Greek coast guard officer tries to calm Syrians who are part of the the largest refugee flow the continent has seen since World War II.Thanassis Stavrakis / Press Association. All rights reserved. The refugee and migrant crisis is a highly sensitive political topic in the European Union. Commentators use different terminologies. Many European media outlets, politicians and officials argue that many (or most) migrants who are arriving in Europe are actually economic migrants, rather than refugees requiring international protection. According to this line of thought, it is more accurate to talk about ‘mixed flows’ rather than flows of refugees.
While it is correct to say that not all migrants are refugees, data of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) show that 82% of the arrivals by sea to the EU in 2016 come from the world’s top-10 ‘refugee producing countries’. Nearly half of 172,945 people who reached the EU by sea from 1 January until early April 2016 come from Syria, another 23% from Afghanistan and 14% from Iraq. Children make up 35% of the total and women another 20%. As the UNHCR claims, ‘the vast majority of those attempting this dangerous crossing are in need of international protection, fleeing war, violence and persecution in their country of origin’.
Arguments highlighting that current migrant flows in the Mediterranean are ‘mixed’, without further qualification, oversimplify an issue that is overwhelmingly humanitarian. Different sources of data, such as the number of asylum permits granted by national authorities, may be quoted in support of claims that the percentage of economic migrants is higher than that which can be derived from UNHCR analyses. However, we can reasonably presume that the UNHCR receives less political pressure than national immigration authorities when assessing the nature of the phenomenon.
