A bit of background. The European Commission has kicked off the debate on legal immigration on economic grounds, and this is as it should be, because it's absolutely vital in the context of the area of freedom, security and justice of “The Hague Programme” (see this column yesterday). But make no mistake about it: beneath the technical, and occasionally bureaucratic, appearance of the Commission's Green Paper lie delicate and controversial issues, from all points of view: politically, economically, socially- even psychologically. They will involve employment, the integration of workers and their families, fundamental rights, black-market work and, indirectly, refugees and even terrorism. All the analysis shows that most of the poor wretches who arrive illegally on European coasts are not “political refugees” but “economic refugees”, who have no right in principle to asylum and should in theory be sent back to their country of origin. The EU has multiplied its rules and procedures to keep this illegal immigration in check, but it recognises that the necessary controls should be accompanied by rules applicable to legal immigration and the integration of immigrants. Action must therefore be taken to redress the balance. In its session this week, the Justice and Home Affairs Council (JHA) is turning its attention to essential dossiers such as procedures for processing asylum applications, the integration of immigrants, how visas work (see our bulletin of 25 January, pages 13/14). Against this backdrop comes the Green Paper on legal immigration and the resulting debate. The Commission is expecting reactions by 15 April; it will then hold a public hearing, and it proposes to put forward an “action programme” at the end of the year, which is provided for by the Hague programme.
Figures to clarify. How can a dispassionate debate be guaranteed, avoiding populist rhetoric, based on reliable data and, above all, respecting the balance between the various interests at play? The starting point for the Green Paper leaves me confused. The Commission states: “Between 2010 and 2030, at current immigration rates, the decline in the active population of the Europe of 25 would lead to a fall in number of workers in the order of 20 million “. Are we to understand that it will take a similar number of immigrants to bridge this gap? I would like to know what they based their calculations on. The Commission itself, and in turn the Council, the European Council and the European Parliament have criticised the shortcomings of employment rates in Europe: the percentage of active people in the EU, compared to citizens of working age, is too low, particularly among women, and objectives to increase it have been set: in 2010, we need to have achieved an overall employment rate of 70%, 60% for women, with interim goals of 67% and 57% for 2005. For the most part, then, potential workers already exist in Europe: we need to create the conditions for them to find a job. Even taking the negative incidence of ageing on board, the dimensions of the problem then become more reasonable. The Commission is more moderate than the UN, some of whose projections of European immigration needs were quite astonishing, but maybe it should explain the meaning of the forecast quoted. The draft Green Paper stated that “more sustained immigration flows will be increasingly necessary”; in the definitive text, “will be” becomes “could be”. This is considerably more cautious.
Immigration and knowledge level. There is another aspect that needs clearing up: the economic motivations behind this kind of recourse to immigration. The Commission cites “competitiveness and, through it, the achievement of the Lisbon objectives”. If I am not very much mistaken, at the top of the list of Lisbon objectives is the creation of the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world. This would mean making the legal immigration policy into an instrument at the disposal of employers to supply cheap labour in the name of competitiveness. Simply to legalise the situation of untrained illegal immigrants would do little or nothing towards the knowledge-based economy. Let's be right about it: Europe has clear humanitarian duties towards those who wash up on its shores, towards their women and children; but there should be a clear distinction between on the one hand, the obligation to deal with human dramas and the irresistible attraction exerted by the European model of society and, on the other, achieving the Lisbon objectives. There is confusion in the Commission's document, which states the problems clearly and relevantly (as I will go into in this column tomorrow), but I am worried about the populist scare-mongering various organisations and other commentators are apt to come out with. (F.R.)