Emmanuel Macron shies away from confronting the migrant crisis

On the Sunday that Britain honoured its war dead, France remembered its fallen from the terrible evening of 13 November, 2015. One hundred and thirty Parisians were massacred at various venues across the capital. A subsequent investigation revealed that two of the Islamist terror cell had entered Europe from the Middle East by blending in among migrants.

A year after the Paris atrocity, Monika Hohlmeier MEP, the European Parliament's chief negotiator on a new European terrorism law, outlined the EU’s determination to keep its citizens safe from future attacks. Hohlmeier placed particular emphasis on tightening the 'great deficiencies that became visible at the EU's external borders over the last months'. Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, were given greater resources, notably an increase in their budget from €143m (£123m) in 2015 to €322m (£280m) by 2020. This has had little effect.   

At the start of this year, Geopolitical Intelligence Services warned that Frontex is being overwhelmed by a growing migrant crisis. GIS posed the question as to whether Frontex’s remit should be extended beyond the Schengen borders into North Africa and the Middle East. If it wasn’t, and if Europe’s leaders continued to prevaricate, it warned that the question of uncontrolled immigration could 'turn into a guillotine over the head of a short-sighted political class'. 

This is particularly true in France, where Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly shied away from confronting the migrant crisis.  

Earlier this month, his government allowed an NGO vessel, Ocean Viking, to dock in Toulon with 234 migrants on board. Italy, which had accepted three other such ships from North Africa in the previous days, refused to allow a fourth to berth so the French stepped in.  

France’s benevolence was denounced by Marine Le Pen and, more significantly, by Gérard Collomb, who served as Macron’s first minister of the interior from 2017 until his resignation the following year. Collomb warned Macron that, in accepting the Ocean Viking, he had set a dangerous precedent. 'If we take in one, are the others not welcome?' said Collomb, who expressed his fear that Macron had played into the hands of Le Pen. 

Collomb, who defected to Macron in 2017 from the Socialist party, also made the explosive claim that he’d resigned from government because he could not support the president’s plan to create ‘controlled’ reception centres for migrants arriving from Africa. In Collomb’s opinion, these ‘hotspots’ would have only encouraged migration and, he suggested, increase the possibility of another terror attack on French soil.  

The arrival of the Ocean Viking in France has indeed provided Le Pen with plenty of political capital, particularly in light of what has transpired in recent days, what she described at the weekend as a ‘humiliation’ for the Republic.  

Gérald Darmanin, the minister of the interior, had promised the National Assembly last week that the migrants who arrived on the ship – mainly Eritreans, Bangladeshis and Moroccans (although only 25 of the 234 migrants were in possession of a passport) – would either be deported to their country of origin or distributed among other European countries.  

It has since been revealed that 26 of the 44 minors taken into care fled before the French authorities could evaluate their status. The majority of the adult migrants have been released because there was not the means to process their claims within the required legal time frame. 'The Toulon court was suddenly submerged by around 180 cases,' explained the president of the region’s Bar, Sophie Caïs. 'It's a real fiasco, as these deadlines are not adapted to such an influx of requests.' 

France blames Italy for the debacle, accusing Giorgia Meloni’s government of ‘dirty tricks’, but she has dismissed the criticism as ‘unjustified’.  

The upshot of the latest crisis is an extraordinary meeting of the Home Affairs council in Brussels this Friday. It is improbable that anything will emerge from the summit other than more empty rhetoric, and perhaps another increase in Frontex’s budget. This had little effect last time, why should things be different now?

Since the Paris massacre of 2015 there have been two other shocking Islamist attacks in France directly attributable to men who had recently travelled to the country. In September 2020, a 25-year-old Pakistani attacked two Parisians with a meat cleaver in the mistaken belief they were employed by Charlie Hebdo. It was subsequently reported that he had entered Europe in 2018 claiming to be a 16-year-old in order to benefit from social aid. A month later, a Tunisian man came to France via the island of Lampedusa with the express intention of killing Christians: he murdered three worshippers in a Nice church. 

Might the victims still be alive had Europe had the resolve to act on a threat analysis report published by Frontex in April 2016? 'The Paris attacks in November 2015 clearly demonstrated that irregular mi­gratory flows could be used by terrorists to enter the EU,' stated the 72-page report, detailing the route used by two of the Paris attackers. 

Frontex highlighted the continued vulnerability of Europe’s borders, and the possibility of further attacks if more effective procedures weren’t put in place. 'False declarations of nationality are rife among nationals who are unlikely to obtain asylum in the EU,' said Frontex. 'With no thorough check or penalties in place for those mak­ing such false declarations, there is a risk that some persons representing a secu­rity threat to the EU may be taking ad­vantage of this situation.'

Nothing has been done, and migrants from across Africa and the Middle East continue to arrive in Europe; 90,000 into Italy alone this year and many more through Serbia into Hungary. As was the case on board the Ocean Viking, few of the new arrivals carry documentation. Many of those coming to Europe are doing so to seek a better life; but there seems little doubt that the chaos of the migrant routes into Europe could be easily exploited by those with malign intent.