From the Centre for European Reform, this is the CEO podcast.

It is a critical moment. If we do not act with urgency, we would then severely undermine the liberal order.

Brexit means Brexit, and we're going to make a success of it.

The wind is back in Europe's sales.

We have now a window of opportunity, but it will not stay open forever.

Hello and you're listening to the Centre for European Reform podcast.

I'm Beth Oppenheimer researcher and today I'm talking to Camino Mortara Martinez, a senior researcher and she's on the line with me from Brussels. Hi Camino. Hi Beth. So we wrote a paper together back in December on legal migration and I thought it'd be interesting for us to revisit this now a few months on. The migration crisis is over so to speak. The numbers of sea arrivals are down by 90% since the

peak of the crisis in 2015. But what we're finding is that the populist rhetoric hasn't abated

and the EU response or its migration policies is still largely driven by reflex responses to populist rhetoric.

And in our paper what we really identify, I think, is that European migration policy is lopsided,

so it's more addressing the control aspect but doesn't provide sufficient legal channels for migrants.

And so I think what we do in our paper is we make the

argument for more effective legal routes to protect Europe's security, uphold EU values and

boost the economy. You see, Beth, I think when we wrote the paper and we were saying that

the migration crisis was over, I'm actually kind of revisiting that idea right now.

I do think we've got a migration, the European migration crisis, which is not based on numbers,

but it's based on values and rhetoric.

And the reason why it is so important to keep this in mind, it's because migration is going to feature very, very highly

in the campaigns of mostly populist, nativist parties in the lead-up to the European elections,

and migration is still one of the top concerns of Europeans, even though the numbers are not there to justify that.

So I wonder whether we can really say that the crisis is over when everything we talk about is basically

migration and policies against migration on how to stop migration.

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