Gwynne Dyer: Illegal immigrants flooding Europe

More people have died between Africa and our coasts than in the Lebanon," said Manuel Barroso, president of the European Union, in Brussels last weekend.

"The massive arrival of illegal immigrants to the EU, mainly to the Spanish, Italian and Maltese coasts, is a European problem and requires a European effort."

But the effort hasn't been very impressive.

In Senegal they call it the D-Day Package, after the Normandy landings in World War II. For between $700 and $1000 (a year's wages in Senegal), you get packed into an open boat that will cross at least 1000km of open ocean, along with anything between 60 and 150 other illegal migrants.

If the boat doesn't founder in a storm or get lost - one washed up on the far side of the Atlantic in Barbados early this year with only desiccated corpses aboard - then after one to two weeks out of sight of land you will be deposited on the beaches of the Canary Islands, Spain's southernmost islands. Welcome to the European Union.

In the first weekend of September, more than 1300 Africans stumbled ashore past horrified tourists on the Canary Islands' beaches, and the number is going up fast.

Since the land route into Europe via the Spanish enclaves on Morocco's northern coast was closed with electrified fences last year, most illegal migration to Spain has shifted south to the far more dangerous sea route to the Canaries.

More than 23,000 illegal would-be immigrants from Africa have landed in the Canaries so far this year, five times last year's total. Nearly 500 bodies have already been fished out of the seas around the Canaries this year, but the real toll is far higher because many more boats vanish far from shore.

At least as many people are now drowning on the way to the Canaries as die each year trying to walk across the desert from Mexico and enter the United States.

The passage across the Mediterranean to Malta and to Italy's southernmost islands is shorter and less stormy, but the boats are flimsy and the loss of life may be equally great.

All across its southern edges, the European Union is under siege from desperate African economic migrants, and it has been very slow to react.

Spanish and Italian law has no effective way of dealing with the migrants, who come from more than a dozen different countries across West Africa. Illegal immigrants crossing the US-Mexican border come from different countries, too, but the US just sends all the ones it catches back to Mexico.

EU countries have few similar deals with African countries, and in any case most of the immigrants refuse to reveal which country they are from, so it becomes legally impossible to send them back.

More than 90 per cent of the migrants who make it to the Canaries are flown out to mainland Spain after a few weeks in detention camps. Then, after 40 days, Spanish authorities are legally obliged to release them.

So they are turned out on the street with a sandwich, no money, and a piece of paper requesting that they leave Spain. Oddly, few of them comply.

Much the same happens in Italy - and once on the streets, the migrants are free to travel without further checks to France, Germany, even as far as Finland, because the Schengen system has abolished internal border controls between most EU members.

The countries further north are losing patience with how the frontline countries are dealing with this problem, especially since Spain made illegal immigration even more attractive last year by granting work permits and residence papers to 700,000 illegal migrants already in the country.

One EU policy tries to keep Africans at home by creating jobs where they live now - the EU will give $23 billion for that purpose between 2008 and 2013 - but there is an almost bottomless reservoir of potential migrants.

"There is no concept of maritime frontiers in the EU regulations," complained Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos last week, but there probably will be soon.

It can be done - aerial and maritime surveillance to detect where the boats leave from, naval ships to intercept them and turn them back while still close to shore - though it requires more resources than Spain, Italy and Malta can muster.

It almost certainly will be done. Stopping illegal immigration is a question of political will, and there is no business lobby in the EU that obstructs effective border controls in order to maintain the inflow of cheap illegal labour, as there is in the United States.

It just takes a long time to get anything done when there are 25 countries involved.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.