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Public opinion and immigration in Europe: can regional migration flows predict public attitudes to immigration
Introduction Attitudes to immigration are becoming part of a new political cleavage in many countries (Kriesi et al., 2012). While a growing share of foreign-born residents is viewed positively by those stressing the benefits...
Preface
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022 and led to a large-scale cross-borders human displacement. To protect Ukrainians fleeing the invasion, the European Council unanimously adopted the Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/382 of 4 March 20221 , giving those fleeing war in Ukraine the right to temporary protection. This was the first time the Council Directive 2001/55/EC2 (Temporary Protection Directive) had been activated or, in other words, implemented to respond to the large-scale arrival of displaced persons fleeing a conflict zone and seeking international protection in the EU.
The activation of the Temporary Protection Directive, which has long been assumed to be obsolete, in 2022, has been presented as the beginning of a new era in the EU asylum policy. Yet is this really the case? Following the activation of the Directive, Member States developed swift responses to the refugee movements from Ukraine in line with the Council’s Implementing Decision 2022/382 of 4 March 2022. According to EU Agency for Asylum (EUAA)3, more than 4,7 million persons forcibly displaced from Ukraine are holding temporary protection status in the Union, as of November 2022.
Although the EU’s decision to open its borders to refugees fleeing Ukraine and grant them immediate access to rights and services is commendable, offering temporary protection to nearly 5 million displaced persons has proved to be challenging for many Member States and revealed far-reaching gaps in both law and policy. Many Member States were forced to adopt new national laws and policies on different aspects relating to temporary protection incorporating the Council Implementing Decision 2022/382 of 4 March 2022, in a quite hasty way. Moreover, the EU’s ‘protection friendly’ response to the Ukrainian displacement is at odds with its highly restrictive containment-driven asylum policies towards non-European asylum seekers, which has become evident in the context of EU-third country cooperation agreements and arrangements such as for instance the EU-Turkey Statement that seeks to contain refugees (coming not from Ukraine but from countries like Syria and Afghanistan) in countries of transit and ‘externalise’ asylum and migration management to third countries. Furthermore, the question can be raised as to whether the EU’s activation of the Temporary Protection Directive hides in fact a logic of ‘hidden containment’ or protracted temporariness instead of one giving preference to medium and longer-term responses favouring automatic/immediate refugee protection and/or regularisation. The EU responses to the large-scale displacement from Ukraine and Europe’s temporary protection laws and policies should be therefore closely scrutinised and analysed not just because temporary protection as a status today affects nearly five million Ukrainians but, in many respects, it also presents a clear departure from EU’s recent asylum policies that are based on contained mobility, responsibility shifting, and externalisation.
This edited volume examines from an interdisciplinary perspective the EU’s response to large scale displacement of refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine and the activation and implementation of the Temporary Protection Directive. The book includes updated and revised versions of the contributions published as part of the second ASILE H2020 Project Forum titled ‘EU Temporary Protection Responses to the Ukraine War and the Future of the EU Asylum System’4 that ran between April and October 2022.