Skip navigation
Europe’s migration impasse
Article

Europe’s migration impasse

GIS, 2017

auto-generated audio
auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Background

Recommendation

Worldwide in 2016, some 55 million refugees and another 60 million “forcibly displaced” migrants sought safety and respite. Quite understandably, wealthy countries such as European Union member states attract people looking for a better life. But as experts from Geopolitical Intelligence Services (GIS) point out, Europe has so far dealt with incoming refugee streams in a haphazard way, and it remains utterly unprepared to respond to future migration waves. This must change, the GIS experts agree: European leaders must both increase their countries’ ability to absorb migrants and help improve conditions in refugees’ countries of origin as part of a broader geopolitical strategy. 

Summary

Europe lacks a coherent strategy to deal with mass migration. In 2015, one million refugees, about half of them from Syria, reached Europe through Greece and Italy. By the summer of that year, Germany, under its “open arms policy,” hastily announced that it would admit all Syrian refugees on humanitarian grounds – but the government backpedaled a few months later by imposing border controls. In late September 2015, European Union (EU) member states agreed to take in 120,000 asylum seekers from Italy, Greece and Hungary over a two-year period. But by June 2017, the program had...

About the Author

Geopolitical Intelligence Services is a European research and consulting firm.