As announced in its president’s State of the Union speech, the European Commission will be unveiling a report on Wednesday 27 September on managing migration, particularly legal migration, and a proposal to change the Schengen Border code to be in line with new security threats.
In the morning, the College of Commissioners will discuss these initiatives, which have been partly revealed by Jean-Claude Juncker (see EUROPE 11861).
On the question of legal migration, the Commission is planning to draw up a balance sheet of its action over the past two years, which it says has made it possible to manage the arrival of immigrants on the shores of the EU. A source says it is a question of moving to an approach that is not simply responding to crises. The Commission is considering focusing on legal migration and unveiling a recommendation on resettlement efforts.
The Commission will combine the programme it unveiled in early July for around 37,000 new resettlement places from 2018 for people currently in Libya, Egypt, Niger and Sudan with the appeal made in early September by UN Secretary General António Guterres for the resettlement of 40,000 individuals at global level (see EUROPE 11822).
The Commission will ask the member states for commitments relating to these two programmes, and will provide details of promises made by the member states to date in relation to its July programme.
Alongside this initiative, the Commission is expected to address in the report the way member states can respond to economic migration in line with their labour market needs, but no legislation is planned in this domain.
The Commission is also expected to focus again on returns ad how to make the European returns system more effective.
Current controls end in November
For the Schengen Area, the Commission has said on a number of occasions that it feels the current rules need to be adjusted to suit new security threats (see EUROPE 11862).
Several countries, led by France and Germany, have long been calling for such a reform and a few days ago, the countries currently concerned by control measures at internal borders (Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and France) called for an amendment of the Schengen Code to facilitate the launch of control measures at internal borders due to security threats.
At present all countries bar France but including Norway carry out controls based on flows of migrants (Article 29 of the Schengen Code), and have exhausted all the prolongation options. The controls will therefore end in mid-November, hence the urgent need for some countries to have new legal bases. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)