We will end locked by these walls

In the space of a week this month, four European countries announced measures that make life more difficult for foreigners who live or want to live within them. In Germany, the government of Olaf Scholz presented one of the most Draconian reforms of its migration model, tightening residence conditions and facilitating deportations. In France, with the votes of the conservatives’ majority, the Senate proposed the elimination of the right to health care for undocumented migrants. Italy announced the opening of detention centres in Albania where asylum seekers would be forced to wait for a response from the state. Rishi Sunak's government, finally, promised to get around the technical problems that, according to the UK Supreme Court decision, justify the freezing of its deportation programme to Rwanda.

Seven days, four governments and one message. They will not be the last, as the election results in the Netherlands suggest. Our continent's migration policy seems to have been reduced to a single purpose, that of preventing migrants from arriving here. Sometimes, the barriers that states put up are physical and are built on the very borders of our territory. As the data in the report accompanying this column point out, in less than a decade the countries that make up the Schengen area have increased the number of kilometers of fences sixfold, to over 2,000, and have spent fortunes equipping them with technology and surveillance personnel. Soon there will be many more, with the new fence between Finland and Russia.

But the report also suggests the existence of other forms of walls that serve a similar purpose. Administrative persecution of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, for example, seeks to suffocate their environments until they are unbearable. Racial controls on public transport, the reporting of abuse or the mere management of a rental contract turn daily routine into a hell from which one would like to escape, eventually. Far away from our gaze, in the countries of origin and transit through which migratory flows take place, walls take the form of agreements for the violent detention of those who move. These vertical borders, based on the concept of externalisation of migration control, feed autocracies and armed groups with consequences that go far beyond the rights of migrants.

It is a barbaric and incompetent model, which does not prevent the arrival of migrants - the numbers of irregular immigration are in the hundreds of thousands every year in the EU - but which violates rights, feeds repulsive legal and illegal businesses, and punishes our own interests. For the fundamental paradox of this process is that walls may end up enclosing those who build them. Europe has put so much effort into preventing the arrival of migrants that it risks forgetting how much we need them. For our continent is growing old, fearful and angry. What is now a competition for barriers to immigration will quickly become a global race to attract the talent our economies desperately need. In this race, countries such as Canada and New Zealand have managed to get ahead of the pack by introducing progressive reforms that facilitate the legal, safe and orderly arrival of people while ensuring their states' international protection obligations. It is order, not a reduction in the number of migrants, that provides reassurance to the public and confidence in the system on all sides.

For that is the last and most dangerous form of wall: the one that is erected and the one we erect in our heads. Prevention of the other leads to personal fear, fear to collective hysteria and hysteria to cruel and misguided policies. Tearing down these walls means accepting the possibility of trying out another migration model and taking risks different from those we are currently experiencing.

* Gonzalo Fanjul is the research director of the porCausa Foundation