FINGERPRINTS

“The flaws in the Schengen Agreement lay not only in the presumptions it made about history. The terrible flaw in Schengen was the way in which its principles were practised. For instance, although member states committed to cooperate in policing the outer borders of the continent, in reality the task was left to the front-line states. Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s Italy, Spain and Greece were abandoned to deal with the inflow alone. 

Even after the creation of the EU border-force Frontex in 2004, the southern states continued to bear the burden. As an exasperated Italian Interior Minister, Angelino Alfano, had to remind his counterparts during the Lampedusa crisis in 2014, ‘The Mediterranean border is a European border.’ 

But it was not only the burden of policing the borders for the whole continent that stretched the Mediterranean countries during this period. These were also the three (to date) iterations of the Dublin Regulation on asylum, an EU-wide agreement that was instituted from the 1990s onwards. 

The aim of the several versions of the Dublin Regulation was to ensure that the EU member state in which a migrant requested asylum was the state that was legally compelled to process that application. In theory it was meant to prevent multiple applications by migrants or their shuttlecocking between states. 

In practice the Dublin Regulation put the onus on the southern states. Given that the boatloads of people with or without documentation were arriving to claim asylum in Italy and Greece rather than Holland or Germany, the Dublin Regulation gave countries like Italy and Greece only a few potential options. 

They could feel impelled to process the asylum applications of every migrant who landed. 

Or they could encourage migrants not to apply for asylum where they landed but instead to head north to find their way to other member states, applying for asylum once there. 

As of Dublin III (which came into force in 2013) the country where fingerprints and asylum claims are stored is the state compelled to see through the asylum process and offer asylum. 

With thousands of people arriving in southern Europe every day, by the time this iteration came in it seems extraordinary that the northern states seriously expected the southern states not to try to find ways to get around this commitment. 

One way in which they did so was by ensuring that the country of arrival did not take the fingerprints of all the new arrivals. If they did so then they would be compelled to see through the rest of the process and potentially offer asylum. 

Far easier to push the migrants north, undocumented, un-fingerprinted and unidentified. The number of people this happened to is unknown and unknowable, but front-line workers privately admit to it happening all the time. 

So Dublin III, which was meant to make the process clearer, in practice incentivised states not to participate in the system at all. 

What is more, migrants coming in 2015 knew that if they gave their fingerprints they would have to stay in the country they were in, and so the migrants themselves increasingly refused to provide them. 

The Italian and Greek authorities could not force them to do so, and as the flow increased both migrants and the southern states had similar reasons not to follow the procedures. If a migrant had expressed a desire to head to northern Europe, it was better for Greece and Italy not to fingerprint them than to do so. Otherwise both migrant and country of arrival would have been faced with another asylum procedure in a country that did not want them and where the migrant did not want to be. The Dublin Regulation, like the Schengen Agreement, turned out to be appealing when migration into the continent was at what had by then become normal levels. But they were catastrophic when migration became the biblical phenomenon it turned into in 2015. Everywhere, feelings seemed to be overriding reality. The German Chancellor, who only a few months earlier had explained to the Lebanese girl that ‘politics was hard’, was reported to have been ‘touched’ by a group of Albanians, Syrians and Iraqis filmed at the train station in Budapest on 1 September as they shouted ‘Germany, Germany, Merkel, Merkel’. Later, as she went to greet arriving migrants in person, Merkel smiled, looking relaxed and happy, as she posed for selfie photos with them taken on their camera phones.”