LAMPEDUSA, Italy — On the beaches of Greece, thousands of migrants landed every day. In the ports of Italy, thousands landed every week. Across the borders of Germany, Austria and Hungary, hundreds of thousands passed every month.
But that was in 2015.
Three years after the peak of Europe’s migration crisis, Greek beaches are comparatively calm. Since last August, the ports of Sicily have been fairly empty. And here on the remote island of Lampedusa — the southernmost point of Italy and once the front line of the crisis — the migrant detention center has been silent for long stretches. Visitors to the camp one recent day could hear only the sound of bird song.
«It’s the quietest it’s been since 2011,» said the island’s mayor, Salvatore Martello. «The number of arrivals has dramatically reduced.»
It is the paradox of Europe’s migration crisis: The actual number of arriving migrants is back to its pre-2015 level, even as the politics of migration shake the Continent.
Leaders of the European Union agreed at a gathering in Brussels on June 29 on shoring up their external borders and creating screening centers for migrants, to decide more quickly whether or not they are legitimate refugees.
And on July 2, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who staked her legacy on welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, agreed to build camps for asylum seekers and to tighten the border with Austria in a political deal to save her government.
It was a spectacular turnabout for a leader who has been the standard-bearer of the liberal European order but has come under intense pressure from the far right and from conservatives in her governing coalition.
Countries are still struggling to absorb the roughly 1.8 million sea arrivals since 2014. Public anxiety has risen in countries like Germany after high-profile assaults involving migrants, including the killing of a 19-year-old German student in 2016 and the terrorist attack on a Christmas market that killed 12 people, also in 2016.
And leaders still have sharp disagreements about who should take responsibility for the newcomers — border states like Greece and Italy, where most migrants enter Europe, or wealthier countries like Germany, which many migrants subsequently attempt to reach.
But what is striking is how many leaders, particularly in far-right parties, continue to successfully create the impression that Europe is a continent under siege.
«We have failed to defend ourselves against the migrant invasion,» Viktor Orban, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, said in a recent speech. He has made it a jailable offense for Hungarians to assist undocumented migrants.
Nor is Mr. Orban alone in taking a hard line. Last month, Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister, closed Italy’s ports to charity-run rescue boats. Horst Seehofer, the German interior minister, threatened to turn back refugees at his country’s southern border. And across the Atlantic, President Donald J. Trump claimed, wrongly, that migration led to a crime epidemic in Germany.
The tactics seem to have worked. Data released last month by the European Union showed that Europeans are more concerned about immigration than about any other social challenge. Mr. Salvini’s party is now leading in Italian polls. Mr. Orban won re-election in April.
Even on Lampedusa, Mr. Martello won the mayoralty last year by promising to focus more on local issues than on burnishing the island’s international reputation as a place of sanctuary for migrants.
But the reality on the ground is that migration is back to pre-crisis levels — and has been for some time.
More than 850,000 asylum seekers arrived in Greece in 2015, with most of them eventually making their way to northern European countries like Germany. So far this year, little more than 13,000 have made the same journey. More than 150,000 people arrived in Italy in 2015; the number so far this year is less than 17,000. In 2016, when applications were at their highest, more than 62,000 people sought asylum in Germany, on average, every month. This year, that average has fallen to little more than 15,000 — the lowest since 2013.
On Lampedusa, more than 21,000 migrants landed in 2015. So far this year, the figure is less than 1,100. Only in Spain have arrival numbers risen, from more than 16,000 in all of 2015 to just over 17,000 so far in 2018. But the increase is still comparatively small — more people would arrive in a single week on the Greek island of Lesbos at the height of the crisis than are likely to arrive in Spain this year.
«It’s an invented crisis,» said Matteo Villa, a migration specialist at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. «The high flows of the last years have bolstered nationalist parties, who are now creating a crisis of their own in order to score cheap political points.»
Mr. Salvini and Mr. Orban have cultivated support by creating the impression that they are the only leaders willing to make the tough decisions needed to reduce migration. Yet the European establishment has been quietly working for some time with the main gatekeepers along the migration trails to Europe, including with authoritarian regimes, to bring the numbers down.
In Italy, arrival numbers plummeted after Mr. Salvini’s predecessor persuaded several militias to halt the smuggling industry in northern Libya, and to keep thousands of would-be migrants in dangerous conditions in makeshift Libyan detention centers.
«The measures implemented by the previous government, which Salvini was so critical of, have actually been effective,» said Andrew Geddes, a migration expert at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
Several European governments have made deportation agreements with Sudan, whose leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been charged with war crimes. A deal with Niger has helped a crackdown on smuggling in the Western Sahara. And the German and Dutch governments brokered a European Union deal in 2016 with the authoritarian government of Turkey that led to an immediate and drastic drop in migration to Greece.
Now, Europe’s challenge is about process: How to house asylum seekers waiting for decisions on their cases; how to integrate them into the economy and into society if their applications are approved; and how to deport them if not.
These challenges remain as officials also have yet to fully address the squalid migrant camps of Greece, which house roughly half of the country’s 60,000 asylum seekers.
Ms. Merkel, who was once the Continent’s unassailable leader, will limp on as chancellor after agreeing to build border camps. But for how long is unclear. The nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment in Europe is taking root — fast — in mainstream German politics.
Ms. Merkel agreed to the latest policy after an insurrection over migration policy led by Mr. Seehofer threatened to bring down her coalition.
Some leaders, like Mr. Orban in Hungary, say Europe should simply protect its borders without worrying about the complexities of its asylum system.
«If we defend our borders, the debate on the distribution of migrants becomes meaningless, as they won’t be able to enter,» he said in a speech last month.
Others want to reduce migration but acknowledge it cannot be ended entirely unless Europe abandons the right to asylum that was enshrined in the international conventions that emerged in the aftermath of World War II.
To uphold this right while also curbing migration, officials in Brussels want to set up hubs to process asylum applications in Africa. Some argue it would be easier and cheaper to invest in more efficient asylum systems in Greece and Italy — and to secure more deportation agreements with the countries migrants are from.
On Lampedusa, the debate seems less about the specifics of migration management, and more about the widening chasm between liberal and illiberal forces in Europe.
It is «an ideological war,» Mr. Martello said. «Europe is divided into two main blocs: One is defending the borders, and the other is actually doing something about the situation.»
Sharp divisions over how to deal with refugees.
© 2018 The New York Times