But I think there will be an interesting twist - aging of the population. This feels like an abstract problem, but it will become very real.
As an European, I agree. At the very least, I think that we have the right to protect our borders.
However, this is not an isolated thing that can be morally decided independently of the rest of our foreign policy. We have provoked and participated in many wars in neighboring countries to defend our "economic interests". We are supporting authoritarian dictatorships in Africa so that European enterprises exploiting their natural resources have an easier job. Heck, when a neighboring country (Libya) threatened a bit our cheap oil supply (that is, our supply of their oil) we got all angry and violent and provoked a war there to change the regime.
Most of the immigrants in question come from countries that we have messed with. We certainly have the right to close our borders to them, but to do so we must first stop destroying and exploiting their countries.
"We"? How many of those wars were started by popular demand, with protests on the streets demanding our leaders take military action? "We" are being blamed for the actions of oil and weapons lobbyists (whose wars are paid by our taxes), and then asked to face the consequences of the actions due to their subversion of democracy.
We pay for the wars we don't want, we get the blame, we get to deal with the immigrants, and in the end, we still have to pay for the oil - the oil companies that benefit (always unnamed) don't hand it out for free!
I understand the evil ways of our leaders... However, I cannot face a person whose town has been bombed to oblivion by my purportedly elected officials, and tell him that I'm a "victim of the system" just like him.
As for "protests on the streets", I've certainly participated in most of the anti-war protests that have happened around me. Problem is that my neighbours consistently keep voting for our ever murderous leadership!
Simple solution: don’t vote for people who start wars? The EU claims to be one of the most democratic entities. Why do people complain they’re being screwed by some minority group?
The point is that you are not allowed to vote against war anymore. It is demonstrably not possible to vote a different Commander-in-Chief in and end the war. Republicans tried that.
We are also not in Syria because of climate change. We are there because they are a geopolitical adversary of Israel.
Either the root causes get fixed or things start breaking, badly.
In addition, there are many "soft" measures. Cooperation with countries like Lybia and Turkey. Help to alleviate the problems they are running from. Announce that anyone who crosses illegaly will not receive an asylum. Etc.
(Though that's only half the problem, and when you get xenophobia even against French in Quebec you see it's complicated)
That ship has sailed for many countries.
Both Hungary and Poland have shown that a modern state can largely prevent illegal crossing of its borders. We have the technology. It's not that difficult. Even easier when you have a sea acting as a barrier.
When the migration happens on a massive scale regardless, it's usually with tacit or explicit establishment's approval.
Consider human rights. The ECJ loves to overrule government decisions on migration/asylum on the grounds of human rights, they do it all the time. The inability to deport Islamic "hate preachers" was one of the contributing factors in the Brexit campaign, in fact. Yet the moment Austria placed a large fraction of its own population under indefinite house arrest without trial, in violation of the Nurenberg Code no less, the EU was mysteriously silent.
Or how about the rule of law. When eastern European countries were electing conservative politicians the EU couldn't shut up about how the "rule of law" was being violated, though they never quite explained how. Then Latvia's parliament banned unvaccinated MPs from voting, violating the most basic rule a democracy has and at a stroke disenfranchising whole chunks of their population. Once again, the EU couldn't find anything to say about this.
I rest this case with a few quotes from Jean-Claude Juncker, former head of the EU Commission. He said these things whilst running the EU's most powerful body:
"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
"When the going gets tough, you have to lie."
"I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates"
"I believe neither the French nor the Dutch really rejected the constitutional treaty." (they did, of course)
In the end the, the EU does have values but those values are not the sort of values they're willing to publicly advertise.
Keeping an airtight border is a very expensive task. You can probably be harder to get into than the next country, but in the context of the EU, that's not really a solution, it's just a way to make the problem worse.
Asylum is not a "free migration card" as some NGOs or some people purport it to be. You don't get it just because you were born in a poor country.
And as much as some maybe, sheltered (or just idealistic) think borders shouldn't exist, no, they're there for a reason.
And the more asylum gets abused the more it will be harder to get.
One problem is that if asylum is refused, very few are forcibly repatriated. Most just ending up living in the EU illegally.
The problem isn't political instability or war. Both things have existed in the past, even within Europe, and there has been no migrant crisis. European nations have always taken huge numbers of asylum seekers, the doors are still open but it has to happen legally and in a controlled way...Europe is a democracy after all. And be clear, there are lots of economic migrants too...some from Sudan, some from Syria but the majority are economic migrants (I am in the UK, admittedly the stuff you see here is particularly extreme but you have asylum seekers taking over LGBT support groups or getting confirmed so they don't get sent back...it is crazy). That is why the article talks about climate change a lot (nutty right-wingers were saying this would be the justification years ago...funny how things work out, it is now apparently an argument made by very serious people...it is bizarre because Africa has one of the greatest endowments of arable land anywhere, so why these people are seeking to move to a region with less arable land and no route for migrants to acquire land is...beyond me)...although I am not sure what someone seeing his brother making money in Spain has to do with climate change, Elon Musk is making tons of money in the US so can I claim asylum there?
Right now, you have activist groups assisting human traffickers, we have no idea who is coming here or why, we have people who are suffering in our own countries (youth unemployment is often lower in the places these people are coming from)...the only solution is to do what governments are doing. Be totally clear too, the only people who differ on this point are people who believe that borders should not exist. That is fine, but this minority view should not be imposed on the public through undemocratic means (the amount of money here is huge: human traffickers are making hundreds of thousands per day, activist groups are collecting wheelbarrows of cash from donors...a lot of people are getting very rich, very fast).
This isn't something that the public is going to yield on. In the UK, an asylum seeker who was cosplaying as a Christian killed an MP. Sweden, bombings through the roof, shooting through the roof. France, attacks on churches and priests constantly. There is a reason why this is happening...these people are not legitimate asylum seekers, there are no controls, they are here to take and not contribute (and btw, both sides of my family were migrants, I know asylum seekers that came to the UK from Uganda, I have friends who are coming here from HK now...the mentality in some parts of the UK is already totally different to the groups that we welcomed in the past, the UK is still tolerant but look at Europe...you are seeing that this is creating real opposition to all forms of migration, it is very worrying, it is having the opposite effect that the "open borders" crowd think, they are creating the thing they say they are fighting).
We have a union that claims to be be committed to human rights such as the right to seek asylum. That union recently experienced serious political unrest after receiving a bit over a million migrants around 2015 and clearly the political leadership decided that could not happen again. So the problem was offshored to Turkey, and to some extent Greece, and I'm sure to some North African nations in deals I'm not aware of.
This is going to be horrific, frankly. Whatever you think of the ethics of the whole business, it's pretty clear that politically, EU leadership is not willing to face another migrant crisis. Unfortunately, the EU also doesn't seem able to do a whole lot about the root causes of the crisis, namely political instability and war south of the EU borders. So what that leaves is the EU turning a blind eye to the problem, trying to get the authoritarian states on our borders to deal with the problem in a deniable fashion instead.
It's not going to work in the long run. People move across borders when they need to. Where it's all going, I don't know, but it's going to be a big, big problem for the EU if the conflicts in the Middle East and Africa can not be stabilized.