Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-02-Speech-2-055"
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"en.20011002.3.2-055"2
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"Mr President, I should particularly like to thank Mr Pirker for the work he has done.
Now more than ever, as the rapporteur has stressed, it is essential to reformulate Community immigration policy: not just aseptic rules allowing or forbidding entry, but a broader and more responsible approach based above all on economic and demographic assessments and evaluations of social and cultural integration.
We therefore need to lay down a strategy for a sustainable immigration policy in which national and local institutions can play a major part in using objective criteria to identify occupational needs and the availability of jobs, accommodation, social services and training for all those who ask to come and live and work in our Member States. Setting limits and strict rules means ensuring they get the best possible welcome and are fully integrated, with mutual respect and benefits for both European citizens and the immigrants. It means avoiding painful social conflict, and it also means being tough on illegal immigration, which all too often is associated with crime and exploitation.
Above all, Europe cannot confine itself to taking a passive role and attitude towards immigration as if it were just a traffic policeman directing traffic. Europe must act with greater political awareness so that it can also interpret fully the strong motivations underlying these phenomena.
Very often, or almost always, people from third countries come to Europe out of desperation, poverty, hunger or marginalisation. Their desperation is such that there are mothers who leave their own children and come to our countries in order to earn something for them.
For this very reason, and also because of its geographical situation, Europe cannot play a merely bureaucratic role, encouraging or limiting immigration. Europe must choose to play a strong, responsible, political role, aware that behind the policy choices to be made regarding immigration there lies the possibility of also being a player in the serious international crisis we are going through.
We must be aware that it is only by making greater efforts through Third World development programmes and by preventing the so-called brain drain that we can implement the best peace policy of all, which is the fight against poverty and injustice.
In conclusion, Mr President, we must be aware that well regulated immigration can bring great benefits to the European Union, to the immigrants themselves and to their countries of origin. But we must be wary of the demagogy of those who propose too permissive an immigration policy, a policy that would encourage Europe to open its borders indiscriminately, reduce controls and extend the right to asylum to an absurd degree, but then to selfishly close our eyes – as we have been doing for years – towards what is happening in the Middle East and the southern countries, as if it had nothing at all to do with us.
September 11 showed that what happens in those parts of the world affects us closely, and so we should really be convinced, with a little consistency…"@en1
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