1. European Union member states are now able to detain undocumented people for periods up to 18 months without any form of due process. Before, this was only possible for a maximum period of 6 months. Free judicial assistance, which used to be obligatory, is no longer provided. Rejected asylum seekers won't be allowed entry in the EU for five years, and foreigners (including vulnerable groups such as pregnant women, the elderly, and unaccompanied minors) can be sent to third countries or to countries they have crossed during their journey. The draft directive, voted on June 19 in the European Parliament, boils down to the generalization to the whole of Europe of the harshest and most unjust rules that were already in place in Germany. And this at a moment that the number of asylum seekers has fallen to its 1977 level.
2. Today, Europe is regulating (legal and clandestine) immigration exclusively in the interests of employers. It opens or shuts the doors of immigration according to the employers' need for a work force and according to their economic interests. The European Union's policy has two sides: closing the borders and applying a selective filter.
3. On one hand, the European Union is construing itself as an inaccessible fortress, violating the fundamental rights of immigrants and refugees on its territory in terms of health care, financial support, jobs, education, political and trade union rights. That way, Fortress Europe is killings thousands of people each year, people who attempt to cross the borders. Repression against undocumented people pushes them deeper into illegality, with underpaid illegal jobs and bad working conditions. This policy allows employers to use those people in a competition with legal jobs.
4. On the other hand, Europe allows for a certain form of migration: the work force that it selects for itself, most often highly skilled workers, in line with the needs of the employers.
5. This policy offers no solution. It serves no purpose for Europe to barricade itself with walls and barbed wire, implementing policies on a world scale that push millions of people in misery, and at the same time denying them any possibility to flee that same misery in order to survive. Recently the Bolivian president Evo Morales denounced the fact that the European Union imposes on the Third World peoples to open up their borders for trade and financial services in the name of the 'free circulation of capital'. But it forbids them to keep water, gas and telecommunications in public hands. The privatization of these sectors, to the benefit of the European transnational corporations, throws millions of people into poverty. The European Union promotes the free circulation of goods and financial flows, but at the same time it imprisons people who try to make use of that same 'free circulation', without due process.
6. The large majority of migrants enter the European Union to contribute to its economy, not to profit from it. They work in public works, in construction, in the hospital and health care sector ... in jobs Europeans are no longer willing or able to take up. They also contribute to the demographical rejuvenation of the European continent.
Migrants are responsible for the largest part of development aid. In 2006, the migrants' money transfers to Latin America reached 68 billion dollar, which is more than the total foreign direct investments of the rich developed nations. On a world level, those transfers amount to $300 billion, while all development aid provided is no more than $104 billion.
7. To put an end to the organized competition between legal labor and undocumented workers, we demand the withdrawal of the "shameful directive" and we propose the regularization of undocumented people. Assigning a residence permit to undocumented people who permanently reside in our country will give them the opportunity to leave illegality and escape the arbitrariness they have to face today. Once his situation regularized, an undocumented worker will enjoy the same benefits of collective bargaining agreements and social legislation as well as trade union rights. Once he receives the same salary and he works in the same conditions, other workers will be much less tempted to see him as a competitor.
This would also immediately put an end to the inhuman control, detention and expulsion of people who haven't committed any crime other than wanting to build a better future for their families, but being unfortunate enough not to dispose of the necessary documents. We demand objective criteria for the regularization of undocumented people. And we propose to shift the authority for immigration from the Ministers of the Interior to the Ministers of Labour.
