Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-11-Speech-2-037"
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"en.20030211.2.2-037"2
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"Madam President, I would like to thank the Commissioner and the rapporteur for her report. I very much applaud the principle of having brought this up for debate. It is a major step towards a common European immigration policy. Without legal means, many people resort to dangerous and illegal ways of circumventing frontiers. Without legal migration, we will struggle to meet our target of making Europe the most competitive economy in the world by 2010.
I was saddened by what Mr Nassauer has said. We have to move the debate forward. There are 350 million people in the European Union at the moment and there will soon be 500 million. He has highlighted that 50 million of those may be unemployed, 5 million of them in Germany. However, as Mr Nassauer will know, and as we have heard in the previous debate, it is not as easy as we would like for someone to move from one EU country to another to work. We must do more to facilitate that, certainly, but in the meantime we must also do more to have legal migration, so as to ensure that the vacant positions we have are filled. We have also got to make sure there are safeguards, because in encouraging third country nationals into the EU we must also make certain that we are not depriving those countries of the very important key workers that they need to help them develop. We do not want to take all the doctors and nurses and teachers from developing countries simply because we need them. But then neither, on the other hand, do we want to say to third country nationals: ‘you can come to the EU but the only jobs you can do are the low-level, manual, nasty jobs that we don't want to do’. So we have got to have a properly balanced scheme, with legal migration that respects individuals and respects their position, supporting both third countries and the EU.
The UK may not have chosen to opt into this measure at the moment, but I am contributing to this debate and participating in it as other British Members are because we want to make certain that we have sound legislation laying down sensible provisions, so that the UK will be able to opt into it in the future."@en1
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