New EU Pact on Migrants: What Does It Mean for Greece?

The EU reached an agreement on Wednesday on new rules designed to share the cost of hosting migrants more evenly between member states.

The New Pact on Migration and Asylum that will come into effect next year obliges member states to help countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain who have been at the forefront of migrant inflows over the last decade.

These countries will now expect other EU states to contribute either by accepting migrants or paying into an EU fund, whose proceeds will be mostly directed to the “front-line” states to help them deal with migrant arrivals.

Previous efforts to share the responsibility of hosting migrants have foundered because eastern EU members in particular were unwilling to take in people who had arrived in Greece, Italy, and other countries.

Migrant arrivals in the European Union are way down from the 2015 peak of more than one million but have steadily crept up from the 2020 low to 255,000 this year up to November. More than half crossed the Mediterranean from Africa to Italy or Malta.

Migrant arrivals in Greece drop in November

The latest figures published by the Greek migration ministry indicate a thirty-three percent decrease in the number of migrants arriving in Greece in November. A total of 4,584 migrants reached the country compared to 6,863 in October.

The ministry took this opportunity to praise its own “comprehensive and multi-level strategy” addressing “irregular migration and trafficking” that led to the drop in arrivals. It also described this as “remarkable if compared to the rise of the phenomenon observed elsewhere, such as in Italy, Croatia and also in Spain.”

“Greece has managed to have fewer arrivals than most EU member states in the southern outer perimeter of the Schengen zone, managed them efficiently and safely for asylum seekers and local communities, within organized structures, unlike what happens in other countries,” the Greek migration ministry added.

Other provisions of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum

The New Pact on Migration and Asylum includes screening irregular migrants when they arrive in the European Union, procedures for handling asylum applications, rules on determining which EU country is responsible for handling applications, and ways to handle crises.

The screening system envisaged will seek to distinguish between those in need of international protection and those who are not.

People whose asylum applications have a low chance of success, such as those from India, Tunisia, or Turkey, can be prevented from entering the EU and detained at the border, as can people seen as representing a threat to security.