Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-26-Speech-3-010"
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I am most grateful to the representative of the Council for his description of the broad outlines of our joint action, and I should particularly like to thank the two rapporteurs, Mrs Gruber and Mr Moreno Sánchez, for the two reports we are discussing and commenting on today.
The fourth facet entails refusing to consider demographic decline as something to which we must surrender, saying ‘never mind, workers are coming from Africa’. Our demographic decline, like our future, must be a cause for concern. That is why, for instance, measures to assist families and the birth rate among Europeans are just as important in this context as governing the phenomenon of immigration from outside Europe.
Naturally we are adopting initiatives to achieve all of this, and some have already been adopted in the field of immigration. I can tell you that we are launching the call for tenders for the European Immigration Portal. I hope the call for tenders will be complete within a few months, red tape permitting, and that it will enable us to have Europe's first unified Immigration Portal. The portal will provide access to job opportunities, offers, searches, sectors where there is a demand for labour, and so on and so forth. It will greatly enhance Europe's capability in this area.
The European Integration Fund is a reality at last. We have discussed this on other occasions, and you have expressed your support for it. I have to say that the Council has slightly cut back the financial envelope I originally proposed, but it is at least up and running. We have almost €1 billion to tackle this major component of our migration strategy. There can be no immigration without integration. The European Fund now exists. We are financing language and vocational training courses in countries of origin. This is another of the preconditions for governing economic migration: if those who arrive here do not have the vocational training that we require in this sector or that, or do not speak the languages of the countries where they work, they are condemned to social isolation and we do not want that. The European Union is already funding initiatives in this area.
As you probably know, the Commission will be adopting two legislative initiatives at my proposal within the next few days. The Council representative has referred to these. They will both be directives, rather innovative ones, the first of them relating to highly skilled workers. It will certainly not be devoted to the numbers game: how many engineers are needed in Italy or how many doctors are needed in Belgium. Such matters will be decided jointly by the governments and labour markets of the countries concerned. What interests us is making Europe more attractive than competitors such as the United States, Canada and Australia, which attract 95% of highly skilled non-European workers – those from African and Asian countries – when Europe as a whole is only capable of attracting 5%. That is too few!
The idea of a European ‘Blue Card’ work permit is this: a highly skilled worker needed in a certain country obtains, after a certain period of time, the right to move to another European Union country – where he has a job, of course – without any complicated formalities or procedures. That person is entitled to return to his own country if he so wishes, and then to come back to Europe again after another period of time, if he so wishes. This kind of circular migration can also prevent a permanent brain drain from countries of origin.
The second directive, on common rights for economic migrants, will naturally be equally important, since we shall have work permits and residence permits in a single document for the first time. The person enters Europe to work. I am obviously not talking about asylum seekers or family reunification; I am talking about people who enter Europe to work: economic migrants. There should in principle be no split between residence and work, and this type of document must be transparent.
Clearly, this will bring about a harmonisation of rights. In some Member States the right to medical care is not comprehensively guaranteed, while in others it is. The proposal to be put by the Commission to the Council and Parliament will of course leave it up to Member States to go beyond the existing level if, for example, some national systems are already more favourable. We obviously do not expect a more virtuous country to reduce its level of rights, but we are saying that less virtuous ones must raise the level of their entitlements to social, educational, medical and other services.
In 2008 I shall put forward proposals regarding other categories of migrant workers: seasonal workers, those who attend paid training courses, and so-called ‘intracorporate’ transfers. If for example a firm has offices in various European cities, the idea is to facilitate movement within that same firm without starting the procedures from scratch in every country. It will then, of course, be the turn of unskilled workers: the largest category, for which a good deal of exploratory work is still needed. Rather than formulating a legislative proposal as of now, I prefer to put forward options, or open-ended proposals – which I will do early next year – with a view to gathering comments and suggestions before formulating the best possible proposal. We are talking not about limited groups here, but about the overwhelming majority of those who come to Europe without any vocational training. Many aspects need to be addressed in this respect.
One key aspect – and I am citing Mrs Gruber's report – is of course cooperation with countries of origin to prevent a brain drain. I am particularly concerned about this aspect. As I have already said, the idea of circular migration is intended precisely for this purpose: to avoid sapping energy on a permanent basis. Cooperation with certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa has already begun, for example, specifically in order to assess how best to handle the most highly skilled workers who work in Europe for a while and then go back home, where they can be employed and deployed for the benefit of their country of origin.
This is an open dialogue that I plan to conduct vigorously over the next few months, partly thanks to the strong support that I am receiving from the current Portuguese Presidency, as I did from previous presidencies. We have a great opportunity in this regard. We have two ministerial summits coming up: the Euro-Mediterranean summit already referred to, and the summit of EU and African leaders. I hope and believe that this summit will enable us to make progress, because I naturally expect the heads of government at the Europe-Africa summit to adopt a genuine declaration of partnership between Europe and Africa on immigration, mobility and employment.
One initial observation is of course how far Europe has come in so little time, in other words a note of optimism. We all remember that, until the Hampton Court summit of October 2005, there were even doubts that Europe could have a common strategy on immigration. Today, not only is this a watchword for all of us, but we are already implementing certain initiatives that have been decided on and have begun to bear real fruit.
If this happens, I believe that we will have taken a major step forward, partly because, as agreed with the Portuguese Presidency, the proposal that we discussed under the German Presidency, with the Federal Republic’s Employment Minister and Minister of the Interior, will now go forward to the first joint Council of Interior and Employment Ministers. At the beginning of December, for the first time, tangible political action will be taken to bring together the various elements of our migration strategy: no longer just security, but also the economic and employment element which is so very important for all the reasons I have given.
Cooperation agreements with countries of origin are another issue. The Commission has started to take action with certain countries on an experimental basis in this area. Briefly, we have drawn up country profiles. Every country is different from the next one, and we cannot govern the flow of migration from Mali in the same way as that from Senegal. Each country has its own profile and must be regarded as distinct.
Having done that, we offer partnership opportunities as part of an overall agreement. We have simply called these ‘cooperation platforms’. They are agreements with a platform of topics to be agreed upon: jointly combating human trafficking, because human trafficking begins in the country of origin; thus, stamping out the corruption that protects this trafficking in human beings, as well as managing job opportunities by providing information and offering vocational and language training. We have opened the first job centre in Bamako, the capital of Mali, with European funding. We have also said that we will provide information about European laws, job opportunities and training courses in that centre. Indeed, we are already doing so. Mali is the first country to have expressed interest, and we have already mounted this initiative with it. We want to do the same thing with other countries as and when they approach us.
As far as integration in concerned, let me state very briefly that integration is a vital part of migration policy, and obviously the Fund will be used for all policies geared to the social inclusion of those who respect our rules. Finally, illegal immigration also forms part of our political strategy. I know, and am pleased, that the LIBE Committee has approved Mr Weber's report on the European repatriation policy. We shall discuss this in the future, but it is important too.
Combating illegal immigration means not encouraging undeclared employment, which attracts illegal labour. As you know, a growing percentage of immigrants in Europe are losing their jobs. This is a major cause for concern. Initially there was work for many people – seasonal work, farming, tourism, public works – whereas now there is a regrettable surge in unemployment. What are we to do with these people who lose their jobs?
Therefore, let us not encourage illegal employment: let us punish employers who profit from illegal immigrants; let us guarantee a repatriation policy that is respectful of fundamental human rights but is also very clear and very firm as to our goals. We cannot tolerate unlawfulness and repeated instances of unlawful conduct.
The European agency Frontex has helped to halt thousands of illegal immigrants. This summer alone it saved more than 1 200 people who would otherwise have perished, as have so many others, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the crews of the vessels, aircraft and helicopters engaged in Frontex missions. However, Frontex has also been able to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants in the areas it patrols. It has been, is, and will remain a key tool in this global approach.
I shall conclude, Madam President, by saying that immigration will be part of our workload for the next few decades, not for the next few months. It is therefore a good thing that Europe realises it has an excellent opportunity to be a player on the world stage in this sphere as in others.
This demonstrates that Europe has a role to play in managing the global, unstoppable phenomenon of migration; national action by the Member States is no longer sufficient. It also shows that European action is advantageous for Europe itself, for the Member States and for all of our partners, both those to the south – mainly the African countries – and also our eastern neighbours, because, as we have been reminded, the Commission proposed extending the global approach eastwards, that is, to migration flows coming from the east. The Council was in full agreement.
We regularly speak about a global approach. We all now agree that this means creating an absolutely inextricable link between the external dimension and internal immigration policies. We cannot confine ourselves to governing immigration solely within our territory; we must deal with the underlying causes of immigration, which, even today, is overwhelmingly made up of desperate people fleeing persecution, poverty or war, who have no choice whether to leave their own country or stay there. They have to abandon their homeland in order to survive.
It is therefore clear that the underlying causes of immigration cannot be tackled purely through an approach based on security, for all that patrolling the Mediterranean has been, and will continue to be, essential to protect the area around the Canary Islands. This cannot be our only strategy, and we must certainly take up a demand being made by the EU Member States: to govern legal migration. That is one of the best ways to combat illegal immigration.
The greater our capacity to govern economic migration, which we must do, the more we shall minimise that grey, nebulous layer of illegal immigration. That is why I wish to begin by speaking about legal migration, which we discussed at an important meeting in Lisbon a few days ago. We talked about prospects for the future, and I gained the impression – which I hope this House will confirm – that there is positive political momentum for looking at economic migration in a non-ideological manner.
Quite frankly, we must do this in the knowledge that we need non-Community workers, and in the knowledge that we must not scaremonger by bandying about huge figures that could give the wrong kind of impression. Some observers and even some major newspaper articles have said: ‘we are prepared to take in 20 million regular migrants’. Such figures are frankly dangerous. It is one thing to point out an obvious demographic trend: Europe is ageing and the number of European workers will fall as a result of demographic decline; it is another thing to dream up as of now figures that might be the right answer in 50 years’ time.
Let us therefore govern all the facets of this phenomenon, beginning with demographic decline in Europe. The second facet, however, is to implement the objectives of the Lisbon Strategy in terms of the European economy’s competitiveness and attractiveness. To do this, we need manpower in all those sectors which, one might say, seem to have been somewhat abandoned by many of our fellow citizens of Europe. The third factor is that immigration cannot be the only means of tackling demographic decline.
We must not forget, for example, that while speaking about immigration from non-Community countries, we still maintain barriers to the free movement of Community workers. Some of our fellow European citizens do not have full freedom to work in all other EU countries. This is known in technical jargon as ‘Community preference’, but it must be explained through political action and not with a bureaucratic term. It means that Europe will enjoy real mobility of labour only once the barriers have been torn down for our fellow European workers, and I am of course referring to those from the new Member States. This, then, is another element to be taken into account."@en1
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