Europe, despite years of containment policies at its borders, remains more exposed than ever to migratory pressures from the South. The year 2023 will have confirmed the upward trend in the flow of arrivals to the Old Continent via the Mediterranean, or even – a new phenomenon – via the Atlantic (and the Spanish archipelago of the Canaries).
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 266,940 migrants and refugees have disembarked – 97% by sea – in twelve months in the southern states of Europe: Spain, Italy, Greece, Malta and Cyprus .
A sign of the erosion of the European Union’s (EU) border control “outsourcing” systems, increasingly negotiated with the states on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, such a surge marks an increase of 67%. – or almost two thirds – compared to the number of arrivals in 2022. We have to go back to 2016 and 2015, when Europe was facing an unprecedented migration crisis, to find higher figures (respectively 373,652 and 1.03 million). The decline which followed this historic peak has ceased and the curves are starting to rise again.
Absorbing 59% of this migratory flow crossing the “mare nostrum”, Italy is at the forefront. The president of the council, Georgia Meloni, found material for her activism with Brussels to extract greater solidarity from its European partners. The procrastination surrounding the development of the “pact on migration and asylum”, which was finally the subject of an agreement between the Council and Parliament on December 20, 2023, bears its mark.
The main source of the migratory rebound in 2023 is on the Tunisian coast, more precisely in the Sfax region, from where most of the boats leave for the Italian island of Lampedusa, barely 160 km away. northeast. Tunisia alone saw two thirds of the migrants and refugees arriving in Italy embark on its shores (97,306 out of 157,301). Unprecedented in the post-independence era, the phenomenon fuels tensions between Tunis and Brussels. To the Europeans who are urging him to better monitor his coasts, in return for financial support (105 million euros) allocated to the fight against “irregular migration”President Kaïs Saïed retorts that his country “cannot be Europe’s border guard”.
Sub-Saharans are fleeing a Tunisia that has become inhospitable
Tunisian nationals contribute only modestly to the flow since their share of the total is only 9.8%. Most of this migratory axis linking the Tunisian South-East to Lampedusa is in fact used by national groups from West Africa, notably Guineans, Ivorians, Burkinabés, Malians and Cameroonians.
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