration.” Thanks to these trends, many European countries have become a ‘nation of immigrants’ with more than 15% of their population being foreign—higher than even the U.S. In the field of international protection alone, the EU has received 8.5 million asylum seekers over the past decade, the equivalent of the Union’s fifteenth most populated state. According to Eurostat, 7.4 million people have entered the EU illegally since 2014, while barely one quarter of them have been removed. Sadly, the official figures also reveal a clear failure of integration, with sharp differences in employment rates, risk of poverty, and criminal activity. 

How much more irrefutable evidence is required to acknowledge the full magnitude and gravity of the EU’s mismanagement of this unprecedented migration crisis? Unprecedented, indeed, because the contemporary phenomenon has little to do with the post-Second World War migration flows. In a world with fewer borders, unlimited mobility, and demographic contrasts, the Geneva Convention and its 1967 Protocol, the principle of “non-refoulement,” the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice case law, are not only obsolete tools, but they are also dangerous straitjackets preventing states from addressing migration and its serious security threats. 

It is past time to rethink this totally outdated framework and adapt it to the fundamentally new circumstances of today. Member states must be allowed to free themselves from a legal framework that has become an existential constraint. Brussels, with its delays, lack of ambition, dogmatism, chronic inefficiency, and permissive case law, is widely responsible for the current impasse and cannot resolve this fundamental issue. 

Thus, the solution does not lie in an umpteenth reform or an ill-conceived Migration and Asylum Pact based on a totally discredited and inefficient approach. After thirty years of failure, the only solution is for the EU to give back its competences to member states so that they can manage migration and asylum policy on a brand-new basis grounded in national sovereignty. 

It is this exact approach which is proposed and developed in our new report “Taking Back Control from Brussels,” published by Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Migration Research Institute, with the support of Ordo Iuris and the European Centre for Law and Justice. Extending the Danish and Irish privilege to opt out from the migration acquis to any member state requesting it, limiting the Schengen area to European citizens only, prohibiting public funding to any ‘civil society’ organization promoting illegal migration, derogating from the Geneva Convention, or reconsidering the scope of the European Convention of Human Rights are only some of the 18 measures proposed to solve the mass migration crisis and disrupt the current unsustainable status quo. While this report focuses on changes to EU policy, we should not forget that mass migration is a global challenge, one that weighs particularly heavily on Western countries, and it is our hope this report will inspire meaningful reforms well beyond Europe’s borders. 

The clock is ticking; Europe must address this existential crisis and reverse this unsustainable predicament. This is not the time for technocratic half-measures, hesitations, and cowardice. It is the time for member states to reclaim their sovereignty and decide for themselves which migration and asylum policies work for their own countries. 

It is time to take back control from Brussels, once and for all.

Viktor Marsai and Róbert Gönczi
authors, Migration Research Institute

Rodrigo Ballester and Yann Caspar
authors, Center for European Studies, Mathias Corvinus Collegium

Jerzy Kwaśniewski
Ordo Iuris

Grégor Puppinck
European Centre for Law and Justice

Alejandro Macarron Larumbe
Centro de Estudios, Formación y Análisis Social

Mark Krikorian and Nayla Rush
Centre for Immigration Studies

Matt O’Brien and Pawel Styrna
Federation of American Immigration Reform

Guy Dampier
Prosperity Institute

Nick Zangwill
University College London

Gladden Pappin
Hungarian Institute of International Affairs

James Carafano and Simon Hankinson
The Heritage Foundation

Frank Furedi
MCC Brussels

Ralph Schoelhammer
Center for IR Theory and Applied History, Mathias Corvinus Collegium

István Kiss and Kristóf György Veres
Danube Institute