Europe is “underestimating” the scale and severity of the migration crisis and “millions of Africans” will flood the continent in the next five years unless urgent action is taken, a senior European official has warned.

Will migration crisis come to an end?

The dire prediction from Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, came as Paris evacuated almost 3,000 migrants from a makeshift camp near the city center – the 34th such evacuation in two years.

Tajani told Il Messagero newspaper that there would be an exodus “of biblical proportions that would be impossible to stop if we don’t confront the problem now.

Population growth, climate change, desertification, wars, famine in Somalia and Sudan. These are the factors that are forcing people to leave.”

Worse to stay at home
He added: “When people lose hope, they risk crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean because it is worse to stay at home, where they run enormous risks.

“If we don’t confront this soon, we will find ourselves with millions of people on our doorstep within five years.
“Today we are trying to solve a problem of a few thousand people, but we need to have a strategy for millions of people.”
The only solution was massive investment in Africa to dissuade people from leaving in the first place, he said.
Tajani’s sombre forecast came a day after EU interior ministers pledged to back an urgent European Commission plan to help Italy, which has accepted about 85,000 of the 100,000 people who have arrived by sea from North Africa this year.

Last month it threatened to close its ports to NGO boats carrying rescued migrants and called on some of the vessels to be sent to ports in France and Spain – a proposal these countries dismissed.

The effects of the migrant influx have been felt in Paris, where the camp of almost 3,000 people was dismantled on Friday, with migrants bused to temporary accommodation in and around the French capital.

The migrants, whose numbers have swollen since the notorious Calais “jungle” was shut in October, had been living around an aid center in the Porte de la Chapelle area.

Set up in November to accommodate 400 people, it soon became swamped by the 200-odd weekly newcomers forced to sleep rough. 

Their ballooning numbers raised security and hygiene concerns and caused tensions with local residents.
President Emmanuel Macron’s government is expected to announce new measures to cope with the migrant crisis this week.
Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s socialist mayor, issued her own proposals. These included an “organized spread” of migrants around the country, increasing the capacity of welcome centers from 50,000 to 75,000 by 2022, and pumping more funds into language and “civic” lessons.

Armored vehicles
Most people landing in Italy are sub-Saharan Africans who have crossed the Mediterranean from Libya, a journey that has claimed more than 2,200 lives this year.

Their influx has exacerbated tensions with Austria, which this week deployed armored vehicles to its border with Italy and threatened to send up to 750 soldiers to block any migrants heading north.

EU ministers agreed to an “action plan” to provide up to €35-million (about R534-million) in aid for Italy and to beef up the Libyan coastguard, which NGOs accuse of rights abuses and collusion with people traffickers.

Amnesty International said it was “deeply problematic” to fund Libya, which has been teetering on lawlessness since dictator Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011.

At a conference in Rome this week, Italy’s foreign minister, Angelino Alfano, stressed to African and EU ministers the importance of bolstering Libya’s southern borders to end what he called “the biggest criminal travel agency in history”.