Brussels, 31/08/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Sunday 30 August, British interior minister Theresa May wrote in a column in the Sunday Times that European legislation on the free circulation of individuals needed to be changed to prevent the unemployed from moving to another member state.
The Home Secretary wrote that reducing net migration to the EU does not necessarily mean damaging free circulation and when it was first introduced, free circulation meant the freedom to move around for a job, not the freedom to cross borders to look for work or claim benefits.
The minister said that there were negative aspects to migration for work within the EU, such as brain-draining qualified staff from the poorer countries. She argued that Portugal had lost a third of its nurses, the Czech Republic a fifth of its medical graduates and Bulgaria was losing five hundred doctors a year.
Criticisms of Schengen
The minister recommended that foreign students leave the United Kingdom when they finish their studies. In the article, May also talked about the rules governing the Schengen Area and the current migration crisis, saying that free circulation rules were an attraction for migrants from the Middle East and Africa and that the main beneficiaries of this 'broken European migration system' were gangs of people-smugglers.
May said tragedies had been exacerbated by the Schengen rules that rely on the lack of border controls among Schengen countries, and this was a warning shot for the EU as a whole.
May's comments come a few days after the British prime minister, David Cameron, visited Portugal and Spain as part of a tour of Europe ahead of preparations for a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, to be held at some point between mid-2016 and 2017.
In an interview with Euractiv on Monday 31 August, Xavier Bettel, the prime minister of Luxembourg, which holds the presidency of the Council of the EU until 31 December 2015, said that some of London's demands, such as those relating to the efficiency and competitiveness of the EU, should be welcomed and he himself fully supported them, but that didn't mean that what was good for the UK was good for the rest of the EU.
Bettel said he couldn't imagine an EU without the United Kingdom or the United Kingdom without the EU.
Commenting on strengthening European integration, Xavier Bettel said he had doubts about the idea of introducing an à la carte Europe, saying he didn't want a pick-and-choose Europe, referring to the UK's desire to be exempt from the principle laid down in the EU treaties of moving towards ever closer Union. (Solenn Paulic)