Germany and France call on the European Commission to start working to design a migration and asylum agreement for the European Union with the United Kingdom. In a letter sent to the Community Executive a few days ago, the Interior Ministers of the two largest EU countries assure that Brexit – the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU was consolidated in 2020 – was “very damaging” to immigration policy. and that the absence of regulatory provisions “contributes” to the “dynamics of irregular flows” on the route of the English Channel and the North Sea.
Berlin and Paris hope to take advantage of the rapprochement with the EU of the new British Prime Minister, the Labor Party Keir Starmer, who will visit Brussels on Wednesday to meet with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and with the president of the European Council, Charles Michel . “The arrival to power of a new British Government, which demonstrates its intention to cooperate constructively with the EU, seems to us conducive to concrete progress on this issue,” says the letter addressed to the European Commissioner for the Interior, Ylva Johanson, signed by the German minister, Nancy Faeser, and the French minister, Gérald Darmanin, replaced a few days ago in the new French Government.
The two EU majors ask Brussels to start working “quickly” on a draft negotiating mandate that would include legal routes for asylum seekers or migrants arriving in the United Kingdom. However, it does not seem that London has much appetite to sign a migration pact with the EU that could involve a distribution of these people or participation in any system that sounds like quotas, say community sources, although it is receptive to formulas that increase returns. .
In recent weeks, civil rights organizations have accused Starmer of taking a hard line on immigration. Two weeks ago, the British Labor Party met with the Italian Prime Minister, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, one of the toughest voices on immigration matters in the EU, to “learn” from her “pragmatic” approach and try to adapt it to reduce the arrivals to the island.
The absence of legal routes to the United Kingdom “fuels people smuggling networks,” says the letter, to which EL PAÍS has had access and which AFP has revealed. Germany and France assure in the text – which is a first approximation to open the debate with the European Commission – that the migratory routes to the United Kingdom that cross continental Europe account for almost a third of irregular entries into the European Schengen area. “The lack of legal prospects in the UK encourages people to hide and strengthens smuggling networks.” In September alone, around twenty people have died when the boats with which they were trying to reach the British coast from continental Europe capsized.
A migrant heads to an inflatable boat in an attempt to cross the English Channel, at Slack Dunes Beach, France, on September 4. Benoit Tessier (REUTERS)
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The letter from Germany and France to the Commission demanding a new migration agreement that was not on the radar in recent years (at least, not in the German one), coincides with an extremely live moment in the migration debate in the EU, with the increase of the extreme right in Berlin and Paris, and in other countries such as Austria, and with politicians from the traditional right or even social democracy – such as the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Fredrerisksen – embracing increasingly restrictive measures.
In recent weeks, the Netherlands (also the wayward Hungary, opposed to the migration agreement) has sparked controversy by ensuring that it wants to leave the European scheme, although this could only be achieved if the EU treaties are changed. This implies that the declaration seems more like a matter of national policy or a way to spur debate and discontent in other member states, when the new migration pact, agreed after years of standstill and negotiations, must begin to be applied at the beginning of the year. ; an agreement that for the first time distributes the burdens in a solidarity manner between all Member States through reception quotas and establishes a payment of up to 20,000 euros to a common basket for each rejected asylum seeker.
The migration issue, at the European level and as a challenge for the continent, will be one of the topics that Von der Leyen will debate in her meeting with Prime Minister Starmer on Wednesday. A possible youth mobility agreement that would allow young people to work and travel freely in the countries of the Union and the United Kingdom has also been on the table for some time in London and Brussels. But in the community capital they are not clear about what the new British leader wants in the “restart” of his relations with the EU, which with his conservative predecessors experienced their lowest moment. London, meanwhile, wants to improve the current trade and cooperation agreement with the EU.
