Page 124 - Rassegna 2020-1

OSSERVATORIO INTERNAZIONALE

The reality of contemporary threats and push-factors (protracted armed
conflicts, organized armed groups, terrorism, transnational organized crime,
etc.) has blurred the clear-cut theoretical difference between who needs tempo-
rary protection and who searches for a life-long better future. This is one of
the main reasons why the EU response to migration and asylum has been sub-
stantially ineffective in the last years. Legal regimes fail because temporary sta-
tus is no longer fit for irregular flows in a globalized world. The logic and the
legal framework of international protection is increasingly unsuitable for the
needs of third-country nationals. The law in books has been surpassed by the
reality “out there” that it is now very different from the old one that was regu-
lated by international and EU rules on asylum and migration. These legal regi-
mes have proven ineffective because they could not reconcile two opposite fee-
lings of those illegally arriving in Europe: the fear of the push-factor they leave
behind (armed conflicts, persecutions, human rights violations, violence, social
and economic hardship, poverty) and the hope for the life to come, for a better
future elsewhere. And most of the time living a better future is at odds with
coming back home sooner or later.
Once the legal dichotomy was between being temporary protected (if an
asylum-seeker) or being returned home (if a migrant). In a globalized world
where everyone illegally arriving in Europe is at the same time both an asylum-
seeker and a migrant, that clear-cut dichotomy is no longer identifiable. Europe
is therefore faced with a new, different dilemma: should we host foreign natio-
nals forever and integrate them in our society or should we close our borders
and isolate ourselves from the wider world? Whatever the answer, the EU will
be called upon to thoroughly revise its policies and the overall legal framework
on asylum and migration.

4. Some clues suggest how the EU might answer to the question. In the
last years the EU legal landscape has changed. The Dublin Regulation have not
stood the pressure of unprecedent and extraordinary humanitarian and migra-
tory flows(3). Its country-of-first-entry criterion turned into a discriminatory
measure placing excessive burden on front line States like Italy and Greece.
Further, the Dublin Regulation lacks appropriate solidarity measures to cope
with situations of huge migratory pressure because it was thought and drafted
for a different and vanishing world with hard and watertight borders. Solidarity
among the EU Member States - a central issue in present European policy
debate - was not (again) a landmark issue at the time. The lack of solidarity
explains the novelty of the temporary relocation mechanism set up in the 2015-
2017 biennium which derogated the Dublin Regulation in the name of stronger

122