In 2015, the migration pressure saw the Commission issue the European Agenda on Migration (European Commission, 2015c). The EAM was proposed by the Commission and subsequently adopted by the Council after consultation with Parliament. In the spirit of implementing article 80 of the TFEU, the main aim of EAM was to facilitate the emergency relocation of individuals who needed international protection from frontline countries, especially Italy and Greece. The policy involved several actions in managing migration pressure, including the establishment of hotspots to trace the movement of irregular migrants and implement EU-wide relocation and resettlement programs. The EU achieved this by establishing multi-agency coordination between European Border, Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), Europol, and EASO. These institutions worked to register and fingerprint all irregular migrants.
The European Approach for Migration had short-term and long-term goals. In the short term, it focused on implementing proposed immediate actions to address the Mediterranean crisis. In the long-term, the EAM had four main policy themes. The themes included securing borders and saving lives, reducing motivation for secondary irregular migration, establishing an effective uniform asylum policy, developing new legal migration measures, and modernizing the blue card system. It also set new priorities for refugee integration to enhance migration benefits for asylum seekers and their countries.
Indeed, the EAM aimed at establishing legislative mechanisms for improving the CEAS, where instead of Council directives, it would create a basis for directly applicable rules. The objective was to simplify and reduce refugee procedures, enhance uniform guarantees for refugees, and ensure stringent measures to prevent abuse. In a way, EAM advanced the directives that
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outlined which applicant qualifies for international protection. To make CEAS workable, the EU needed a plan to harmonize the refugee recognition rates and asylum protection and implement more strict measures to prevent secondary migration. The EAM highlighted the reception conditions Directive, which contained the most disputatious issues, to address the time challenge in asylum processing. It was to reduce the waiting period for accessing the labor market and ultimately prevent asylum seekers from traveling from one member state to another (European Commission, 2015c).
Even under the EAM framework, there was an effort to change the Dublin Regulation.
Moreover, EAM saw the Eurodac database reform with an aim to extend its coverage of data of immigrants who never applied for international protection but still were residing in the EU member states. Some measures included fingerprinting of the above six-year-old children to track and reunite them with their families. The policy permitted law enforcers to access the database (European Commission, 2015c). The Commission further made reforms whereby the EASO ceased to be an EU supporting entity and became a fully operational EU Agency for Asylum management. EASO was also mandated by aiding the operations of CEAS, such as monitoring the EU operational laws and ensuring uniformity in verifying applications across all member States (European Parliament, 2018).
Some reforms in the EAM framework appeared redundant and overlapping. For example, the EU developed, adopted, and revised several directives on immigration without implementing them. The Council Directive 2002/90/EC outlined what constituted a crime of facilitating illegal entry, transit and residence while the framework Decision 2002/946/JHA defined the criminal liabilities for such actions (European Commission, 2002). The Directive 2011/36/EU offered guidelines on combating and preventing human trafficking as well as protecting the victims. These directives were further connected to Council Directive 2004/81/EC, which
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highlighted measures against granting the smuggled or trafficked people residence permit (European Commission, 2004). Later, the Commission developed a 2015-2020 EU Action Plan intending to combat migrant smuggling. In line with this plan, the Commission performed a fitness check on the implementation of the then legal framework. It established that there lacked enough evidence on the prosecution of people engaged in humanitarian assistance. Eventually, it concluded that a legal framework to address human smuggling was crucial for irregular migration management.
The Commission further revised the Directive on Procedures to establish EU-wide common standards and procedures for deporting illegal immigrants. The initial recast was outlined in the Returns Directive (2008/115/EC), whose implementation report was first issued in March 2014. Later in September 2015, under the council's direction, the Commission issued an Action Plan on return. The main objective of the Action Plan was to enhance the return of irregular migrants. Within the same plan, the Commission established the European Return Programme, which had both short and long-term goals of returning the irregular migrants with a rejected asylum application. The short-term goal was to harmonize the disparity between the national return schemes, while the long-term goal was to empower joint reintegration programs (European Commission, 2008; European Commission, 2015e). Again, this move appeared like going back to the previous policy proposals that had initially failed.
Within the European Agenda for Migration, the EU had established trust funds to support its external management of irregular migration. The Asylum Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), established under the EU Action Plan, was the chief funding source for implementing EAM. Overall, there was a significant increase in funding allocation for AMIF in the period 2014-2020. Other funding instruments included the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD), and the European Social
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Fund (ESF). However, since funds allocated to these programs were not explicitly provided for in the budget, the actual execution of the EU Action Plan remained unclear (European Parliament, 2018).