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Sarkozy Starts Immigration Row
France's interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a tough EU-level solution to the continent's illegal immigration crisis.
"We can't all continue to have our own immigration policies," the BBC reports him as saying, "We can only solve the problems of immigration through perfect coordination with our European partners."
It's reported, too, that he is to call for the creation of a single European asylum agency to examine claims from immigrants, awarding refugee status on an EU-wide level, rather than the current national system. Individuals granted citizenship in EU nations are currently able to live in any other EU nation.
Sarkozy's proposals will appeal to EU Commissioners and governments for differing reasons. Commissioners might be sniffy about Sarko's populist appeal to keep immigration under control, but they are unlikely to baulk at the offer of yet more power wrenched from governments to Brussels. Governments - well, some governments - for their part, could avoid media accusations of anti-immigrant behaviour at home by signing over powers to an EU body of sufficient toughness.
On the other hand, many governments, not least the British, claim that policing their borders remains one of the few symbols of nationhood remaining. Furthermore, an EU body might decide that immigrants awaiting their papers should be shared out according to demand, population and ability to pay: Britain scores highly on all of these.
Few governments would relish the outcry in the press when it emerges that the EU will be sending Britain an annual quota of its poor huddled masses, on top of those already granted residency who decide to flock there anyway. Even if the annual number of immigrants was reduced thanks to other EU nations being forced to absorb them, the "EU sends immigrants to Blighty" story would be a media nightmare.
Besides, Britons - and other nations - can change governments when they disapprove of their immigration policy. The EU can't be changed by voters.
How long would those immigrants sent to Poland - that is, if Poland's government would have any at all - hang around before heading westward?
Another part of Sarkozy's strategy is to send police and military forces to bolster the current Frontex agency, which patrols the seas between Africa and Europe. Once again we could see a small and so-we're-told inoffensive EU agency suddenly becoming large and powerful thanks to a built-in, "dormant" EU expansion order.
A final plank of the strategy seems designed to annoy governments who have experimented with national solutions. Sarkozy has called for a ban on "mass regularisation measures" - that is, the granting of amnesties to illegals. Spain, and its centre-left government, is a target here and has been a recipient of Sarko's ire in the past.
Spain granted papers to 600,000 illegals last year, and while the number who headed over the border into France is unrecorded, the French interior minister believes that such mass actions encourages illegal immigrants.
Sarko's probably right here - immigrants coming into Spain might decide that when their numbers are sufficient, the government will grant another amnesty rather than go about the task of deporting half a million people. Where would they go, considering the government had the manpower to catch them? Camps? Boatloads? And once they're back in Africa, which is where most illegals come from? Another media nightmare, with the potential to be a humanitarian catastrophe.
He identifies Spain as a weak link, thanks to the presence of Spanish enclaves in Africa. Potential migrants from all over Africa risk their lives in the flock to Ceuta (on the Moroccan coast) in the belief that if they get in, they're on Spanish soil and thus can have their claims treated.
In this way, Sarkozy's thinking goes, Spanish policies on immigration affect Europe as a whole, and therefore should be regulated by Europe. Despite angry protests, Spain has recognised this to an extent, taking €30 million in EU money to build a series of razor wire fences to keep the Africans out.
And those Spanish protests? Spain's prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero claims France has no right to interfere in other nation's immigration policies. With a reference to last November's riots in France's mainly immigrant housing estates, he said he "does not accept what the French interior minister might have to say, after what we saw in the neighbourhoods of Paris".
