EU fears Iran war will put new migration rules to the test 

BRUSSELS — The EU is braced for a wave of refugees fleeing the war in Iran, according to four national migration ministers, and is hoping that the rules it spent a decade working on will be up to the challenge.

More than a million people sought asylum in Europe in 2015, many of them fleeing civil war in Syria, and Europe’s scramble to respond to it exposed deep divisions in the bloc. In its wake, the EU spent years in tough negotiations on reforming its migration policy by allowing migrants to be dispersed more evenly among countries and accelerating deportations of failed asylum-seekers.

Just weeks before those rules come into force, the escalating violence in the Middle East has raised the possibility of an early stress test. 

The EU “cannot overlook the possibility of a new refugee crisis,” said Nicholas Ioannides, deputy migration minister of Cyprus, the EU country that’s closest to the Middle East.

Such a crisis “might test [the] effectiveness of the bloc’s new rules, and that’s something we need to be prepared for,” he warned. Cyprus currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

The violence in the Middle East shows no sign of slowing, two weeks after U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began, with Tehran launching its own attacks in the region, including on the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and Israel saying it would expand its attacks in Lebanon.

The EU “cannot overlook the possibility of a new refugee crisis,” said Nicholas Ioannides, deputy migration minister of Cyprus, the EU country that’s closest to the Middle East. | Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images

In addition to the hundreds of people who have been killed, hundreds of thousands have been forced out of their homes, with IOM’s Regional Director for the Middle East Othman Belbeisi saying Thursday that Lebanon is now nearing one million displaced people.

For the time being, there’s no sign of large numbers of people fleeing to Europe to escape the violence, according to the U.N. migration agency (IOM) — but in a region long battered by conflicts, the seeds for a large-scale displacement are there, with some 19 million displaced people in the Middle East before the war even began.

In a report written before the war, the EU’s agency for asylum warned that in Iran, a country of 90 million, “even partial destabilization could generate refugee movements of an unprecedented magnitude.”

“We will see how things turn out if [the EU’s migration policy] comes under pressure again,” Dutch Migration Minister Bart van den Brink, who only took up his role last month, told POLITICO on the sidelines of a meeting of migration ministers in Brussels last week. 

Van den Brink was optimistic, however, saying that “there has been much more solidarity and relaxation in the relationship between different member states” since the EU agreed on the migration pact and that “the willingness to cooperate is also far greater” now that migration is so high on the political agenda.

The Migration and Asylum Pact, the product of years of negotiations between national governments, is due to be implemented on June 12 and will introduce stricter procedures to process asylum applications at the border, special measures for crisis situations, and a mechanism to support countries that receive the bulk of migrants by providing financial aid or by accepting relocations. 

“We will see how things turn out if [the EU’s migration policy] comes under pressure again,” Dutch Migration Minister Bart van den Brink told POLITICO last week. | John Beckmann/DeFodi Images/DeFodi via Getty Images

The new measures show the EU has “come a long way since 2015, when the refugee crisis erupted,” Cyprus’s Ioannides said.

Wir schaffen das

The desire to come up with new migration rules was spurred by the events of 2015, when an estimated one million people sought asylum in Europe, half of them fleeing Syria. Europe’s response tested the EU’s unity, as countries criticized the way Greece, which received the vast majority of the refugees, was handling the crisis; reinstated border controls to stop refugees from traveling onward within the bloc; and dragged their feet over an emergency relocation plan.

The European Commission’s response was to step up collaboration with Turkey, with Ankara agreeing to take back Syrian migrants who reach Greece illegally in return for financial support and the relocation in Europe of Syrian refugees in Turkey. The bloc would go on to agree migration deals with countries, including Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon.

But it would take the EU years to find an agreement that bridged the positions of border countries, which demanded more support in handling asylum seekers, and inland countries, which said too many people were arriving and moving around Europe without permission or oversight.

As far-right anti-migration parties amassed support in the wake of the crisis, centrist parties in EU countries increasingly embraced a tougher approach to migration. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement in 2015 that Europe would be able to manage the influx of refugees — “Wir schaffen das” — is regularly brought up as evidence of Europe’s missteps.

Spain, which recently announced plans to regularize 500,000 undocumented migrants, appeared to stand by Merkel’s approach at the time. 

“In 2015, we were able to face an important movement of refugees coming from Syria,” Home Affairs Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told POLITICO. “So if it’s necessary, it’s not going to be any kind of problem to receive refugees coming from the East.” 

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement in 2015 that Europe would be able to manage the influx of refugees is regularly brought up as evidence of Europe’s missteps. | Thomas Kienzle/AFP via Getty Images

Other ministers, however, treated 2015 as a cautionary tale. “A new refugee crisis … is not an option for us,” Sweden’s Migration Minister Johan Forssel said.

Forssel argued that “we are still seeing the consequences of what happened 10 years ago. And that’s not just the situation in Sweden, but I would say elsewhere in Europe too.” 

A drop in the ocean

The “status quo … is not an option,” the Commission said after the 2015 influx, as it sought to shepherd new migration rules. Agreement on the new migration pact was finally found in 2023 and will be applied from June. Additional rules that will allow countries to detain and deport failed asylum seekers to a country with which the person doesn’t have ties, and which have led to an outcry from NGOs, are still under negotiation.

“The rules took a long [time] to reform because the EU needed to fill up a vacuum of trust with legislation,” said Alberto Horst Neidhardt, head of the European Policy Centre’s migration program. “Today, that trust remains very fragile.” 

The new rules, which are meant to promote solidarity, “would be a drop in the ocean if we were to witness mass displacement,” Neidhardt said, adding that crisis provisions would not prevent countries from resorting to border closures if there was mass migration into Europe, putting the EU’s asylum system, and also its free-travel Schengen zone and even EU integration as a whole, at risk.

He argued that, whether over “genuine concern about the humanitarian situation in the region” or over fears about its impact on Europe, the EU’s best bet is to support efforts to stabilize and offer protection in the Middle East.