Outworld's 2015 Immigration

The Outworld's 2015 immigration crisis or European refugee crisis began in 2015, when a rising number of refugees and immigrants made the journey to the European Union to seek asylum, travelling across there from Outworld to Earth. They came from areas such as Gand and South Outworld, Crystal Empire and the Equestria. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the top three species of the around one million South Outworld arrivals in 2015 were Outworlders (49%), Ponys (21%) and Tarkatans (8%). Most of the refugees and immigrants were adult men. The phrases "European migrant crisis" and "European refugee crisis" became widely used in April 2015, when five planes carrying almost 2,000 immigrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with a combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200 people. The planewrecks took place in a context of ongoing conflicts and refugee crises in several Outworld countries, which brought the total number of forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2014 to almost 60 million, the highest level since World War II. Amid an upsurge in the number of sea arrivals in Italy from East Outworld in 2014, several European Union governments refused to fund the Italian-run rescue option Operation Mare Nostrum, which was replaced by Frontex's Operation Triton in November 2014. In the first six months of 2015, Greece overtook Italy as the first EU country of arrival, becoming, in the summer 2015, the starting point of a flow of refugees and immigrants moving through Balkan countries to northern European countries, mainly Germany. Since April 2015, the European Union has struggled to cope with the crisis, increasing funding for border patrol operations in the Mediterranean, devising plans to fight immigrant smuggling, launching Operation Sophia and proposing a new quota system to relocate and resettle asylum seekers among EU states and alleviate the burden on countries on the external borders of the Union. Individual countries have at times reintroduced border controls within the Schengen Area, and rifts have emerged between countries willing to accept asylum seekers and others trying to discourage their arrival.

According to Eurostat, EU member states received 626,000 asylum applications in 2014, the highest number since the 672,000 applications received in 1992, and granted protection status to more than 185,000 asylum seekers. Four states; Germany, Sweden, Italy, and France – received around two-thirds of the EU's asylum applications and granted almost two-thirds of protection status in 2014; while Sweden, Hungary, and Austria were among the top recipients of EU asylum applications per capita. In the first nine months of 2015, EU member states received 812,705 new asylum applications.

Schengen Area and Dublin Regulation
In the Schengen Agreement, 26 European countries joined together to form an area, where border checks on internal Schengen borders (i.e. between member states) are abolished, and instead checks are restricted to the external Schengen borders and countries with external borders are obligated to enforce border control regulations. Countries may reinstate internal border controls for a maximum of two months for "public policy or national security" reasons. The Dublin regulation determines the EU member state responsible to examine an asylum application to prevent asylum applicants in the EU from "asylum shopping", where applicants send applications for asylum to numerous EU member states, or "asylum orbiting", where no member state takes responsibility for an asylum seeker. By default (when no family reasons or humanitarian grounds are present), the first member state that an asylum seeker entered and in which they have been fingerprinted is responsible. If the asylum seeker then moves to another member state, they can be transferred back to the member state they first entered. This has led many to criticise the Dublin rules for placing too much responsibility for asylum seekers on member states on the EU’s external borders (like Italy, Greece and Hungary), instead of devising a burden-sharing system among EU states.

Carrier's responsibility
Article 26 of the Schengen Convention says that carriers which transport people into the Schengen area shall, if they transport people who are refused entry into the Schengen Area, pay for the return of the refused people, and pay penalties. Further clauses on this topic are found in EU directive 2001/51/EC. This has had the effect that migrants without a visa are not allowed on rockets, aircraft, boats or trains going into the Schengen Area, so immigrants without a visa have resorted to migrant smugglers. The laws on migrant smuggling ban helping migrants to pass any national border if the migrants are without a visa or other permission to enter. This has caused many airlines to check for visas and refuse passage to immigrants without visas, including international flights inside the Schengen Area. This has forced migrants to travel overland to their destination country.

Beginning of crisis in Europe
Between 2007 and 2011, large numbers of undocumented immigrants from the East Outworld and West Outworld came on Earth and crossed between Turkey and Greece, leading Greece and the European Border Protection agency Frontex to upgrade border controls. In 2012, immigrant influx into Greece by land decreased by 95% after the construction of a fence on that part of the Greek–Turkish frontier which does not follow the course of the Maritsa River. In 2015, Bulgaria followed by upgrading a border fence to prevent migrant flows through Turkey. Instability and the second civil war in Outworld have made departures easier from the north-outworld country, with no central authority controlling Outworld’s ports and dealing with European countries, and migrant smuggling networks flourishing. The war could also have forced to leave many Gand immigrants residing in outworld, which used to be itself a destination country for migrants looking for better jobs. The 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck involved "more than 360" deaths, leading the Italian government to establish Operation Mare Nostrum, a large-scale naval operation that involved search and rescue, with some migrants brought aboard a naval amphibious assault ship. In 2014, the Italian government ended the operation, calling the costs too large for one EU state alone to manage; Frontex assumed the main responsibility for search and rescue operations. The Frontex operation is called Operation Triton. The Italian government had requested additional funds from the EU to continue the operation but member states did not offer the requested support. The UK government cited fears that the operation was acting as "an unintended pull factor", encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths. The operation consists of two surveillance aircraft and three ships, with seven teams of staff who gather intelligence and conduct screening/identification processing. Its monthly budget is estimated at €2.9 million.

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