EU announces emergency aid plan for migrant crisis

In response to the growing migrant crisis in Europe, the EU is submitting new plans to provide emergency humanitarian aid.

On Tuesday, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned that Europe was “on the cusp of a largely self-induced humanitarian crisis”. Greece in particular has been struggling to cope with the massive influx of refugees, and has requested assistance from the European Commission to help support 100,000 asylum seekers.

Conditions are worsening at crowded camps on Greece’s borders, with shortages of food, shelter, water and sanitation. Despite the closure of Idomeni, thousands of migrants and refugees are still travelling to the Greek-Macedonian border, desperate to attempt to continue their journey to more northern European countries such as Germany, but finding themselves stranded in overwhelmed camps or even forced to wait on buses and at petrol stations.

The European Commission’s plans to combat this crisis would mean the first distribution of humanitarian funds within the bloc rather than outside it. As a result, EU agencies would be able to work directly with the UN and other groups inside Europe. The aid plan would allocate €700 million over the next three years to help any EU state deal with the migration crisis. This would be distributed as €300 million this year, and €200 million each in the two following years.

Tim Hatton has written about what the EU should do to amend their policy toward asylum-seekers in his article for IZA World of Labor. He argues that “more attention needs to be given to creating a more even distribution of asylum claims”, which can partly be done by reallocating a proportion of the asylum claims across different countries. Additionally, he writes that “offering a safe haven for refugees can be viewed as a public good, and this provides a basis for cooperation on asylum policies across the EU."

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Setting policy on asylum: Has the EU got it right?, by Tim Hatton