Using EU Aid to Address the Root Causes of Migration and Refugee Flows

The EU has been experiencing since 2014 what is often referred to as a refugee and migration crisis. Between 2014 and 2017, new asylum applications reached, according to Eurostat, 3.7 million (the highest in any four-year period since World War II).nDuring the same period, total irregular arrivals by the Mediterranean sea, including migrants whose main motivation was economic, reached an estimated 2.8 million, with the related death toll rising dramatically. Driven by the surge in asylum seekers, total migration inflows into the EU, including regular economic migration, also rose markedly, averaging 4.5 million per year in 2015-2016, a new historical peak. Although there has been a marked reduction in the numbers of both asylum applications and total irregular arrivals since mid-2016, the political and social debate on how to respond to migration is far from over.

The crisis has underlined the urgency of rethinking and reinforcing the EU’s migration and asylum policies. In order to promote a coordinated response to these challenges, the European Commission proposed in May 2015 a new European Agenda on Migration, combining both internal and external policies and bringing together all relevant actors. Since then, a significant number of actions have been taken by the EU to reinforce and update its migration policy.

A key dimension of the EU’s new migration strategy is the financial one and, within this, the potential use of external financial assistance to address the root causes of migration and refugee flows. The objective of this book is to look at the extent to which the EU’s external financial instruments can be redesigned or used more effectively to alleviate underlying migration and refugee pressures, thus supporting the external dimension of the EU’s migration policy.