Despite Lampedusa, Europe still split on migration

(BRUSSELS) - With far-right parties peddling xenophobia across Europe, the Lampedusa refugee tragedy seems unlikely to spawn a long hoped-for single EU migration policy to help avoid new drama.

The fate of the hundreds of Africans who died in the shipwreck off the Italian island is sure to dominate talks between European Union justice and home affairs next week -- though migration was not on the agenda.

For years now, the EU's executive, the European Commission, has struggled to rouse interest in a single approach to the divisive issue of migration, time after time coming up against a brick wall of national self interest.

"We need a new policy at the European level," said Michele Cercone, spokesman for home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem.

"Migration policies are fragmented, inward-looking, left in the hands of member states and subject to domestic political considerations," he added. "Immigration is viewed as a threat, a problem, never as a potential benefit."

The Commission wants to open new avenues of legal migration while also sharing the burden among all 28 member states as the floods of impoverished refugees wash up on the shores of southern Europe -- in Italy, Malta, Greece, Spain and Cyprus.

But rising anti-immigrant sentiment and the strains of the economic crisis stand in the way.

In Britain, where immigration for years has topped polls of voters' concerns, Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative party fears a growing threat from the anti-EU, anti-immigration UK Independence Party (UKIP).

In the Netherlands, far-right Geert Wilders said in a statement issued as the scale of the Lampedusa tragedy was unfolding that the government's decision to take in 250 Syrian refugees was simply "incomprehensible".

Instead they should be sent to the Gulf states, he said, as responsibility for hosting Syrians "should not come down to Dutch taxpayers but to oil magnates".

Yet asylum-seekers are on the rise, prompted by turmoil and war across the Middle East and North Africa.

Spain for instance says some 3,000 Africans have tried to slip through via its enclave of Melilla in Morocco this year, almost twice as many as last year in the same period.

To tighten surveillance along the EU's long external borders, the bloc in 2004 set up Frontex, an agency based in Warsaw whose assets such as ships are all donated by member states.

Frontex is reported to have saved 16,000 lives in the Mediterranean over the last two years. But due to crisis-era belt-tightening its budget has slipped from 118 million euros ($160 million) in 2011 to 90 million in 2012 and 85 this year.

Will tightening Europe's borders work?

But Italy, which says 30,000 migrants have arrived so far this year -- more than four times the number from last year -- wants the agency moved south.

"How can an operational international organisation be located so far away from the heart of the problem," said right-wing politician Roberto Menia. "Frontex should be headquartered in Lampedusa."

The Commission meanwhile plans to launch a new state-of-the-art surveillance system in December "to track, identify and save" ships in danger carrying migrants.

The launch of Eurosur, which will include drones, satellite systems and high resolution cameras, will be put to the vote at the European Parliament next week.

But there are divisions over the new system which will be based on data exchange between various national maritime agencies that survey sea borders.

The Migreurop network of NGOs working on migration issues says Eurosur is "the worst possible response" because it fails to address the real issue of why migrants and refugees seek to come to Europe.

"Tightening up the borders will only lead to new dramas, to migrants taking ever more dangerous and costly routes," said Migreurop vie-president Claire Rodier.

The Commission meanwhile is also seeking to press ahead with efforts to open new channels for legal migration.

In June for instance, the EU signed a "mobility partnership" with Morocco to negotiate a deal facilitating the delivery of visas for students, researchers and business executives. Its flip side is to also agree to jointly fight trafficking.

The Commission hopes to sign similar agreements with other countries across the Mediterranean such as Tunisia.