On 15 February the Italian coastguard launched an operation to rescue more than 2,000 migrants who were in difficulty between the island of Lampedusa and the coast of Libya. Anna Triandafyllidou writes on the pressure irregular migration is having on the countries of southern Europe. She argues that countries such as Italy and Greece are now facing a ‘triple crisis’ composed of irregular migration, stubborn unemployment rates, and high levels of poverty, which is feeding into the growth of anti-establishment politics

Triandafyllidou, Anna

LSE Research Online

17/02/2015Irregular migration is feeding into the growth of anti-establishment politics in southern Europeblogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2015/02/17/irregular-migration-is-feeding-into-the-growth-of-anti-establishment-politics-in-southern-europe/On 15 February the Italian coastguard launched an operation to rescue more than 2,000 migrantswho were in diﬃculty between the island of Lampedusa and the coast of Libya. AnnaTriandafyllidou writes on the pressure irregular migration is having on the countries of southernEurope. She argues that countries such as Italy and Greece are now facing a ‘triple crisis’composed of irregular migration, stubborn unemployment rates, and high levels of poverty, which isfeeding into the growth of anti-establishment politics.In recent years, Greece seems to have functioned as a barometer for social tensions in Europe.The country’s economic crisis and potential exit from the euro has generated deep anxiety for the Eurozone, ﬁrst inthe period between 2010 and 2012, and again in the aftermath of the Greek election on 25 January. At the sametime, Syrian asylum seekers’ squats in Syndagma square, which emerged in November last year – directly in frontof the Hellenic Parliament – exempliﬁed the failures of the EU’s asylum system.Syrians were given international protection by the Greek state through a facilitated and rapid procedure, after agovernment decision in November. The asylum seekers themselves do not want this protection: they wanted tomove on to other European countries where such protection comes with a set of integration measures(accommodation, training, family allowances) that would guarantee these families a future in the host country.Ultimately, the squat was dissolved partly through negotiation and satisfaction of the refugees’ claims – the mayor ofAthens, along with the national government, sought shelter for families and tried to integrate these people into theadmittedly scarce social assistance programmes that Greece has been running in these austere times. It was alsoachieved partly through police intervention – eﬀectively the asylum seekers were physically removed fromSyndagma square by police forces one chilly December morning.These events highlight the tough challenges that southern European countries, and particularly Greece and Italy,face. Asylum is a common concern for both northern and southern European countries, however southern countriesare exposed to pressures at their borders because of their geographical proximity to zones of instability and conﬂict.Northern and western European countries, on the other hand, are the preferred destinations of asylum seekers.Thus both groups of countries have a common concern to share this burden, albeit looking at the problem fromdiﬀerent perspectives. Southern European countries simultaneously face the pressures of irregular migration andasylum seekers, which necessitates a way of eﬀectively ﬁltering applications. Northern European countries aremore ‘protected’ from irregular migration because of their geographical position and hence face mostly the problemof processing applications rather than that of ﬁltering them at their borders.The problem of irregular migration in southern European countriesFour EU countries have taken the brunt of irregular migration arrivals and asylum seeker applications in the past 15years: Spain, Italy, Malta and Greece. While Spain was a preferred route for irregular migrants from sub-SaharanAfrica in the mid-2000s, this western Mediterranean route is by now largely abandoned. Italy by contrast has beenregistering high numbers of arrivals of irregular migrants throughout the last ten years and ranks 12th in terms of itsshare of asylum seekers among the top ten receiving countries worldwide in the period 2008-2014.Lampedusa, Credit: Dorli Photography (CC-BY-SA-3.0)1/3In 2011, arrivals were related to the Arab spring: anestimated total of 25,000 Tunisians arrived at the island ofLampedusa in the ﬁrst two months of 2011. An additional20,000 sub-Saharan Africans arrived in the spring andsummer of 2011 in Lampedusa and Sicily, ﬂeeing the warand racial violence in Libya. Since 2013, though, therehas been a dramatic increase in the number of Syrianasylum seekers ﬂeeing war in the region, leading to ahuge upsurge in arrivals on Italian shores. The MareNostrum operation, run by the Italian government with theaim of intercepting migrant boats headed for Italy, savedover 150,000 asylum seekers and irregular migrants inthe period between October 2013 and October 2014.Greece also remains one of the main geographical pointsof entrance to the EU for Asian and African irregularmigrants and asylum claimants travelling through Africaor Asia to Turkey and then crossing into Europe. Apprehensions of irregular migrants (including potential asylumseekers) at the Greek Turkish land and sea borders nearly doubled in the period 2007-2010, before decreasing from2011-2013, only to pick up abruptly in late 2013, leading to over 72,000 apprehensions in 2014 (twice as manycompared to 2013).The three Mediterranean routes of irregular migration (and hence also of asylum seekers) function ascommunicating containers: when one route is stopped, another is under pressure. When this route is abandoned itis not because irregular migration and asylum seeking pressures overall fall but rather because the routes shift. Inthe late 2000s and early 2010s, the Greek Turkish land and sea corridor was heavily under pressure, and in the lastyear we have witnessed another dramatic change as irregular migrants and particularly asylum seekers seek tocross from Libya or Turkey to Italy.Loading asylum seekers or irregular migrants onto small dinghies, which in turn transfer them to cargo ships andthen push them toward Italian waters is the latest strategy uncovered by the coastguard, migration experts and themedia. The turbulent Middle Eastern context suggests that pressures for asylum seeking from the region andopportunities for smugglers to make money by ferrying people to southern EU shores will continue.Irregular migration and anti-establishment politics in Greece, Italy and SpainIn this diﬃcult international landscape, Greece, Italy and Spain are caught between a rock and a hard place: theyface an international migration and asylum seeking management crisis, and an internal migration crisis – as migrantworkers who are settled in the country face dramatic unemployment and increasing poverty often resulting in theirloss of legal migration status. However they also face an increasingly angry electorate, tired of years of austerity andlooking for a route towards economic growth and improvement of the social protection net (which was weak in theﬁrst place and has become nearly non-existent after ﬁve years of austerity).Greece has experienced its own neo-Nazi moment with the rise of Golden Dawn in the last ﬁve years. Gaining seatsfor the ﬁrst time in the municipal council of Athens in the 2010 election, Golden Dawn won 7 per cent in the 2012national elections, and 6.3 per cent in 2015. In the lead up to the 2015 elections, the left-wing protest vote wasnevertheless directed toward Syriza and other parties, including the centrist To Potami (The River), and theIndependent Greeks (ANEL), who eventually entered into a governing coalition with Syriza. For now, the momentumbehind Golden Dawn appears to have stalled.The populist Five Star Movement led by Beppe Grillo in Italy has also become deﬂated to some extent. After aspectacular success in the 2013 election, internal discord and the allegedly ‘authoritarian tendencies’ of the party’s2/3leader have led to disillusionment among some voters. In Spain, despite harsh austerity measures and dramaticallyhigh unemployment (like Greece) popular discontent has been channelled to new centre-left forces, chieﬂyPodemos, which more closely resembles Syriza than Grillo’s movement.The challenge perhaps remains whether these political parties can manage to successfully channel populardiscontent and citizen protest back into the political system, strengthening eﬀorts aimed at socio economic andpolitical reform rather than leading to anti-systemic populist or radical-right protest. Dealing with their triple crisis –increased migration and asylum pressures, rampant unemployment and de-regularisation of settled migrants, andincreasing poverty for citizens – southern European countries and their governments undoubtedly face tough timesahead. Part of the solution to their challenges lies, however, with Europe, as national migration/asylum managementand socio-economic reform are closely intertwined with EU policies in these areas.Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1MtNkJT _________________________________About the authorAnna Triandafyllidou – European University InstituteAnna Triandafyllidou is Professor at the Global Governance Programme of the Robert SchumanCentre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) at the European University Institute.3/3

Irregular migration is feeding into the growth of anti-establishment politics in southern Europe

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