Pushback's Pushback

Protecting borders isn't the purpose of an EU memberstate!

The European Union is grilling memberstates who dare to do even the bare minimum to protect their sovereign borders.

Greece was recently harangued by EU Home Affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson for pushing migrants back from its sea and land borders, and refusing to allow illegal migrants to transit through the country to the wider continent.

Johansson, for some context, has a long history of refusing to allow nations to determine their own fates, such as when she worked to refuse the people of her native Sweden a referendum on joining NATO.

This anti-Greek story comes on the heels of two other major developments in European policy: the continued push for a EU wide migration pact, which would essentially hand over control of migration to the European Commission, and a row in the EU's parliament about border agencies doing even the bare minimum to protect memberstate sovereignty.

Lawmakers, while hearing testimony from Frontex, the EU's border agency, and the Italian coastguard, devolved into screaming at eachother and making profane gestures.

This is, however, a minor piece of the wider puzzle.

Italy alone has seen over 42,000 arrivals since January of this year, these are the highest numbers since 2016. Germany is also experiencing a massive surge in migration, as we outlined in a recent piece, and legal migration to memberstates such as France has increased 45%. The French government is also pushing a bill to give amnesty to potentially hundreds of thousands of illegal migrant workers already in the country.

Meloni’s administration is facilitating the arrival of thousands of Tunisian economic migrants, and while not a European Union memberstate it is still worth reminding readers that the UK’s Home Office expects the country to take in over one million new arrivals in 2023.

The European Union and most memberstates are rapidly pushing European nation's to a point where they will not be allowed to control who enters their countries in any meaingful way and to a situation where national elites in most countries are doing all they can to facilitate further migrant arrivals.

Nations are lambasted for refusing to allow illegal migrants entry. They are targeted for not taking fake refugees seriously, and even nations doing comparatively little, such as Italy, are still harassed by Brussels based institutions for what little they actually do to protect their borders.

The European Union is a neoliberal policymaking prison for memberstates who look out for their national interests to even the slightest degree, and is an institution beyond repair.