A plan to reform the European Union's migration rules will have a limited impact on reducing the migrant burden on its southern members at a time when they are dealing with severe economic recessions. It will also lead to renewed disputes between Southern and Eastern European states, while not significantly reducing the leverage that Turkey and other countries have on the bloc. On Sept. 23, the European Commission proposed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum. According to the current EU rules, the member state where a migrant first enters the bloc is responsible for them, which puts significant pressure on Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Italy, Spain, Malta and Cyprus. The new pact does not abolish this principle, and instead calls on the rest of the European Union to provide greater financial and logistical support for Mediterranean countries. 

• The European Union has failed to introduce migration reforms since the migration crisis of 2015, when countries in Central and Eastern Europe rejected the European Commission's plan to automatically distribute migrants and asylum seekers across the Continent. Over the past five years, EU members such as Germany have been accepting migrants from countries such as Italy and Greece on a voluntary basis. 
• The number of migrant arrivals to the European Union by sea has fallen from roughly one million in 2015 to around 123,000 in 2019.
• Between January and mid-September, the main entry points of migrants by sea were Italy (receiving around 22,400 migrants), Spain (17,200 migrants) and Greece (12,600 migrants). 
• Southern European countries are among the most affected by the pandemic-induced recessions in Europe, with Italy expected to contract by 11.2 percent, Spain by 10.9 percent and Greece by 9 percent this year. 

The European Union will remain an attractive destination for asylum seekers and economic migrants, and member states will continue to struggle to enforce deportations. The European Commission's new plan proposes to introduce more efficient mechanisms to process asylum and migration requests and faster repatriations of migrants whose requests are rejected. EU member states will increase their efforts to repatriate irregular migrants, but logistical and economic problems will remain. In the meantime, the worsening economic conditions in countries with large refugee populations such as Turkey and Lebanon, as well as in transit states for migrants such as Libya, Tunisia and Morocco, means that thousands of asylum seekers and economic migrants will continue trying to reach the bloc by sea. 

• Only 38.1 percent of “first-instance” asylum applications that the European Union received in 2019 resulted in positive outcomes.
• Only a small proportion of migrants whose asylum or migration requests are rejected are actually repatriated, and most stay in Europe irregularly. This happens because most EU member states lack the capability to track every single irregular migrant or to enforce repatriation decisions. 
• Several EU countries have voluntary repatriation programs for irregular migrants, but most have been suspended since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The European Commission's plan does not introduce a mechanism to distribute migrants across the bloc, which means that countries in the Mediterranean will continue to carry most of the burden. Countries that do not want to accept migrants from other EU member states are asked to provide financial assistance to those with larger migrant populations and to participate in the repatriation process. While this could financially help countries such as Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain, these states will continue to be the main entry point for migrants and will thus remain responsible for most asylum and migration applications. This will enable Turkey to continue threatening to allow a greater number of migrants to reach Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria as leverage in its dealings with the European Union. Countries such as Morocco and Libya will also use migration as a negotiation tool when asking EU members such as Spain and Italy for economic assistance.

• On Sept. 23, the Greek and Spanish governments said that they will insist on introducing mandatory relocations of migrants in the European Union. Countries including Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, meanwhile, welcomed the fact that the commission's proposed plan does not include mandatory resettlements.
• The commission's plan will require ratification from the EU Council and the European Parliament as well, which means that it can be amended or even aborted in the coming months.