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EU is not taking in an "endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East". The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population. Out of this, ca 600 00 are asylum seekers. If EU was actually intent on ushering in an "endless number of migrants", this would be an incredibly weak effort, considering how many Africans and Middle Easterns are actually willing to move; it would also be strange for EU to run a whole agency (and keep giving it more and more funds, and turn a blind eye to its migrant pushbacks) to coordinate ways to keep unauthorized migrants, mainly from these areas, out.
EU countries do, indeed, wish to utilize migration to save the welfare state, but when it comes to first residence permits EU issues for employment/education purposes, far and away the biggest group, already in 2021, were the Ukrainians. That indicates who EU wants to work, currently, and it's not hard to imagine that there's a number of Eurocrats currently seeing the Ukrainian refugee flows to Europe as a major boon, presenting an employable and uncontroversial constituency for further work. EU does, at times, weakly try to get Eastern European countries to take in more refugees, mainly as a form of "burden sharing" to take the load off the Western countries, but as one can see from their demographics, these efforts are not really an example of "cajoling, threatening and twisting arms", since that sort of a thing would presumably actually get results.
EU migration policy can mostly be understood through three mandates: getting a modicum of labor-based migration (often from other, non-EU European countries, though that's a diminishing category) and then trying to balance the quest to maintain some sort of a de jure refugee/asylum system, since that is an important part of EU's self-image/external image as the bulwark of the international system and its underlying human rights treaties, and the quest to de facto ensure there's not too many asylum seekers and refugees, let alone illegal immigrants, since that would be destabilizing. The push/pull created by the conflict of the last two mandates then makes the whole immigration policy rather an unwieldy contraption, not really something that most mainstream EU forces are willing to discuss.
I'd also like to add the huge amounts of money, plus various political concessions, given to Turkey in exchange for keeping the migrants at bay.
Yes, and the general way how many seem to believe that EU's migration policies are basically those few confused months in 2015 (or rather a certain interpretation of those months) essentially representing the entire EU migration policy until then and since then, instead of looking at all the things EU has done, both diplomatically and legislatively, to try to make sure that those months aren't repeated again.
You're leaving out the most culture war relevant part of the story, how this policy came to be. The turkey deal only happened after the crisis.
On one side, you have the blank statists, who thought it would be a good idea (they weren't confused) to import millions of MENA people . On the other, the far right and eastern europeans, who warned that they were unassimilable . As the evidence poured in, and the blank statists started losing elections, they changed course, and the state of affairs you describe is the result. Sadly yet predictably, Pol(and) was right again.
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