Europe has certainly adopted more fortress-like controls against would-be refugees. A concomitant rise in anti-immigrant political parties has in turn fueled popular resentment towards EU institutions.
But the debate requires much more than "moral appeals."
A recent study entitled 'Building Walls' puts the growth of EU internal and external border barriers into stark perspective. In the 1990s, there were two border walls. Now the number has grown to a total of 17, with most of the structures built over the past three years.
Ten countries out of 28 EU member states have built physical barriers to control migrants entering from outside the bloc. They include Austria, Spain, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Greece, Slovenia and Latvia.
The authors of the above report call the structures "edifices of fear" and make the startling comparison to the Berlin Wall that separated East and West Germany until its dismantlement in 1989. EU states have built border barriers equivalent to the length of six Berlin Walls.
The report also reproaches the proliferation of "mental walls" across EU member states with the rise of what it calls "far-right" and "racist" political parties. There are now, it is claimed, 10 EU states in which "xenophobic" parties have significant government or parliamentary representation.
However, the problem with a report like this is that it provides no practical solutions to the immense political and social challenges stemming from phenomenal migration. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees estimates that a record number of 68.5 million people worldwide are forcibly on the move from their origins, many of them trying to reach Europe.
We can perhaps agree that in recent years that the EU has faced an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers and would-be refugees. That, in turn, has engendered political and social tensions, as well as anti-immigrant parties and anti-EU popular sentiments.
The authors of 'Building Walls,' however, largely base their appeal on moral arguments in favor of accepting migrants in the context of human rights. They call on EU governments to reject "racist discourse of the extreme right" and "to reverse the policies that lead us to walling ourselves in and defending a fortress in which the privileged and secure live."
That recommendation reveals an abject naivety. Millions of EU citizens would not consider themselves "privileged and secure," as the authors claim.
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