Few issues arouse such strong passions as immigration, where concrete economic and social challenges overlap with the fundamental concept of national identity. It is thus not surprising that Europe is having difficulty in coming to grips with the current refugee crisis.
Until now EU countries were operating under the so-called Dublin system, through which frontier countries have to bear all the responsibility of dealing with asylum seekers (registering them, providing support, and processing asylum applications). This system is not tenable when hundreds of thousands of arrivals overwhelm the capacity of EU frontier states like Greece and Italy.
The EU must move toward a fairer sharing of the responsibility. The new approach asks that asylum seekers be distributed across different member countries according to economic, demographic, and structural capacities to integrate the migrants, while taking into account, to the extent possible, their private and family links with specific member states.
Recent decisions go in this direction. At the Extraordinary Justice and Home Affairs Council Meeting of September 22, 2015, European heads of state decided to relocate 120,000 refugees from Greece and Italy). Legally speaking, this new approach to relocation introduces only a temporary derogation from the Dublin asylum system. It foresees a mandatory distribution model among EU member states according to new distribution criteria, including the size of the population, the gross domestic product, the average number of past asylum applications, and unemployment rates.