Italy’s top appeals court has established that sending sea migrants back to Libya is unlawful, “a ruling hailed by charities and human rights groups,” reports Reuters on Feb. 18.

The Court of Cassation upheld the conviction of the captain of an Italian towboat, Asso 28, who in 2018 rescued 101 migrants from a rubber dinghy and returned them to Libya, Reuters said.

The ruling is final, upholding earlier decisions by two lower courts, the news agency noted.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) on Feb. 15 published a report, The Fiscal Impact of Refugees and Asylees at The Federal, State and Local Levels From 2005-2019, which examines the fiscal impact of refugees and asylees on the U.S. government and economy.

Some of the key findings include:  

Net Fiscal Impact: Refugees and asylees had a positive net fiscal impact on the U.S. government over the 15-year period, totaling $123.8 billion. The net fiscal benefit to the federal government was estimated at $31.5 billion and approximately $92.3 billion to state and local governments. When compared with the total U.S. population on a per capita basis, refugees and asylees had a comparable net fiscal impact.

Government Revenue: Refugees and asylees contributed an estimated $581 billion in revenue to all levels of government. Through payroll, income, and excise taxes, they contributed an estimated $363 billion to the federal government, and through income, sales, and property taxes, they contributed $218 billion to state and local governments.

Government Expenditures: Over the 15-year period, governmental expenditures on refugees and asylees totaled an estimated $457.2 billion. Expenditures by the federal government represented 72.5 percent of the total, at $331.5 billion, while state and local government expenditures were 27.5 percent of the total, at $125.7 billion.

A Feb. 10 article in the New York Times details the latest example of how migrants are increasingly being used as political pawns in Europe, with Finland accusing Russia of assisting asylum seekers to reach the border of Finland, which is holding a vote on Sunday for its new president.

“Poking up through the snow drifts on the Finnish-Russian border lies a symbol of Moscow’s biggest provocation yet toward NATO’s newest member: a sprawling heap of broken bicycles,” the story notes.

“The battered bikes are sold for hundreds of dollars on the Russian side to asylum seekers from as far away as Syria and Somalia. They are then encouraged — sometimes forced, according to Finnish guards — to cross the border. Finns say it is a hybrid warfare campaign against their country, using some of the world’s most desperate people, just as it is staking out a new position in a shifting world order,” writes Erika Solomon.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban has also been accused of easing the path of migrants through Hungary to neighboring Slovakia.

Kelly Greenhill wrote about this disturbing trend in a 2022 piece published in Foreign Affairs.

She is a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at SOAS University of London, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, and a Senior Research Scholar at MIT.

“In the fall of 2021, the leaders of several European countries announced that they were being confronted by an entirely new security threat: weaponized migration,” wrote Greenhill.

Over the course of a few months, Alexander Lukashenko, “the authoritarian leader of Belarus, enticed thousands of migrants and would-be asylum seekers, primarily Kurds from Iraq and Syria, as well as some Afghans, to his country with promises of easy access to the European Union.”

“Although it has multiple uses, weaponized migration is often employed as an instrument of state-level coercion, undertaken to achieve a wide range of geopolitical and other foreign policy goals that have been frustrated by other means,” Greenhill notes. 

She said that when weaponized migration is used, it is often successful. “In nearly three-quarters of the 81 cases I have identified, the tactic achieved at least some of the desired objectives; in well over half, it obtained most or all of what was sought.”