What Happened to Europe’s Migrant Crisis?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2017
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Back in 2015 our radios and TV bulletins were full of stories of people trying to get to Europe. We saw distressing pictures as boats sank and lives were lost. Huge numbers of men, women and children tried to make their way by road, rail and foot to Hungary, Germany and beyond. There was anguish and fear in EU capitals. Now the story has slipped from the front pages. We find out what happened next.
(Photo: Syrian refugees sit aboard a dinghy heading to the island of Lesbos early on June 18, 2015. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading the inquiry. We learned a lot making this week's program. We hope you do too. Do you remember when our TV screens and newspapers were full of pictures of migrants struggling and dying trying to get to Europe. We saw families carrying |
| 0:26.4 | children pushing aged relatives in wheelchairs for mile after mile, people pressing through border crossings or trying to board |
| 0:35.4 | cram trains. There were horrifying images of shipwrecks, wretched people pulled |
| 0:40.9 | from the sea, and the bodies of those who couldn't be saved. |
| 0:45.0 | Like Arlen Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose perfect lifeless body was found washed up on a beach in Turkey. |
| 0:53.0 | A heartbreaking photograph of the dead boy, forcing Europeans to think hard about what they owed to those fleeing war and hardship elsewhere. |
| 1:04.0 | Europe's leaders were dealing with a crisis, moral, political and practical, and then... |
| 1:20.0 | And then, the story slipped off the front pages and out of the TV bulletins. I'm Ruth Alexander. This is the inquiry and this week we want to know what happened to Europe's migrant crisis. |
| 1:30.0 | Just to be clear, we want to know what happened to the flows of people trying to reach Europe. |
| 1:35.0 | We're not talking about what happened to those who made it. |
| 1:38.0 | That's another story. Part 1, the story so far. |
| 1:45.0 | People move forward. |
| 1:47.0 | People move for reasons that are entirely understandable, whether it be love work, or because they're trying to leave something behind that it has become untenable. |
| 2:04.0 | Our first expert witness, Elizabeth Colet, is the director of the Migration Policy Institute |
| 2:11.8 | Europe. I spoke to her at the height of Europe's |
| 2:14.4 | migrant crisis in 2015 and I've gone back to her this week to be reminded how that |
| 2:19.4 | situation came about. In 2015 she says migration to Europe was not actually a new phenomenon. |
| 2:27.0 | It's really been happening for the last two decades or even more. |
| 2:30.7 | People try different sea routes at different times, she says, but there's one route in particular that has enduring popularity. |
| 2:38.0 | The central Mediterranean route, particularly between Libya and Italy, has always been the sort of centre of the pendulum. It's always swung back to that route. |
| 2:46.0 | So the Libya to Italy route has long been the journey of choice for people coming from various African, Middle Eastern and even Asian countries. |
| 2:54.8 | What was new in 2015 was the sheer number of people trying to get to Europe. |
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