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Viewpoint: Our "freedom", their labour: a "tradesman's entrance" for Fortress Europe (1)

01 November 2005

By Ben Hayes

The new European Commission “Policy Plan on Legal Migration” will introduce fast-track migration with settlement rights for skilled workers and temporary admission with no rights for unskilled workers.

“Strengthening freedom” (from “illegal” immigrants)

It is getting difficult to remember what to call EU Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) policy. Having started life in 1991 as the rather ominous sounding “Third Pillar” of EU cooperation, JHA was renamed the “Area of freedom, security and justice” in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty. With increasing criticism of the overemphasis on “security” it was recently renamed the “Area of freedom, justice and security”. But despite the spin, JHA policy remains predominantly about “security”.

This is problematic for the EU because it is still ostensibly committed under the Treaties to strengthening “freedom” and “justice” as well. It is therefore always interesting to see how the EU purports to do this – having recently introduced the mandatory fingerprinting for EU all passport holders, the mandatory retention of all EU telecommunications traffic data and the mandatory surveillance of all air travellers, the EU can hardly start defining “freedom” in terms of civil liberties.

Under the heading “strengthening freedom”, the latest EU “operational programme” reads:

In 2006 work will continue under this part of the Action Plan on promoting the right of all EU citizens to move and reside freely in the territory of the Member States. This calls for a focus on the associated question of further developing policy on asylum, migration and border controls (16065/05).

There is no mention of any other value, principle or policy. “Freedom” for EU citizens simply means being able to live and travel in “Fortress Europe”, which means increasingly repressive measures against refugees and undocumented economic migrants (and never mind if citizens’ residence and movement is less and less “free”). In 2006 the EU will thus continue work on restricting refugees’ access to Geneva Convention protection, preventing illegal immigration and trafficking into the EU, strengthening border controls, developing law enforcement databases such as SIS II and the Visa Information System, and the increased vetting and surveillance of visa applicants and holders. All of this is listed in the operational programme, together with further external action on “global migration management”.

In spite of these restrictive policies and this particular vision of “freedom” the EU is increasingly dependent upon migrant labour. On the one hand it requires highly skilled labour to maintain the competitive advantage of European economies and on the other it requires “casual” labour to maintain production and do the jobs EU citizens are unwilling to do. Until now, the member states have been unwilling to address this issue at the EU level.

Towards an EU policy on “legal migration”

In January 2005 the European Commission produced a “Green Paper” calling for a “broad discussion” on an “EU approach to managing economic migration”. It began by recognising that falling birth rates and ageing populations in the EU make the admission of economic migrants a political imperative. It also noted that the “main world regions are already competing to attract migrants to meet the needs of their economies”.

In response to the consultation the Commission received “approximately 130 responses”, 40 of which came from civil society groups and NGOs calling unanimously for a more liberal EU approach to immigration and migrants’ rights (1). Unfortunately, the writing was already on the wall. First, the EU member states had already shown no interest in adopting the relatively liberal Commission proposal on economic migration of 2001 (2). Second, the scope for EU policy would be limited significantly because of agreement in the draft EU constitution that it would be up to individual member states to d