The legislative reports by Javier Moreno Sanchez (S&D, Spanish) and Damian Boeselager (Greens/EFA, German) on legal labour migration, respectively on the revision of the Single Permit and Long-Term Residence Status Directives for third-country nationals, were relatively well received on Thursday 1 December in the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties.
These two reports (see EUROPE 13063/9, 13062/18) aim both to make life easier for third-country workers and employers seeking to recruit them in the EU and to give them more rights to move around the EU and also to change employers.
The Spanish socialist’s report aims to reduce to 90 days “the processing time for a single permit application”, compared to 4 months in the Commission’s text. A new accelerated procedure of 45 days is also created “where the application is submitted by or on behalf of an applicant who has participated in an EU Talent Partnership with a third country, or where the applicant is already a single permit holder in another Member State”. The permit holder must also be allowed to remain in the territory “for 9 months” after becoming unemployed, even if the permit period normally expires during this period.
While most groups welcomed the proposals, reservations were expressed by the EPP and ECR groups, with the EPP wanting Member States, which also have national permit systems, to retain full competence over the entry of migrant workers into their territory. The EPP group also said that “the solution to labour shortages cannot be to always bring in people from outside the EU”.
For Patryk Jaki (ECR, Polish), the 9-month period left to workers who have lost their jobs is “too long” and may foster a system of “fictitious unemployed”, he said.
Dutch MEP Tineke Strike (Greens/EFA) highlighted many positive points, including the extension of the directive to beneficiaries of temporary protection, but she wanted to further strengthen the provisions on sanctions against companies exploiting workers and the use of legal aid for them.
Damian Boeselager’s report was also well received, with some MEPs hoping that the two texts will lead to “functional economic migration”, according to Abir Al-Sahlani (Renew Europe, Swedish).
For The Left, Greek Konstantinos Arvanitis argued that this directive should provide equal footing for long-term residents and their families; he asked for care on integration measures for beneficiaries of this status so as not to add barriers to procedures.
The main innovation of the German MEP’s report is to allow a third-country national to apply for long-term resident status in the EU after 3 years of legal residence in a Member State, instead of 5 years.
Pact on Migration and Asylum
Representatives of the European Parliament and the Czech Presidency of the EU Council agreed on 30 November to move forward on the first trilogues, notably in December, on several texts of the Pact on Migration and Asylum, in this case the Eurodac regulation, for which the co-legislators’ objective is to launch negotiations while still under the Czech Presidency, and then on the regulation on the screening of migrants, possibly in January.
For their part, the Member States also agreed, on 29 November at the SCIFA meeting, to add the ‘reception conditions for asylum seekers’ directive to the package of agreements already reached in 2018 that Prague wants to have validated, including also the European framework on resettlement and the ‘qualification’ directive. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)