EU Lawmaker Explains New Migration Pact After Narrow Parliament Vote

The European Parliament narrowly adopted a package of migration and asylum laws earlier this month, making it harder for migrants without a valid claim to remain in the European Union. The vote followed nearly a decade of political wrangling and a recent rise in arrivals, with more than a million asylum applications filed across the bloc in 2023.

Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar, a Spanish member of the European Parliament, described how the new pact is meant to work in an interview with NPR's A Martínez. Lopez Aguilar noted that migration and asylum were once the sole responsibility of national governments, which remain keen to strengthen scrutiny of who enters EU territory. Parliament, however, is bound to strike a balance between shared responsibility and what the lawmaker called obligatory solidarity, both among member states and toward migrants and asylum-seekers.

Asked how officials will separate those who deserve asylum from those who do not, Lopez Aguilar said there are established criteria. Some applicants credibly show they are fleeing persecution because of their identity, beliefs, ideology, gender or sexual orientation. Others come from countries in despair or from a generation lacking opportunities.

The pact sets a maximum 12-week turnaround, within which a rejected asylum claim could lead to forcible return to the applicant's home country. Lopez Aguilar said migration and asylum have become the most divisive and difficult issue on the European agenda, and that interior ministers were adamant about speeding up the return of people who are not eligible to stay because they entered the EU irregularly. But carrying out returns, the lawmaker said, requires extensive negotiation of agreements with transit and origin countries and a great deal of European diplomacy.

On where migrants will go if they are admitted but will not remain in the country where they arrive, Lopez Aguilar pointed to a planned European solidarity network. It is intended to relieve member states under pressure by distributing asylum-seekers across all members, rather than leaving them with countries that have exposed external borders. The lawmaker named the Canary Islands in Spain, Lampedusa in Italy and the Greek islands, which sit close to the Mediterranean, the main route for irregular migration toward the bloc.

Enforcement, Lopez Aguilar acknowledged, will be a challenge for the next term of the European Parliament. The European legal system does not dissolve the member states, the lawmaker said, and it relies on their commitment to comply with EU law. Governments differ in how they see migration: some call it a threat, others a challenge and others simply a fact that has always been part of human history. Lopez Aguilar argued it needs to be handled with common rules in line with EU fundamental standards, which the lawmaker described as the highest in the world.

The pact will not take effect for another two years. Asked how the bloc will know whether it is working, Lopez Aguilar said it will take time but that the new law makes a difference. A common system, the lawmaker said, should leave the EU stronger and less vulnerable to the action-reaction dynamic that has drawn heavy criticism in Parliament over the years, and Lopez Aguilar expressed hope that it would end that pattern.