France hopeful on EU immigration deal

Brice Hortefeux, the French immigration minister, is completing a tour of EU capitals in order to prepare the ground for a “European immigration pact” to be endorsed by heads of state at a summit in October.

Hortefeux has already visited 18 EU capitals and intends to complete his tour of the 27 member states before the start of the French Presidency on 1 July, said Alain Lamassoure, a French MEP who is among the European affairs advisors of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The European immigration pact “should be probably one of the dominant themes of the first European Council” to take place on 15 October in Brussels, Lamassoure told journalists in Brussels on 9 April. He said Hortefeux’s strategy was to replicate the approach that German Chancellor Angela Merkel successfully applied to energy policy by agreeing first on a common set of objectives at the European summit before deciding on the details at a later stage. The European Parliament would likely endorse the idea in a resolution to be voted upon during its 8-9 October mini-plenary session ahead of the summit, he said.

“The President has for a long time announced that the question of migration flows will be a priority topic of the French Presidency,” Hortefeux told the EU delegation of the French Parliament on 23 January. He said his meetings with EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini, as well as the German, Italian, Spanish and British interior ministers, had led him to believe that their immigration policies were “more or less converging”. However, he said they were “still lacking coherence” despite the “strong wishes of public opinion” on the matter. 

A number of EU texts are already in the pipeline, including a proposal for a blue card, the fight against undeclared work and the return of illegal immigrants.

But according to Lamassoure, decisions taken by EU interior ministers at Council meetings are rarely followed up as each country continues to draft its own immigration laws afterwards “as if nothing had happened”.

“By negotiating on our own with third countries on the return of illegal immigrants, we have completely failed,” Lamassoure explained, saying the 27 EU countries were now starting to realise that they are finding themselves in a similar situation. “We are realising that zero immigration is impossible and that immigration without control is unacceptable for our citizens.” 

According to Lamassoure, the added value of the European immigration pact will be to engage EU heads of states in a “real political decision” which will prepare the ground for further concrete proposals to be tabled once the Lisbon Treaty comes into force, allowing the EU to make decisions by qualified majority with a stronger legal base.

Read more with Euractiv

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