Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The proposal yesterday from the European Commission regarding European border guards, which will be discussed at the European Council, is most serious. It represents an attempt to build even higher the walls of fortress Europe and to further militarise those walls. It places metaphorical and real barbed wire on them, provides for tower guards and for drones flying across the Mediterranean. In doing that, it eliminates the democratic rights of countries to determine and observe their own borders in favour of a centralised European force.

The parallel with the ongoing drive for fiscal union is striking. It is all about the fact a crisis has appeared that offers opportunities for the 1% in Europe and its clinical project of the capitalist integration of the European Union. The fiscal union uses the euro crisis to say we must drive ahead with this project, eliminating the rights of national governments to write their own budgets, etc. The refugee crisis is now being used to build higher the walls of fortress Europe and to centralise European border controls in a central European border force. That is the proposal from the Commission, but I am sure it will meet opposition at this stage, including at the European Council.

What we face is described in the Commission document as the establishment of a border guard of 1,500 people empowered to intervene rapidly within three days. It states:

[T]he Agency will in the first instance be empowered to recommend Member States launch joint operations or rapid border interventions.

Where deficiencies persist and national action is not forthcoming, the Commission will be able to adopt an implementing decision determining the situation at a particular section ... requires urgent action and entrusting the Agency with the task of carrying out appropriate operational measures. This will allow the Agency to intervene immediately in crises situations by deploying European Border ... Teams.

This means the right of member states to have their own border guards and coast guards is being overridden by the establishment, or the proposed establishment, of this force.

A third element of this proposal, and anybody who has followed the history of European migration policy will know what it means, is that it provides for an enhanced role for the agency as regards co-operation with third countries. This is about the externalisation of European borders. It is about another deal, like the deal done with Gaddafi providing huge amounts of money in order to keep migrants from Africa away from Europe. It means the Commission is going to try to buy off new dictators across the north of Africa and the Middle East so they become European border guards. Effectively, they are gong to outsource European border guards and externalise the European borders.

The consequence of this will be further abuses of the human rights of migrants. It means an extension of the kind of horrific scenes we are seeing in a number of countries in eastern Europe, with migrants treated horrifically as sub-human. It means an extension of that and effectively making it European policy. It means an increase of deaths in the Mediterranean. What is now called the cemetery of the Mediterranean will, unfortunately, see more drownings and we will see an increase of the figure of 30,000 of those who have died over the past 30 years trying to make their way to Europe if these measures to make European borders more effective are implemented. It also means an undermining of the democratic rights of states in favour of a centralisation of power in the European Union under the control of the European Commission. Europe must not go down the road of Donald Trump. The right of asylum must be defended. We must oppose racist immigration controls and must fight for a society in which people do not feel the need to travel all across to world to escape from war and poverty.

I will finish with a quote from The Guardianfrom playwright, Anders Lustgarten. He states:

In all the rage about migration, one thing is never discussed: what we do to cause it. ...

The single biggest thing we could do to stop migration is to abolish the development mafia: the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Investment Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

A very close second is to stop bombing the Middle East. The West destroyed the infrastructure of Libya without any clue as to what would replace it. What has [been left] is a vacuum state run by warlords that is now the center of Mediterranean people-smuggling. We're right behind the Sisi regime in Egypt that is eradicating the Arab Spring, cracking down on Muslims and privatizing infrastructure at a rate of knots.

I would add to that the disastrous rate of climate change, which is also fuelling the mass movement of people offered no choice.

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