European Parliament, Brussels, 13 July, 2016
There was no apparent post-Brexit decline of high-level interest in an event LSE hosted on Migration: maintaining hospitality at the European Parliament in Brussels last week.
A group of 50 senior Commission officials, MEPs, NGO activists as well as experts and politicians from across Europe talked about how to ensure that European citizens remained hospitable to immigrants. The event was part of the LSE IGA Migration Initiative, on which Peter Sutherland is a Professor of Practice. Sutherland, who is also the UN Special Representative for Migration, and a former EU Commissioner spoke passionately about the foundations of the European Union and the moral principles of solidarity and the integration of peoples of a continent that had been divided by war and inhumanity. If we undermine these principles, the EU itself is undermined, he said. European countries all needed to play their part in taking in people fleeing conflict. At present there were 21 member states who had accepted fewer refugees than the Pope had taken home with him from Greece on his plane.
Dominik Hangartner discussed his latest research on the effect of different asylum administrative processes on the eventual integration of immigrants into their new societies.
Olivier Onidi, The Commission’s new Deputy Director General for Migration and Asylum said that if we have a crisis it is not a migration crisis, but a crisis of political leadership. Migration was a fact of life in the 21st Century, and something we need to modernise our political and legal framework to take into account. We need to rebuild trust in the asylum system, both trust of those who risk their lives to come to Europe who need to be treated fairly with dignity and respect. But also rebuild trust of our own populations in the system, who are sometimes losing faith, because of the lack of leadership and coordination, but also because some people are using immigration to spread fear so as to further their own political interests.
The discussion was moderated by Claude Moraes MEP, who chairs the Civil Liberties Committee in the European Parliament and is an LSE alumnus. There was some lively exchange of views on the security of Europe’s external borders, but there seemed to be consensus that it would be impossible to address illegal immigration without at the same time creating a proper legal channel.
LSE is planning a programme of events in Brussels to boost faculty engagement with policy debates and the impact of research output. Migration is one of the key themes, and further events are in the pipeline.