Europe’s Refugees

Europe tore down borders after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Then a flood of refugees in 2015 fleeing wars on its doorstep triggered Europe's biggest wave of displaced people since World War II and a crisis that put some of those fences back up. Years later, the political fallout continues with populist governments in countries such as Italy taking a hard-line stance on refugee arrivals. The 27-member European Union is deeply divided over how to handle asylum-seekers escaping conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. The rift has raised questions about the EU’s commitment to its passport-free zone — one of the bloc’s crowning achievements — as leaders squabbled over balancing moral and legal obligations with anti-immigrant sentiment.

An upsurge of violence in Syria’s nine-year civil war raised fears of a new wave of refugees into Europe in early 2020. The conflict threatened to undermine a March 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey that largely halted what had been an uncontrolled flow of asylum-seekers smuggled onto Greek islands from the Turkish coast during 2015, when more than 1 million migrants arrived. The figure fell to about a third of that number in 2016. Many applied for asylum in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy hurt her popularity at home. Political tensions erupted again in June 2018, when Italy refused to let boats with more than 600 mainly African refugees dock, forcing them to head to Spain instead. To cope with the surge in 2015, Germany, Sweden and other countries temporarily reintroduced some border controls, while Hungary, Slovenia and Macedonia erected fences along sections of their borders. Terror attacks in Europe hardened resistance to a plans to redistribute asylum-seekers across the bloc.