TROGLITZ, Germany — As Europe confronts a rapidly escalating migration crisis driven by war, persecution and poverty in an arc of strife from West Africa to Afghanistan, even high-level European officials are beginning to admit the obvious.
The region’s refugee management system is broken.
The world is witnessing a momentous period of instability and conflict that has produced what the United Nations now describes as the largest pool of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced persons since the ravages of World War II. In Western Europe, countries are dealing with the biggest wave of asylum-seekers and refugees since the 1990s, when war in the former Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union sparked a massive migration west.
As a new crisis develops, the nations of Europe appear overwhelmed, scrambling to contain what has become a full-blown humanitarian emergency.
The most lethal gaps may be on the front lines in Italy, where, critics say, Rome ended a costly but effective naval rescue operation in November, leaving in place a much-reduced European effort that has failed to prevent a rapidly climbing death toll in the Mediterranean. The worst migrant disaster in the region — the capsizing of a ship Sunday in which up to 850 people drowned — already has made April the deadliest month of the crisis.
The International Organization for Migration said the toll for the year could top 30,000 — nearly 10 times the 2014 record total of 3,279.
But the problems run far deeper than the harrowing images of shipwrecks and body bags on European docks. As the number of asylum applicants soars, a European system put in place over decades to process, house and absorb people fleeing war and persecution is unraveling.
This is evident in Greece, where reception centers are so horrific that a European court ruled that asylum-seekers found escaping the country could not be sent back.
After coming under blistering criticism following Sunday’s deadly sinking, Europe appears to have been spurred to a measure of action. On Thursday, EU leaders will gather for an emergency summit, considering a 10-point plan that could ramp up rescue efforts and begin to address other sweeping system flaws.
Migration experts fear that European efforts now being considered — including an operation to destroy fleets of smuggler ships — could trap the estimated 1 million potential migrants on the coast of a lawless, dangerous Libya.
“You cannot just close off the Mediterranean,” said Madeline Garlick, a former official at the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and a refugee expert at the Migration Policy Institute in Brussels.
