The head of Frontex, the EU’s border and coastguard agency, has said he doesn’t think it is really possible or desirable to keep migrants out of Europe. The Spectator‘s Lionel Shriver says this confirms her theory on why political elites constantly fail so utterly at controlling immigration, despite it being the downfall of governments across Europe: it’s due to a combination of ineptitude (they don’t know how) and what Shriver calls “pathological niceness”. Here’s an excerpt.
“To put it bluntly,” the Dutchman Hans Leijtens told an interviewer from Germany’s Die Welt, “nothing can stop people from crossing a border, no wall, no fence, no sea, no river. Sometimes it’s pretended that you can just put a lid on top of the bottle, and then the migration stops. But that’s a misconception.”
To paraphrase, the man since last spring in charge of securing Europe’s borders – the porousness of which has a direct knock-on effect on Britain’s small-boats problem – does not believe in the possibility of securing any border. It’s not hard to infer from that quote that our friend Hans does not believe it is possible to prevent so much as a single gatecrasher from entering the EU, or from entering any country, for that matter. Yet this is his job.
It’s as if you have just hired a fry cook to flip burgers, and though your new employee proves happy to accept a salary, he promptly declares that he will not be flipping any burgers because he does not believe there’s such a thing as a hamburger.
I regard that interview as one vote for fecklessness. Hans cheerfully throws up his hands. There’s nothing to be done. We can’t keep anybody out. We don’t know how. I imagine Hans must greatly enjoy his work, providing as it does so much leisure time.
Yet further on, the festively feeble Frontex exec tips his hand. “Who am I to condemn migrants?” he declares. “This talk of ‘stopping people’ and ‘closing borders’ can’t be our narrative all the time. My job is to strike a balance between effective border management and respect for fundamental rights.” Presumably, fundamental rights such as the inherent prerogative of everyone from everywhere in the world to live in your country because they don’t like theirs. Helpless Hans wants to address the whole European migration debate with “increased humanity, less fear of the unknown, less prejudice”.
“In other words,” says Shriver, “the head of Frontex has a vested interest in his absolute incapacity to keep anyone out of Europe because he doesn’t especially want to keep anyone out of Europe.”
Worth reading in full.
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