#EU border control

[munaeem]

Is it possible to contain the flow of illegal migrants into Southern Europe?

Managing the Flow of Migrants into Southern Europe: Exploring Preventative Measures In recent years, the issue of managing the influx of illegal migrants has become a pressing concern for Southern European countries. Scenes of chaos and strained resources witnessed elsewhere in the European Union and neighboring nations have underscored the importance of proactive measures to address this…

[thoughtlessarse]

Keir Starmer says he wants to learn from Italy’s ‘dramatic’ statistics. But a Guardian investigation reveals that EU money goes to officers who are involved in shocking abuse, leaving people to die in the desert and colluding with smugglers When she saw them, lined up at the road checkpoint, Marie sensed the situation might turn ugly. Four officers, each wearing the combat green of Tunisia’s national guard. They asked to look inside her bag. “There was nothing, just some clothes.” For weeks Marie had traversed the Sahara, travelling 3,000 miles from home. Now, minutes from her destination – the north coast of Africa – she feared she might not make it. An armed officer lunged towards her. Another grabbed her from behind, hoisting her into the air. By the road, on the outskirts of the Tunisian city of Sfax, the 22-year-old was sexually assaulted in broad daylight. “It was clear they were going to rape me,” says the Ivorian, her voice wobbling. Her screams saved her, alerting a group of passing Sudanese refugees. Her attackers retreated to a patrol car. Marie knows she was lucky. According to Yasmine, who set up a healthcare organisation in Sfax, hundreds of sub-Saharan migrant women have been raped by Tunisian security forces over the past 18 months. “We’ve had so many cases of violent rape and torture by the police,” she says. Marie, from the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, knows others who describe rape by Tunisia’s national guard. “We’re being raped in large numbers; they [the national guard] take everything from us.” After the attack, Marie headed to a makeshift camp in olive groves near El Amra, a town north of Sfax. Migration experts say that tens of thousands of sub-Saharan refugees and migrants, encircled by police, are now living here. Conditions are described as “horrific”. Humanitarian organisation, aid agencies, even the UN, are unable to access the camp.-What happened to Marie in May has relevance beyond her continent: her attackers belong to a police force directly funded by Europe.

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[head-post]

Slovenia prolongs border controls to June 2024

Slovenia decided to extend its border checks with Croatia and Hungary until June 22, 2024, against the background of “significant deterioration of security in the Middle East,” growing terrorist threat and violent conflicts across Africa.

The country first introduced temporary checks on October 21 under Article 28 of the Schengen Borders Code, then applied Article 25 of the code, which allowed police checks for six months. Any further extension would depend on the security situation in Slovenia and the wider region.

The Government stated that the level of terrorist risk remained elevated in Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe. The situation is perilous because a threat to one member of the Schengen area poses a threat to all other members.

Read more HERE

[trendynewsnow]

Dutch Government to Reinstate Border Checks Amid Rising Irregular Migration

Dutch Government Plans Increased Border Checks to Combat Irregular Migration On Monday, the Dutch government announced its intention to implement enhanced land border checks as a measure to address irregular migration. This decision follows a similar initiative undertaken by Germany in September, reflecting a growing trend among European nations to tighten immigration controls in response to…

[ironmanrecords]

Formal apology on behalf of the United Kingdom to the people of the European Union regarding Brexit and a gesture of hospitality

Dear People of the European Union, I am writing this letter for and on behalf of the United Kingdom to extend our heartfelt apologies for the impact of Brexit on the people of the European Union, and for the personal insult, distress and uncertainty it has caused. I didn’t vote for Brexit, I voted to remain and I have had to learn to respect and accept the outcome of the referendum and it’s…

[niveditaabaidya]

Wagner Military Group Control 80% Of Bakhmut. #bakhmut #wagner #ukraine ...

[mesetacadre]

Something I'd consider to be a big step in any communist's theoretical and practical development is the true adoption of class politics, as the main vehicle of your discourse. There is no shame in not having done this, and I'd wager almost any communist had a period of time between consciously adopting marxist politics and this "true adoption" I'm referring to. Some never take this step as well.

Especially if you were already into politics, rejecting the political discourse of bourgeois democracy and substituting it for class politics is something that takes conscious effort. Take immigration as an example, this is a relevant subject of debate in the EU. The two main positions in normal (read: bourgeois) debate is to either make legal immigration harder and murder more migrants, or to relax controls and allow easier legal integration into whichever country they're in. Your intuition as a newer communist is probably to side with the second position, and that's understandable. But a consistently class conscious position is to first understand that those two broad sets of policies (hardening or relaxing the borders) both serve different factions of the same capitalist class at the same time:

Immigration, particularly from global south countries sacked by Europe, serves to increase the reserve army of labor that exerts a downwards pressure on wages, especially from these immigrants whose precarious situations force them to take the harshest jobs for miserable pay. So these two alternating policies of opening or closing up the border (but never closing it) serve to control the size of this reserve army when it's convenient, and once they're in Europe, to utilize this mass of low-wage workers. This is what is at the crux of the bourgeois debate over immigration in Europe, it's just coated in different paints, one nationalistic and one more "humanitarian". And this is what informs the actually marxist position in this particular debate; the rejection of any and all instrumentilzation of our fellow workers for the benefit of the capitalist class. There is no immigration policy within a capitalist framework that does not utilize the cheap labor brought by immigration.

If our goal as communists is to guide the working class to power, then we should be consequent in this and not lose ourselves in debates about which policy the managers of capitalism should adopt, it's to educate workers in our actual positions and utilize these debates as a jumping off point. This is what differentiates communists and opportunists who use workerist rethoric

[probablyasocialecologist]

But while bombs rain down, business continues as usual, with Israel granting 12 licences to six companies to explore for natural gas off the country's Mediterranean coast on October 30th. This is the latest venture to exploit one of several gas fields discovered on the Mediterranean coast over recent decades, aiming to solve Israel’s energy dependency and, crucially, Europe’s supplies. The total oil and gas reserves were valued at a staggering $524 billion in 2019. But Israel does not have sole legal entitlement to the $524 billion, according to a UN report published in the same year. Not only is some of the $524 billion sourced from within the Occupied Territory of Palestine, much of the rest sits outside national borders in the deep sea, and thus should be shared with all relevant parties. The report questions the national right to these resources given they took millions of years to form—and that Palestinians occupied the whole territory until Israel’s recent formal creation. The authors also note it is another war crime for the occupying power to deny the citizens the right to use their own natural resources, including diverting Palestine’s water supply, cutting off access to their fisheries, grabbing agricultural land and destroying olive groves. The financial costs are massive. “To date, the real and opportunity costs of the occupation exclusively in the area of oil and natural gas have accumulated to tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars.”

[...]

Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008 brought the Palestinian gas fields under Israeli control—without regard for international law. The BG Group has been dealing with the Israeli government ever since. The UN estimates billions of dollars in loss for the Palestinian people. But more gas for everyone else.

[txttletale]

Hi! Do you think you could link me to some resources about the problems/ evils of the EU? Would love to find some but it's hard to know what's reliable when I have no base knowledge in this area + you seem very well informed :)

sure. let's start with what the EU does to its own member states--in 2009, the EU bailed the greek government out of severe debt on the condition that they establish brutal austerity measures, cutting public spending and welfare. these measures served to immiserate and destroy the lives of thousands of greek people:

Greek mortality has worsened significantly since the beginning of the century. In 2000, the death rate per 100,000 people was 944.5. By 2016, it had risen to 1174.9, with most of the increase taking place from 2010 onwards.

[forbes]

Since the implementation of the austerity programme, Greece has reduced its ratio of health-care expenditure to GDP to one of the lowest within the EU, with 50% less public hospital funding in 2015 than in 2009. This reduction has left hospitals with a deficit in basic supplies, while consumers are challenged by transient drug shortages.

[the lancet]

The homeless population is thought to have grown by 25 per cent since 2009, now numbering 20,000 people.

[oxfam]

the most brutal treatment, however, the EU of course reserves for migrants from the global south. the EU sets strict migration quotas and uses its member states as weapons against desperate people fleeing across the mediterranean. boats are prevented from landing, migrants that do make it to land are repelled with brutal violence, and refugees are deported back to countries where their lives are in lethal danger. these policies have led to many, many deaths--and the refugees and migrants who do survive are treating fucking inhumanely.

After a perilous journey across the desert, Abdulaziz was locked up in Triq al-Sikka, a grim prison in Tripoli, Libya. Why? Because the EU pays Libyan militias millions of euros to detain anyone deemed a possible migrant to Europe [...] A leaked EU internal memorandum in 2020 acknowledged that capturing migrants was now “a profitable business model” [...] in Triq al-Sikka and other detention centres, “acts of murder, enslavement, torture, rape and other inhumane acts are committed against migrants”, observed a damning UN report.

[the guardian]

Volunteers have logged more than 27,000 deaths by drowning since 1993, often hundreds at a time when large ships capsize. These account for nearly 80% of all the entries.

[the guardian]

Refugees and asylum seekers were punched, slapped, beaten with truncheons, weapons, sticks or branches, by police or border guards who often removed their ID tags or badges, the committee said in its annual report. People on the move were subject to pushbacks, expulsion from European states, either by land or sea, without having asylum claims heard. Victims were also subject to “inhuman and degrading treatment”, such as having bullets fired close to their bodies while they lay on the ground, being pushed into rivers, sometimes with hands tied, or being forced to walk barefoot or even naked across a border.

[the guardian]

In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.

[the guardian]

i could go on. i could cite dozens more similarly brutal news stories about horrific mistreatment, or any of the dozens of people who have killed themselves in the custody of border police under horrific conditions. the EU is a murderous institution that does not care about the lives of refugees and migrants or about the lives of the citizens of any member state that is not pursuing a vicious enough neoliberal political program

[munaeem]

What is Frontex? How this European is making efforts to secure EU border?

Frontex: Securing EU Borders In an era of changing geopolitical landscapes and increasing global migration, the need to secure Europe’s borders has become a pressing issue. This is where Frontex comes into play – an essential European agency that tirelessly works towards ensuring safety and protection within the EU. What is Frontex? Frontex, formally known as the European Border and Coast…

[thoughtlessarse]

Languages: Deutsch

Europe’s free-travel zone, otherwise known as the Schengen Area, is increasingly being punctured by border controls as many EU countries opt to tighten their internal borders. Signed in 1985 and coming into force in 1995, the Schengen Area is considered one of the bloc’s biggest benefits, allowing people to travel between member states without undergoing a single passport check. With 29 members, the latest round of expansion took place on 31 March with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria, limited to aerial and maritime border crossings. While the European Commission spokesperson was clear that border checks “must remain exceptional, strictly limited in time and a measure of last resort, if a serious threat to public policy or internal security has been established,” the enthusiasm of EU members for border controls, an anathema to the project, is increasing. A growing number no longer want to use border controls as the short-term, last-resort measure that Schengen originally intended them to be. What began as localised, long-term border controls in Bavaria has now expanded into a nationwide policy across Germany. The country, once a staunch advocate of open borders and a founding member of the Schengen Area, is increasingly tightening its national borders. […] Faced with a surge in border controls, Brussels has been at pains to convince EU countries to consider “possible alternatives”, like targeted police controls to address security concerns, “without resorting to the reintroduction of internal border controls,” they added. 

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“Targetted police controls,” means Black and brown people will be discriminated against, making such EU citizens second class.

[head-post]

Netherlands to introduce border controls as part of anti-migration drive

The Netherlands will become the latest EU country to step up strict border controls to reduce the number of immigrants, after France and Germany announced similar measures.

The border controls could come into effect at the end of next month, Dutch broadcaster RTL reported on Wednesday, citing government sources.

The border controls are part of broader anti-migration measures proposed by a Dutch coalition led by Geert Wilders’ PVV party. The measures also include limiting asylum permits to a maximum of three years and restricting the ability of asylum seekers who are allowed to stay to reunite with family members, RTL reported.

This comes after France announced last week that it would step up border checks from November, following a similar move by neighbouring Germany, which suspended the freedom of the passport-free Schengen Zone in September to crack down on illegal immigration.

The tough new border controls to be introduced in the Netherlands were already part of a coalition agreement reached by the parties in July, following Wilders’ stunning election victory almost a year ago. But it took months for the parties to reach a compromise on the way forward, as Wilders insisted on declaring a national asylum crisis, which would allow the government to bypass parliament.

However, such a move was opposed not only by the opposition parties but also by one of the PVV’s coalition partners, who questioned its necessity and even legality.

As a compromise, the new package will be voted on both in the Lower House, where the government has a majority, and in the Senate, where it is likely to receive enough support outside the coalition to pass.

Border controls introduced because of “serious threats to public policy”

Meanwhile, French authorities notified the European Commission last week that the country’s borders with six neighbouring Schengen members – Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and Switzerland – will be reinforced from November 1 for at least six months.

The controls will apply to travellers entering France by land, sea and air from all six countries and will expire on April 1, 2025, but authorities said they could be extended.

A French government statement said the checks were introduced because of “serious threats to public policy, public order and internal security caused by high-level terrorist activities … criminal networks facilitating irregular migration and smuggling, as well as migratory flows into which radicalised individuals can infiltrate.”

This is the first time France has introduced such controls since the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is possible that migrants and unauthorised travellers will be turned back at the border and suspected criminals will be detained.

Under the Schengen Agreement, 29 European countries have agreed to abolish internal border controls in order to achieve freedom of movement across the continent.

Twenty-five of the 27 EU member states are party to the agreement, along with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

However, the Schengen Borders Code allows member states to introduce temporary border checks “as a last resort” if the authorities believe there is a serious threat to public order or internal security.

Such temporary restrictions can last up to six months, which is why French authorities have given an end date of April 1, 2025 for the upcoming measures. However, such checks could be extended if threats are deemed to persist.

Read more HERE

[trendynewsnow]

Migration Dominates EU Leaders' Summit Agenda

Migration Takes Center Stage at EU Leaders’ Summit The upcoming summit of European Union leaders, set to commence on Thursday morning in Brussels, is poised to be dominated by discussions surrounding migration. A growing chorus of voices is advocating for the offshoring of asylum procedures and expedited deportations. This shift comes despite stern admonitions from non-governmental organizations…

[darkeagleruins]

Border czar Kamala Harris and members of Congress please take note of the latest developments in Europe .

Several EU countries are taking measures against the disastrous open borders agenda.

Sweden is paying $32,500 repatriation per migrant .

Hungary is in negotiations to send asylum seekers to Brussels .

Germany is closing their borders and implementing border controls.

The Netherlands is introducing emergency laws to curb migration.