Europeans torn between locking borders and need for labor

Audio 7:30 p.m.

Migrants wait outside the new center in the village of Zervou on the island of Samos, Greece, September 20, 2021. (Illustrative image) © Michael Svarnias/AP

By: Léa-Lisa Westerhoff Follow

2 mins

The record arrival in 2015 of more than 1 million asylum seekers bound for Europe has greatly destabilized the continent.

Divided, the countries of Europe have since struggled to cooperate on asylum and immigration.

And the new Pact on migration adopted a little over a year ago by the European Commission has not changed the situation.

Example with Greece, this country considered as the main access to the European continent in 2015 seeks to get rid of this status of gateway by locking its borders.

Since the conservatives came to power in the summer of 2019, Greek migration policy has therefore continued to harden.

For asylum seekers and migrants, Greece is increasingly turning into a dead end.

Joel Bronner.

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Among the avenues explored by certain European countries, the outsourcing of asylum applications.

That is to say subcontracting to another country the reception of asylum seekers while waiting for their request to be examined.

Supported in general by the extreme right, in Denmark, and this is a first, it is a social-democratic government which has decided to put this idea into practice.

The explanations of

The figures all plead for a renewed partnership on migration and mobility.

Example: by 2050, Europe will have 95 million fewer workers, which will cause shortages in many sectors of the economy.

In catering, construction or IT, as in information and telecommunications technologies, needs are already being felt in Europe.

As a result, to overcome this lack of manpower, Lithuania has started to recruit on the African continent.

For two years, the small country of 3 million inhabitants, on the shores of the Baltic, has therefore developed a program to recruit in Nigeria, 200 million inhabitants and therefore as much potential for qualified labour.

The report by

Another small country in Northern Europe, has understood the potential represented by the African continent, Estonia, with more than one million inhabitants, has been developing important relations with Africa for several years.

In addition to the presence of a hundred Estonian soldiers within the Takuba force in Mali, players in the digital sector are present in many countries, through government projects.

The European Union, which was built on the idea of ​​living forever in peace, has seen this value abused in recent weeks.

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• Immigration

• Employment and Labor

• Greece

• Denmark

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• mali

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