Europe hopes barbed wire will keep migrants out. It won’t

When SpainEU EU first surrounded Ceuta and Melilla, its North African exclaves, in barbed wire in 1993 and 1996, few suspected the practice would catch on. The 1990s were, after all, an optimistic time in Europe, as the Berlin Wall came down. Alas, things have been changing. Between 2014 and 2023, the total length of border fences in the rose from 315 to 2,163km. Another 245km will go up this year.Fences first spiked in popularity during the Syria-driven migrant crisis of 2015-16. Now, with pandemic-era restrictions gone, illegal migration is back in full spate. Frontex, the ’s external-border agency, registered 380,000 illegal border crossings last year, the highest number since 2016. Europe is turning to fences to stem the tide and confront Russian hostility. Nowhere is that clearer than along its eastern border, where Russia and Belarus have engineered migrant influxes into Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland. Each responded with barbed wire.