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The restrictive harmonisation of Europes immigration and and asylum politics

This is one of the introductory contributions given on Sunday 23 April 2000 as part of the European networking days "Fortress Europe and the international organisation of the sans papiers". There were two contributions prior to this one. The first dealt with globalisation and the labour market and was presented by the Caravan Committee Hanau. The second was presented by Omeheira Lopez from the Border Documentation Centre in Reynosa/Mexico on the U.S.-Mexican deadly border regime and exploitative labour relations

We have just heard how migration is closely related to the labour market and free movement of capital and how the control of migration is not only a defensive mechanism by European countries against sharing profits, but has become a global phenomenon. Although historical and economic circumstances may differ, the deadly consequences of violent migration control are always the same. For the past 20 years now, the struggles for the rights of refugees and migrants in Europe have been more or less organised on a local, at best at a national level. But with the gradual, and soon complete, harmonisation of Europe\\'s approach to asylum and immigration, the resistance fight has started to organise on a European level, because in order to fight European repression, there has to be a truly European resistance.

What activists and more importantly refugees and migrants in Europe are increasingly facing now is not only the harmonisation of procedures and politics towards them. The European harmonisation of migration politics is a euphemism for a declaration of war against migrants and asylum seekers. It is the explicit illegalisation of human beings on a European level, a concerted effort to fight undocumented immigration as well as the practical implementation of a functioning deportation machinery which will deport hundreds of thousands of people every year. Before we hear later on today how this politics affects refugees and migrants in some individual European countries and how grassroots and self-organisations try and develop strategies of resistance against it, I will just briefly outline how the present legal system which underpins the EU\\'s migration approach developed. Because although watching the state is a futile business unless you are going to do something about it, or as Sivanandan, the editor of Race & Class, has said, "they watch us, we watch them - that\\'s no big deal", we need to know where they are going to hit next, where they are strong so that we can evade them, and where they are weak so we can fight them directly.

As already mentioned, Europe\\'s approach to migration and asylum changed in the 1960\\'s - mainly due to a drastic change in labour needs after the decline in the manufacturing industry. With increasing European integration on an economic level came intergovernmental agreements on what was now defined as a problem - immigration. In 1984, Germany, France, and the Benelux countries signed the Schengen Agreement to lift internal border cotrols. But contrary to common belief, Schengen is not about free movement, it is about the control of movement and more importantly about the militarisation of the EU\\'s external borders. Out of 142 articles in the Schengen Implementation Agreement, only 1 deals with the abolition of internal border controls. The remaining 141 deal with external border controls, police cooperation, legal cooperation and most importantly, the collection of personal data on irregular refugees and migrants. The Schengen Information System, the SIS, was allegedly created to combat international crime by coordinating policing and surveillance through a European centralised data base. But if the SIS really deals with so-called crime and moreover, derived from a European initiative, why is it that over 80% of the data input was not only entered by Germany and France alone, but that over 90% contains data on so-called illegals and deportees? Schengen gave police and officials powers to control non-EU nationals internally. It is responsible for the increase of police checks at train stations, in trains, on the streets along the external borders, within the country. These stop and search operations are necessarily racist as colour, it seems, is the only way the police can define origin. On the other hand, the militarisation of external border controls has led to the death of thousands of refugees and migrants at Europe\\'s shores and borders. The contribution on Italy later on, will give you a horrific picture of how EU law-makers are directly responsible for, literally, massacres of refugees and migrants trying to enter the EU.

In order to let this new regime run smoothly however, it had to be truly European. So once the concept was thought through, emphasis was put on a coordinated effort to harmonise policing, immigraton, asylum and legal cooperation. In 1993, the Maastricht Treaty created the so-called pillar structure of the EU. The first pillar deals with economic cooperation, the second pillar with political cooperation, and the third with so-called Justice and Home Affairs. Justice and Home Affairs covers everything from policing to migration and asylum as well as police and judicial cooperation. The so far ad hoc arrangements, followed through by intergovernmental agreements like Schengen, were made permanent and the Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers was created.

The Amsterdam Treaty, which came into force May 1999, was discussed on a very practical level in Tampere last October and began the complete integration of immigration, asylum and policing matters into the European Community framework. This should mean that decisions taken are finally approved by the European Parliament and can be challenged under European Court of Justice. Only, the third pillar, i.e. Justice and Home Affairs matters, seems too precarious for EU ministers to be decided under the democratic process. The Amsterdam Treaty therefore gives Ministers and police officials another 5 years to finalise their project of exlusion and to legalise the illegalisation of people before they let the European Parliament and the Court have any power to decide on these matters. What was being discussed at Tampere then, was the very practical implementation of the new Europe, which has started to harmonise the globalisation of immigration controls. Enforcing European policies onto poorer countries is taking place now, because Brussels officials and police officers have finally realised as layed out in the Austrian Strategy Paper, that, and I quote: "an effective entry control concept cannot be based simply on controls at the border but must cover every step taken by a third coutnry national from the time he begins his journey to the time he reaches his destination"

This approach is based on so-called Action Plans which target migrant producing as well as transit countries. The first Action Plan was drafted when in 1997 and 1998 significant numbers of Iraqi Kurds entered the EU via the Italian coast. The EU actually had to start thinking about how to keep migrants and refugees out of the EU, on a very practical level: the Iraq Action Plan was drafted, the term illegal immigrant was coined and emphasis was put on prevention. This meant using liaison officers who worked from within so-called migrant producing countries, it made carriers and travel companies responsible for the documentation of their passengers, it talked of universal fingerprinting of aslyum seekers through Eurodac, a computerised fingerprinting system in order to immediately identify and ultimately deport asylum seekers and migrants. It also invented "safe areas in the region of origin" so as to legally deport people and circumvent the Geneva Convention.

In 1998, the Action Plan was drafted for wider application and was followed by the Austrian Strategy Paper on Asylum and Migration. The Strategy Paper can only be described as imperialist. It proposed a so-called cross-pillar approach to migration: EU trade, aid and so-called development was linked to imposing EU migration policies onto countries of origin and transit countries. The EU, it said, "must use its political and economic muscle" to enforce readmission agreements onto countries of origin and transit. These ideas were developed further and five more countries, or rather, regions, were targeted: Albania, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Afghanistan.

These so-called Action Plans contain an in-depth analysis of the demographic, economic, political and human rights situation in the target countries, the causes of migration from and through them. It includes statistics on the population size and age structure, life expectancy, infant mortality, imports and exports to and from the EU and the rest of the world, GDP, development aid, existing trade and aid agreements, cooperation and readmission agreements. All of these are now being used to force these countries into accepting EU readmission agreements. Morocco for example, which has so far refused to take back its own undocumented nationals as well as other Africans who are said to have passed through the country before entering Europe, will in future not only have to take back those refugees and migrants. Morocco will have to impose visa requirements on West Aficans, particularly Nigerians, Senegalese, Malians and nationals of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Due to Moroccos\\'s position in the Euro-Mediterranean partnership and the Association Agreement signed in 1996 as well as its heavy dependence on EU trade, it is in absolutely no position to say no to EU imperialism.

Probably the most cynical thing about these Action Plans is that they do not even pretend that refugees and migrants are not in threat of persecution and death in their countries of origin. The final Action Plan on Iraq for example, describes the country as a dictatorship, with no civil rights where 2,500 people have been extra-judicially executed in the past two years. The Sri Lanka Action Plan finds that the primary cause of migration is the conflict between the army and the LTTE, where there are no signs of settlement or peace, and human rights abuses are abundant. It claims that Tamils face a double risk: that of forced recruitment by the Tamil Tigers and the risk of being suspected by the authorities to be part of the resistance movement. This goes on. We hear stories of floods, devastation, hunger, dictatorships, violence, gross human rights abuses. But after having enlightened us about the reality of refugees and migrants, none of the Action Plans propose that as a consequence of this situation the EU should grant asylum to anyone fleeing death and persecution. On the contrary. They then go on to spell out concrete plans to contain migration, to force people to stay in unsafe areas as well as removing, that is deporting, anyone who has managed to get into Europe. Prevention, deterrence and removal are the key policy aspects here.

In sum, we can say that the EU approach to asylum and migration is nothing but a new tool of imperialism, an imposition of EU interests onto poorer countries and the continuing exclusion and persecution of those who have been victims of the world system of exploitation for centuries. This conferece however, is here to organise resistance and to discuss strategies, so that, armed with an understanding of the functioning of the European state, as well as the strategies of resistance we are about to hear, we can effectively fight the EU\\'s new imperialist tendencies.

Thank You.