Will a Quota Plan for Asylum Seekers Plan Work —and Why Not?

The article describes the recent situation in the Mediterranean, where the number of asylum seekers arriving from countries south and east of the Mediterranean Sea is increasing significantly. The European Commission has suggested a plan, “A European Agenda on Migration”, which will redistribute the migrants arriving mainly in Italy and Greece, so that all 28 EU member states will take their part of the responsibility. The plan should – according to the EU-Commission – be mandatory and this has resulted in criticism from several member states, not least the UK. The article claims that the idea from the EU-Commission of a mandatory quota plan for asylum seekers will not work, because too many states will pretend, that the problem does not really belong to them. They fear that accepting a system according to which each state has to accept a fixed quota of asylum seekers in a recent context might later on lead to a common EU migra-tion policy, which are beyond national control and would make it difficult to avoid responsibilities for internal crisis situations emerging in other parts of the Middle East or North Africa in the future.