The Refugee Crisis: A European Policy Failure.

Abstract

The outbreak of unprecedented number of people from Middle Eastern and African countries -fleeing from war, persecution, and unrelenting poverty-have been crossing borders into and within Europe, traversing the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the English Channel. This refugee crisis has created a vast range of spillover effects turning immigration, asylum, border control, and state sovereignty into interconnected problems, making migration not only a political event but also a media spectacle all over the world. The evolving context of this crisis continues to throw up new challenges for the European Union requiring robust systems and policies that can be adapted to meet them. Refugee protection efforts in Europe have continuously suffered from substantial collective efforts in the area of policy making due to the restrictive policy measures adopted by European region. Although the number of protection programs in European has increased in recent years, mal-integration and lack of consensus within the nations continue to grow within the region. The diverse agendas followed by the countries in the European region have in one way or the other influenced the refugee crisis at a larger scale, increasing the repercussions of the crisis. Thus, the response of the European nations has been quite lamentable. Hence, this paper examines how the refugee protection obligations of European countries have been affected by increasing lack of consensus in the European Union. The objective of this paper is to identify the discrepancies between European policies implemented on refugee crisis and it intends to find out possible means in building a successful European Refugee Policy. Further, this paper is conducted as a qualitative study with the use of secondary data under the refugee crisis and the European policies. In conclusion, this paper will discuss hurdles faced by the European region in drafting refugee protection policies, argue on the overburdening risks of the prevailing measures and aims to provide recommendations to the divided Europe to unify its’ policies.