The range of measures will include: initiatives to develop better cooperation with refugee source countries, most notably with North African states; reinforce Frontex, increase surveillance of the Turkish-Greek border, and improve the management of migratory flows as well as more efficient procedures for deportations and to combat human trafficking.

The proposals have come at time when illegal immigration is the cause of growing concern in Denmark. However the newspaper also notes –

… according to the Ministry of Justice, we do not know how many illegal immigrants there are in Denmark. However, there is some justification for the worry that the large number of immigrants who are currently in Greece and Italy may decide to move north.

The measures are also justified for practical reasons, argues Marlène Wind of Copenhagen University, who is quoted by the daily –

Problems linked to illegal immigration are a threat to the single market and the European spirit of free movement. For this reason, it will also be a victory for the Danish Presidency to have the project implemented.

According to the Court, the Italian "push-back" policy in operation since 2009 violates international law because it deals with migrants collectively and denies them the right to appeal in Italian courts. Roberto Maroni, the Northern League interior minister at that time, has criticised the sentence as "political", while PM Mario Monti has stated that the government will study the ruling. But Il Manifesto is sceptical –

Deals with the new Libyan government point in the same direction as those cut with Gaddafi. To change this would require a thorough legislative overhaul and a new information policy. On reading online comments about the sentence, one realizes that Europe is now seen as a threat to our national integrity. This is the product of two decades of xenophobia and institutional hostility towards immigrants.

The Berlin daily notes that many of the shipwrecks in the Mediterranean “are not front-page news,” and illustrates its article with the photograph of a boat that sank off the coast of a Tunisian island with 700 Libyan refugees on board in June 2011.

Having enumerated a list of “the worst maritime catastrophes in the Mediterranean since 2006,” the Berlin alternative daily remarks:

Hundreds of thousands of people end up as anonymous corpses on the high seas or washed up on rocky beaches. Tens of thousands of refugees fall into the hands of the mafia in a crisis stricken Europe that has no room or humanity for them. [...] The dead are among us, whether from a luxury cruise ship or a trawler.

The migration bubble that grew during the last decade of [economic] splendour has suddenly burst, becoming a wave that has triggered a massive exodus of some half a million citizens.

According to a report released on 16 January by the National Statistics Institute (INE), net migration is negative (-50,090) for the first time in ten years, with  62,611 nationals and 445,130 non-nationals leaving in 2011. The main destinations for migrants are Morocco, Ecuador and Bolivia, followed by Brazil, France, Argentina, Germany, the United Kingdom and China.

The conservative daily blames part of Spain’s population decline to a declining birthrate, at 1.4 children per woman -

2011 was also the year that for the first time saw the average age for having a first child go over the barrier of 31.

The Institute’s economists argue that:

… the interaction between migrant inflows and GDP emerges as positive, indicating that during periods of lower growth, migrant inflows are associated with ... slower [dole] claimant growth than would otherwise have occurred.

Over in Italy, employment is on the rise again after a 3 year fall triggered by the economic crisis, notes La Stampa. Latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) reports that jobs held by Italian citizens grew by 39,000 in the third quarter of 2011. Employment among immigrant workers, whose number has been steadily rising in recent years, continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace, up 120,000 jobs compared to 167,000 in the Q2 2011. Is it a positive signal of a progressive recovery from the crisis?”, asks sociologist Luca Ricolfi on the Turin daily –

I fear the answer is no. […] Something new is happening: after years of crisis, Italians are realising that they can no longer afford to retire early, to accept top level jobs only and hold out for better times. We are not yet seeing direct competition, but [employers] are reacting to the crisis by reducing the demand for foreign labour and [employees] not abandoning the jobs they hold. […] The apparently unstoppable rise in foreign employment now seems bound to slow down, if not to cease.

But the crisis is also prompting a growing number of Italian unemployed to give up looking for work, notes Corriere della Sera, quoting data from Eurostat’s Underemployed and Potentially Active Labour Force statistics. 2.7 million Italians, the highest in the EU, out of a total of 8.2 million, are available for work but not seeking it. The only countries where pessimism over employment prospects is still relatively low are Germany, France and Belgium.

“We can now regard the myth of the temporary nature of post-accession Polish emigration as refuted. The last census has confirmed that we are dealing with the biggest population loss in postwar history”, notes Krystyna Iglicka, a demographer at Warsaw’s Centre for International Relations.

According to the Catholic weekly, this means that Poland’s migration policy and campaigns encouraging emigrants to return have totally failed. “We are dealing with population and workforce drain and in twenty years’ time we’re going to be the EU’s oldest society, which mass emigration will make a major contribution to”, laments Iglicka.

The court's verdict, which referred to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, has undermined Dublin II. Noting that in 2010 90% of illegal immigrants entered the EU via Greece, the judges took the view that “Greek authorities are not capable of managing the flow of refugees.” They further pointed out that the UK and Ireland must be aware of the risks in Greece, where refugees find themselves in an unbearable situation and have to contend with interminable delays in the processing of their applications, and should not deport them to the country.

In the wake of the judgement, from now on the state where refugees are located when detained by authorities will have to process their applications, explains TAZ, which notes that Germany is not ready to accept "a general change to the Dublin system."

On 2 December the European Commissioner for Internal Affairs suggested that this right be granted only in emergencies and for a period of five days at most. Currently, states can re-impose border controls for 30 days in the event of a threat to their internal security.

According to diplomatic sources cited by the German daily, the other members of the Schengen area, with the exception of the Czech Republic, Italy and Lithuania, reject the idea of asking permission from Brussels to restore internal border controls. On the contrary, they demand more freedom in this area, particularly in the face of the influx of migrants, and want countries to have the ability to force their partners to restore controls.

According to an expert on immigration quoted by a German newspaper, such a move would be “a challenge to European integration”.

And as the European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström points out in the columns of the newspaper, that means that the other 17 member states should be making greater efforts, and that we are nowhere near the the harmonisation of asylum policy the Commission aimed to establish by 2012.

According to an expert quoted by the daily, the economic crisis has proved to be a further obstacle to harmonisation: certain countries with more “open” policies fear that they will be obliged to take on more applications, while others, like Greece, have simply refused to welcome any further asylum seekers. Then, he adds, there is a third group of countries like Finland and the Netherlands, where the influence of right-wing populist parties has reduced the number of applications that are accepted.

The Commissioner is critical of Greece, which was the point of entry into the EU for 80,000 people over the last two years, and where “conditions for refugees fall short of what is humanly acceptable.” This observation is borne out by a feature report on the Tychero refugee centre, which is close to the Turkish border.

In order to establish a fairer system for distributing the burden of welcoming asylum seekers, Cecilia Malmström is proposing, along with other measures, to provide temporary assistance to countries with the highest in-flows of migrants. Her proposals will be on the agenda for discussion at the EU’s 13-December Council of Ministers meeting.

In spite of Erdogan’s declaration that "we go well together" delivered in German, and Merkel’s warmly applauded “I am also your Chancellor” addressed to Germany’s three million Turkish immigrants, the two countries remain divided over longstanding issues: the question of dual nationality for immigrants in Germany, demanded by Erdogan, and the obligation to learn German stipulated by Merkel. "Assimilation is a crime against humanity," comparable to anti-Semitism, insisted the Turkish Prime Minister while Angela Merkel remained impassive. The Chancellor also maintained an eloquent silence on the issue of Turkey’s accession to the European Union.

The affair has divided the CDA to the point where, on 30 October, close to 85% of the party voted to back a resolution stipulating that “the deportation of unaccompanied minors is not desirable, and does not correspond to the principles of the CDA”. The text, which contradicts government policy and the party’s programme, has highlighted a rift in the ranks of the CDA.

The left-wing daily remarks that “a year after the political leap without a safety net” represented by participation in a government supported by populist Geert Wilders, the CDA “has found itself in a bottomless pit”, which is reflected by its position in the polls. For a Trouw columnist, the affair has demonstrated  a “political powerlessness that will be disastrous for confidence in the state”. The CDA will have to “take charge of the situation [...] but it will not succeed in its current cooperation with PVV”.

On September 16 as well the Commission should be presenting another instalment of the “new Schengen governance,” writes Le Figaro for its part: Brussels will now be able to suspend from the Schengen area any countries that fail to protect their sector of Europe's common border. It's a threat that especially affects Athens, notes the French daily. But this programme has not won unanimity within the EU: the Ministers of the Interior from France, Germany and Spain have already drafted a joint statement in which they refuse point-blank to surrender control over temporary checks at their own borders to the EU.

For the newspaper, "the history of Turkish immigration has been a success. The indigenous population and the immigrants get on well, better than they do in many neighbouring countries. The number of Turkish graduates is on the increase, the Turkish middle class continues to grow, there are Turkish MPs in many of the country’s regional parliaments, and the leader of the Green Party is Turkish.” In short, TAZ concludes, the Turks “have changed the face of Germany.”

The second picture, taken on the same day, shows the riots in Bari (Apulia region). Frustrated by delays in the processing of their asylum applications, African migrants, who have been held for seven months in a “filtration” camp, “chanted ‘papiers papiers,’ before rioting and blocking traffic. A total of 60 people including policemen and migrants were injured”. The protest, reports La Repubblica, spread to the Calabrian town of Crotone, where “migrants emulated the riots in Bari,” and Nardò (Apulia) where “400 North African farm labourers went on strike for better wages”.

Last year in Rosarno (Calabria), African migrants, who complained that they were “being treated like animals by Italians,” staged violent protests.

One fact perfectly illustrates how far Europe is moving into the abyss of xenophobia: the abolition of internal controls between European Union member states got underway in 1995 when, as a result of the war in Yugoslavia, Europe had to cope with a flood of more than 600,000 refugees. Germany alone took over 345,000 people in an effort that was little known and even less recognised, but other countries also stepped up to the mark: Austria took in 80,000, Sweden 57,000, Switzerland 25,000, the Netherlands 24,000 and Denmark 20,000.

Nobody backed down then or doubted that getting rid of border controls was a good idea. Now, however, a few young men from north Africa and the prospect of electoral defeat by the far right have put Berlusconi and Sarkozy, leaders of two of the most prosperous countries in the world, to flight.

In the EU there are 20 million non-EU immigrants, which represents only four percent of the population. With the exception of Estonia and Latvia, which have significant Russian minorities that have not been nationalised, no country has more than eight percent of immigrants from outside the EU. To make matters worse, this Europe of twenty-seven states that wants to preach democracy and solidarity to the whole world actually helped out in 2010 by approving just 55,100 applications for asylum.

That Rome and Paris wanted to entice Brussels by offering it greater responsibilities is within the realm of the comprehensible. But that the European Commission, which is the guardian of the treaties, should have been willing to sell so cheaply a principle of European integration as key as the free movement of people is truly worrisome.

The conservative daily Jyllands-Posten revealed this report on April 28 under the headline “Restrictions on foreigners saves billions”. According to the liberal daily, the annual cost to Danish society of non-Western immigrants is put at 15.7 billion kroner (2.1 billion euros), and since the right came to power in 2001 the kingdom has saved 5.1 billion kroner (nearly 684 million euros) every year. 

In Information, the economists deny this interpretation of their report, explaining that it cannot be known how non-Western immigrants affect the economy of the kingdom. While the figures are correct, the economists explain, they do not capture the cost of immigrants. For example, their study does not distinguish between refugees and immigrants whose situations and journey to Denmark differ. And as the proportion of children and youth is higher among immigrants than in Danish society in general, immigrants do currently contribute far less than others in society through taxes, but that will probably change over time. That is why, says Marianne Frank Hansen, one of the leaders of the group of economists behind the report, calling for tougher immigration law “is a somewhat exaggerated conclusion to be drawn from the report.”

"Member states were wrong to consider that the wave of migrants landing on the island of Lampedusa was strictly an internal Italian matter. And Italy’s reaction, which was to allow the new arrivals to travel to other European countries, and in particular to France, has thrown petrol on the flames,"

writes NRC Handelsblad in a report which bemoans the absence of solidarity between member states on the issue of the North African migrants. According to the Dutch newspaper, "populist measures like tighter border controls are little more than symbolic."

In fact, it would be much more efficient if member states "acknowledged their shared responsibility for Europe’s external borders by establishing a common immigration policy. But instead, they have continued to live in the world they left behind 26 years ago,” when they signed the Schengen Agreement.

In an interview published by NRC, a researcher for the Centre for European Reform, Hugo Brandy, explains that:

"the crisis surrounding the Schengen Agreement is comparable to the one faced by the single currency," because "Schengen and the euro both depend on mutual trust. Now that certain countries are betraying that trust, we are having to resort to sanctions. In both cases, we are wondering if these crises will prove to be setbacks, or if, on the contrary, they will act as a spur for integration.”

In France, Le Monde is keen to defend the benefits of Schengen at a time when the agreement has been threatened by a migration flow, which "is not as Paris claims on a ‘Biblical’ scale, but significant" nonetheless.  

"Signed in the 1980s, the Schengen Agreement, which was mainly designed to cover internal European migration, ranks, along with the euro, as one of Europe’s greatest achievements: a common currency and no more borders, two highly charged symbols!

"However, Schengen will have to be adapted in response to new migration flows, and that means additional help for states – like Italy, Greece and Spain – which are located on the EU’s external borders and tasked with regulating immigration. At the same time, if the Arab Spring is not to result in increased migration, there is a real need for an EU investment strategy to provide aid and long-term loans for its southern neighbours. All of this comes at a cost, and this is the main problem for the EU for which the issue of greater budgetary solidarity remains a taboo subject. One Franco-Italian letter to Brussels will not be enough to change this."

In La Stampa, historian Gian Enrico Rusconi notes that the current "Mediterranean-Libyan crisis" has marked the official end of "the triangle formed by Italy, France and Germany, which has had a major influence on the history of the European project."

"Germany has become increasingly inward looking, and France plays its cards with sovereign indifference, while the European Commission has emerged as a weak executive that is lacking in self-confidence, and even powerless. Although it feels that it is to some extent a victim, Italy has chosen to privilege alliances with more powerful countries, but on a fundamental level it no longer knows where it is going."

Looking back on the "long-term vision" and the "determination" of the German, French and Italian leaders of the post-war period, who engaged "their three nations in a process to construct a new Europe," Rusconi affirms that "this cycle has either come to a close, or at best, has been irredeemably altered".  

"Along with more than 20 other countries, the three nations continue to be bound to each other by institutional links that are significant and even irreversible, but these links are anything but efficient when Europe is called on to address major issues like the use of military force, or the control of borders and spheres of influence. On these matters, it seems that plain old national sovereignty is still the main priority. Differences and national interests which had pompously been written off as obsolescent have once again come to the fore."

The European Council directive comes into force in 2013 and “will give hundreds of refugees and other sub-Saharan Africans in Malta a raft of new rights equal to those granted to non-EU citizens who come to live here legally,” reports the Times of Malta.

The move will also see such migrants afforded the right to reside in other EU states.

The country has been “stridently opposed” says the Maltese daily. “In 2008, when the proposal first came before Justice and Home Affairs Ministers, Malta had managed to block it single-handedly as the legislation needed unanimity to be approved,” and has failed to push its implementation back to 2018.