FIGAROVOX/MAINTENANCE – Frontex Director General Fabrice Leggeri tendered his resignation on Friday 29 April. For the director general of the Thomas More Institute Jean-Thomas Lesueur, the European agency is at the heart of an ideological battle, which has prevented the Frenchman from carrying out his mission.
Jean-Thomas Lesueur is Director General of the Thomas More Institute.
LE FIGARO. – At the head of the Frontex agency since 2015, reappointed in 2019, the French Fabrice Leggeri left his position as executive director on Friday. What does this resignation mean to you?
Jean-Thomas LESUEUR. – This resignation is the epilogue of a silent battle that is being waged behind the scenes of the European institutions on the mission of the Frontex agency and more generally on the meaning to be given to European migration policy. On the one hand, Fabrice Leggeri and the management of Frontex who constantly reminded us that the mandate of the agency was to guard the common border. On the other hand, Ylva Johansson, European Commissioner for Home Affairs, who oversees Frontex, aligned with the NGOs, who would like to transform Frontex in some way into an agency monitoring Member States’ respect for the fundamental rights of migrants to their arrival. Concretely, the action of Fabrice Leggeri had been hampered for months by the initiatives of the “fundamental rights officer” present within the agency to guarantee these rights…
Beyond the personal fate of Fabrice Leggeri, the substance of the case is ideological and political, it must be understood…
Jean-Thomas Lesueur
Fabrice Leggeri has been under fire for two years from criticism from part of the European Parliament, the Commission, certain NGOs and the media, but also from some Member States, in particular Switzerland, where a vote is being organized on 15 May on the country’s participation in increasing the means granted to the agency. In question, investigations reporting illegal pushbacks in the Aegean Sea, contrary to Union law and international law. Are these criticisms justified?
This accusation has been largely debunked by the facts. Investigations by various European bodies, such as the European Parliament, OLAF (European Anti-Fraud Office, which one wonders what competence it has in this area, etc.) or others, either concluded that there were no such rejections , or downplayed Frontex’s involvement. These are the NGOs no-borders and the media (mainly German, like Der Spiegel again very recently) who are leading the charge – complacently supplied by Turkey with tendentious testimonies or satellite images… Beyond the personal fate of Fabrice Leggeri, the substance of the affair is ideological and political, it must be understood…
Read alsoImmigration: Frontex, symbol of “Europe-powerlessness”
After the European elections, the new Parliament, with green connotations, reduced the agency’s allocation to one billion per year (against 1.8 billion initially planned).
Yes, this is another front of the battle. One would have thought (or hoped) that after the wave of migration in 2015-2016, European leaders would finally take the migration issue seriously and understand what it has to do with declining European societies, which doubt their model and which have already welcomed massive immigration for five decades. That’s not what happened.
In any case, if we can consider that the previous European Commission (chaired by Jean-Claude Junker between 2014 and 2019) had some inclinations, this is absolutely not the case with the current Commission, chaired by Ursula von der Leyen. Within it, there are humanitarian visions (that of the NGOs which play a deleterious role on the ground) and technocratic (that of the migration management international organizations) which dominate everything. Let us add that Ylva Johansson personally takes a « borderless » look at immigration and does not hesitate to affirm that “migratory phenomena have been and will always be part of our societies” and “Immigration is part of what makes our continent prosperous”. According to her, immigration is an inevitable phenomenon, to which we must adapt, and a benefit for European economies. This vision is the basis of the multiculturalist vision that the European Commission recently defended in an opinion campaign.
Do you think there is a desire to curb Frontex?
To kill her, probably not. But to modify its mission, certainly. By lowering its means, by granting it fewer men and by asking it to have as its first objective the respect of the “fundamental rights” of migrants, this is indeed the case. I add right away that you don’t need to be a Eurolath, or even a Europhile, to worry about the consequences of this offensive against Frontex (we ourselves have often criticized European migration policy in these columns, for example the « European Pact on Migration and Asylum » in September 2020). Realism demands it. Because it is all the efforts made since the 2015 migration crisis, however limited and piecemeal they may be, that risk being swept away.
The migration problem is not a variable of economic and social policy. It is an existential question, as I have said, in that it affects the identity and the future of peoples and cultures.
Jean-Thomas Lesueur
Is Frontex at the heart of an ideological battle?
Yes, very clearly. The view of Ylva Johansson and of the entire European Commission in a way extends the vision of the UN in its famous report « Replacement migration: a solution to population decline and aging?”, which dates from the year 2000. This report, which caused so much ink to flow, was steeped in the dogma of “happy globalization” which reigned at the time. The problem is that, twenty years later, the results are bleak to say the least. This dogma, which saw the human person as an interchangeable and movable economic agent according to the needs of globalization, does not stand up to the spectacle of the fracturing of our societies, the rise of communitarianism and racialism, the spectacular phenomena of ethnic violence that we see in Europe. This is because the migration problem is not a variable of economic and social policy. It is an existential question, as I have said, in that it affects the identity and the future of peoples and cultures. This is what Ylva Johansson and the European Commission do not want to see.
After this departure, should we expect a president with a more “borderless” vision at the head of Frontex?
It is undoubtedly this scenario that the Commission would like. But we can hope that it will not happen so easily for her because many Eastern European countries have a reading radically opposed to hers. Last January, sixteen countries met in Vilnius to discuss the protection of the European Union’s borders (including the walls). This meeting, which followed the migration blackmail that Belarus had imposed on Lithuania, Poland and others, was the continuation of a letter signed by twelve countries in October 2021 asking the Commission to abandon its angelism in matters of immigration. For these countries, a border is made to be guarded and a migrant who enters their territory illegally must be turned back. It’s probably odious in the world of Ylva Johansson but it’s normal in the real world! In terms of immigration, as in others (on multiculturalism or the Russian danger), political common sense rises in the East…
SEE ALSO – In Calais, anti-border activists occupy a ten-storey building
.