Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

The EU's Migration Crisis Is Far From Over

Thousands of undocumented migrants are still arriving in the EU, and there's no easy solution to the political crises that creates.

September 6, 2016 at 12:32 PM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

The lucky ones.
Photographer: Alfonso Di Vincenzo/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have adjusted her policies after last year's refugee influx. But on Sunday, she was punished anyhow by voters in her own constituency of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. That's one sign that the EU migration crisis is far from resolved yet.

Ever since March, when Merkel rammed through a European Union deal with Turkey under which undocumented migrants reaching the Greek islands from Turkish ports are to be sent back, the flow of refugees from Turkey to Europe receded quite dramatically. That's not because the deal is working as written: According to the United Nations refugee agency, only 468 people have been returned to Turkey since March in nine separate handovers, a tiny portion of the 16,688 people who arrived on the Greek islands from Turkey between March 20 and September 4.