It’s a common claim bandied about by far-right MEPs as the immigration debate grows ever more toxic. But do the figures match the rhetoric?
It may seem like a perennial concern, but the debate on immigration to the EU has heated up significantly in recent months.
Far-right politicians in France, Germany, Hungary and beyond have pointed to supposedly “unprecedented” migrant arrivals as a threat to European security and identity.
Berlin has brought in new border controls, Budapest has threatened to send busloads of migrants to Brussels to show the EU the apparent urgency of the issue, and Spain’s prime minister has hashed out agreements with African leaders to try and stem the flow of people.
Yet despite the rhetoric and various defensive measures, official figures show that in the first eight months of this year, unauthorised migration to the EU in fact dropped significantly.
According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, irregular crossings over the EU’s southern borders — which typically represent the bulk of this type of migration — were down by 35% from January to August.
Some 115,000 unauthorised migrants, representing less than 0.03% of the EU’s population, have come to the EU this year via the Mediterranean or Atlantic, down from 176,252 in the same period last year.
To put that in perspective, more than 1 million people entered the EU at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015.
The EU’s own data shows a similar trend. Frontex, the bloc’s border agency, says that unauthorised crossings from the south have fallen by 39% overall this year compared to 2023.
Migrants most commonly use the route from North Africa across the central Mediterranean to Italy, and about 64% fewer people used the route this year than in 2023.
Still, the figures for individual routes are not the same across the board.
The second-most used route is the eastern Mediterranean, with migrants arriving in Greece. Numbers here rose by 57% in the first eight months of year, with smuggling networks using speedboats and other aggressive methods to counter the coastguard.
This is also despite the EU’s purported success with the EU-Turkey statement, signed in 2016, which has supposedly stemmed the flow of irregular migrants from Turkey into the EU.
The Atlantic route from West Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands is the third-most-used route, and its use has more than doubled this year.
According to the UN, more than 25,500 migrants from the likes of Mali and Senegal landed there at the end of August.
Nevertheless, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has announced a raft of agreements with various West African nations to try and stem the tide, increase cooperation and combat human trafficking.
Sánchez assured that despite the rhetoric in Europe, migration itself isn’t a problem; as he sees it, it involves certain problems that need to be dealt with humanely.
