The real ‘Dubliners’ are the populists

Solutions or mere token gestures? The Italian government, in its handling of the migrant crisis, has made a communications blunder for which it is now paying a heavy price. The issue is simple and easy to understand: if you raise your voice and threaten an allied country with tighter border controls when that country is in difficulty, just to score a propaganda point with your voters, you cannot complain when other European countries, in order to score a propaganda point with their own voters, choose a similar approach. In short: if you legitimately threaten to tighten Schengen controls – as happened in the wake of the arrivals in Ceuta – you cannot take offence if someone, as has happened in recent days, erects further barriers, legitimately asking countries of first entry not to manage the arrivals of irregular migrants simply by opening their borders to neighbouring countries.

The summer controversy over the application of the Dublin Regulation can, with a touch of laziness, be interpreted in this way, and there is nothing wrong with that; but if one wishes to attempt to develop a line of reasoning that goes beyond the logic of ‘blah blah blah’ one might try to make an effort to reflect and get to the heart of the great farce of misunderstandings and hypocrisies that has been staged for weeks in a symmetrical manner by both the Italian right and left, who seem intent on taking to the public stage on this issue with the sole aim of offering voters not solutions but trivialities – a speciality in which a very well-known former general tends to excel more than others. The crucial starting point for reflecting on the widespread hypocrisy and the farce of misunderstandings is to understand whether or not the political forces intend to commit their countries to the fight against irregular immigration. If we take this as our starting point, we must take a further step and adopt the only possible approach to tackling the issue without demagoguery. If you call for responsibility, you must call for greater solidarity. If you call for solidarity, you must call for greater responsibility. If you call for responsibility without solidarity, and if you call for solidarity without responsibility, you are fuelling a dual form of populism. On the one hand, the populism of irresponsibility, which promises unregulated immigration and generates fear. On the other, the populism of a lack of solidarity, which, by isolating the countries most exposed to immigration, generates insecurity. Anyone who strays from this delicate balance tends to fuel ‘peanut politics’, which sometimes generates fear, sometimes insecurity, and sometimes both at once.

On the right, the reasoning implies the need to come to terms with a necessary realisation: adhering to rules such as the Dublin Regulation – which were established primarily to determine who is responsible for an asylum claim and to prevent distribution from occurring haphazardly through secondary movements – means recognising that the best way to manage the phenomenon of irregular migration is not to go it alone, but to seek European solutions for managing borders, ensuring faster returns, and negotiating agreements with the countries from which migrants depart.

On the left, however, the argument implies the need to come to terms with another necessary realisation: if, in the face of a crisis such as that in Ceuta, you praise an approach such as that taken by the Spanish government in managing migrants, an approach characterised by heavy-handed measures, strict repatriations and rigorous controls, you cannot regard every attempt by Europe to introduce rules to govern illegal immigration as a shift to the right, as the PD, for example, has been doing for years, denouncing the underlying extremism (fascism?) that drives the European Union in its drafting of the famous Pact on Asylum and Migration.

Meloni, who spoke on the subject yesterday, is right to say that the Dublin system and the Pact on Asylum and Migration are two distinct things, but the spirit of the two agreements is the same: greater responsibility in return for greater solidarity, and vice versa (in the new Pact, solidarity and responsibility are two sides of the same coin: those who ask for solidarity from other countries must respect European rules on responsibility and secondary movements, which is why the Meloni government cannot defy the requests of European countries asking Italy to take back asylum seekers for whom it is responsible but who have moved to other countries). But to try to move beyond the farce of misunderstandings on the issue of migrants – a farce in which the right in Europe has many solutions, some demagogic and others not, whilst the left in Italy seems to have only one solution: to say ‘no’ to its opponents’ solutions, a government programme of dubious effectiveness – we must try to focus on the three possible lessons offered by the summer’s row.

Point number one: the crisis in Ceuta does not prove that the European Pact does not work, but it does demonstrate why a European Pact is essential for managing migration, first and foremost irregular migration.

Point number two: the Dublin Regulation is not an attempt to offload the entire burden of managing migrants onto the countries of first entry, but rather an attempt to establish which state is responsible for each application, thereby preventing secondary movements from arbitrarily determining how asylum seekers are distributed across Europe; for if an irregular migrant arrives in Italy or Spain, one cannot claim to be helping those countries by allowing migrants to move around Europe at random. We must find ways to avoid postponing the resolution of these issues, by speeding up the repatriation of those who have no right to remain or by streamlining the asylum application process.

Point number three: when it comes to migrants, the real dichotomy is not between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, nor is it between those who want solidarity and those who want accountability, but rather between those who can distinguish between a policy designed to seek solutions and one designed to stir up trouble.