The French Presidency of the EU is committed to securing a European Pact on Immigration. We must insist that European cooperation is not limited to exclusion, but that a positive policy on legal migration and integration is developed in the context of the development of a rich European citizenship.

Positive Immigration policy must be the foundation of a new European Politics

Editorial, Europa May/June 2008

The French government has declared as one of its primary intentions during its Presidency of the European Union – starting on July 1st – to secure a European Pact on Immigration. The initiative to formulate common policy at a European level is to be welcomed, but in the European year of intercultural dialogue we must insist that it is a positive approach to immigration that is agreed upon.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding the ‘innovative’ European Pact coming from President Sarkozy has been regarding illegal immigrants and the control of the borders of the European Union. This is not surprising from a President who made it one of his election promises to deport thousands of sans-papiers. But cooperation on stopping illegal immigration is no innovation in the European Union: since it became a community competence in 1999 the fight against illegal immigration has been the only aspect of immigration that the EU states have cooperated on. Legal migration policy and development policies for third countries – to improve conditions in the countries of origin – have been left up to individual nation states.

With attention and energies focussed on the policing of borders rather than on the welcoming of migrants and on the causes of their arrival, migrants are becoming seen increasingly as a ‘problem’ to be dealt with en masse rather than as individuals arriving for a variety of reasons. Inscribed in this movement towards the dehumanisation of migrants are various recent illiberal proposals such strong emphasis on including biometric information as part of visas, and taking the fingerprints and iris-scans of both adults and children entering the European Union.

The proposals of the European Commission for standardising the legal basis for detention and return of migrants to the European Union seem to exemplify this: the proposed legal time limit of up to 18 months for detention of migrants without papers is in line with the more draconian of European policies, such those in Greece and Malta – in France, for example, the current limit is 32 days (although it should be remembered that in the UK at the moment there is no legal limit on detention at all). These proposals have to have the agreement of the European Parliament in order to be accepted – the first test of Parliament’s co-decision on this subject will come later on this year.

After a recent compromise between the Commission and the Parliament at Strasburg on these proposals – which actually made them more illiberal – the Parliament’s rapporteur on the return of illegal immigrants, Manfred Weber MEP, said that it is only on the condition of a stronger line on illegal immigration that European citizens would be willing to accept a politics of aid for legal immigration. But the logic of the argument is surely the inverse: only on the basis of a positive politics of legal immigration is it going to be possible to deal with illegal immigration. Without any proposals for a European politics of legal immigration, the Commission’s proposals threaten to turn detention into the ‘normal’ state of the immigrant.

The chief positive proposal of the Commission, picked up in the French proposals for the European Pact, is a ‘blue card’ scheme based in some ways on the USA’s green card targeted towards professionals with diplomas. But the current proposals for the blue card make it even more difficult to obtain and renew than the green card (the only way of getting a blue card is to have a one-year job contract with a salary of at least 3 times the minimum wage; it is only valid for 2 years), few details have emerged as to exactly how it will be implemented and very little has been said about 3rd country development and avoiding a brain-drain situation in those countries.

There is a tendency in the European Union to talk about external immigration, from third states outside the EU to EU countries and internal migration between EU states as if they were radically different issues. The European Pact on Immigration concerns exclusively the former, for example. But in fact the two form a continuum that has to be thought of in a joined-up way. It is true that in the Schengen area – recently extended in December 2007 – a significant number of the legal barriers to the free movement of workers have been brought down, and no visas are required to work in other countries. But, firstly, Romanians and Bulgarians are citizens of the EU yet do not yet have the same rights to movement as other EU citizens, and secondly, since requirements for becoming a national citizen are different throughout the European Union (and national citizenship is the only way of getting European citizenship), many third state migrants are becoming citizens in one state and then rapidly relocating to another. Given the likelihood of further expansion of the EU, and the impossibility and undesirability of ‘managing’ the movements of migrants once they are inside the EU area, migration must be thought of in a different way.

But more important are the social barriers opposed to all forms of migration. Completely absent from the debate at present are proposals for European integration policy. It is completely contrary to the idea of granting European citizenship that ‘integration’ should be left as simply a national issue. Moreover, integration is a two-way process. We have recently seen fear of migrants from Romania intervene crucially in local elections in Rome, and the British National Party has won a seat in the London Mayoral Assembly: without the development of a rich notion of European citizenship amongst ‘settled’ populations, the integration of ‘transient’ migrant European citizens will remain impossible.

In the European Year of Intercultural dialogue one might have hoped that the link would have been made, for the situation of the migrant is the index of the success or failure of intercultural dialogue. One suspects that the new right-wing mayor of Rome has understood this when he proposes that the Rome Film Festival will from now on only show Italian films. There has to be a concerted effort both on the part of the European institutions and from civil society and cultural organisations to fight against these prejudices and construct a positive version of European citizenship. For as long as pro-Europeans remain silent about these issues and leave them to the radical right they are irresponsibly hoping against hope – and recent evidence – that they will go away.

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