Speech given by Vladimír Spidla, European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities at the Czech Presidency Ministerial Conference on Inclusion of

Migrant Workers, 26.2.2009

Dear minister, ladies and gentlemen

I am very pleased to have this opportunity to speak at this conference about migration questions. I greatly appreciate the fact that the Czech Presidency has decided to pay serious attention to this topic, as I consider it an absolutely key topic at the start of the 21st century. In fact, I am convinced that the success of Europe in this century will, depend to a great extent, inter alia, on how it handles migration- related issues.

Migration was, is and will be an important part of our European reality - this applies whether we are dealing with migration between individual regions and states or migration from (and to) the third countries. The notion of homogenous national cultures that migrants enter as marginal or even disruptive elements is the product of nationalistic mythology from the second half of the 19th century. I consider it regrettable that some people – in particular populist politicians – make do with this primitive and purpose-construed argument to this day. But all we need to do is glance back into history to see how key a role migrants played in forming the European as well as the world‘s cultural heritage. The first great genius of the Spanish painting scene was a Greek, El Greco; the greatest artists of Czech Gothic style were migrants from , Master Theodoric and Peter Parler; one of the founders of modern English literature was

Joseph Conrad (Korzenowski), from .

Erasmus of Rotterdam, a great humanist of the 16th century, was actually a life-long migrant wandering from one country to another. And way back then he proclaimed something that sounds very modern – even bold – half a century later: "I want to be useful" he wrote, "but not just to Germans but also to the French, Spanish, English, Czechs, Russians and even, if possible, to the Turks and Arabs." Similarly a century later, albeit to a significant degree involuntarily, the great Czech humanist and teacher Jan Ámos Komenský also wandered from one country to another – in today’s terminology he was more an asylum seeker than a traditional immigrant.

But the benefits of migration should not, in my view, be reduced solely to wonderful works of ‘high culture’ or to the question of individual migration. After all, the appearance of today’s Europe has, to a great extent, been formed by the mass migration of ordinary people – either looking for work, as Italians heading to Central and Eastern Europe did for hundreds of years, or fleeing from oppression and persecution: which was the ordeal of Jews and Romanies but at times also Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and members of other nations. Today, in an era of the we actually no longer define migration between individual European countries as "immigration", but as the free movement of people in a common European area. So, do historic migration examples within Europe have any significance for today‘s deliberations on migration from the third countries?

I believe that they do. Firstly, because distances have "shrunk" and migration between individual continents is today almost equivalent to what in the past was migration from one European country to another. But also because, to date, part of intra-European migration is not, in the wider sense of the word, and will not be for a long time to come the "free movement of EU citizens" because part of Europe – the western Balkans, Ukraine, Russia, the Caucuses – remains outside the . And then there is Turkey, a candidate for membership and also the motherland of one of the largest communities of immigrants in Europe today. We must not forget the countries of North Africa and the Near East , although they are a long way from becoming members of the EU, since antiquity they have shared the Mediterranean Sea with Europeans. After all, St. Paul was an immigrant from the now known as Israel and St. Augustine was a migrant from present-day Tunisia.

The second reason why these parallels are worthwhile is the promise of the migrants themselves. The legal conditions may be different for citizens of the EU and citizens of the third countries, but migration as a process has a certain invariable, whether at the socio-economic level or from its purely individual, human dimension. The decision to leave one’s homeland and move to another country – whether short term, long term or permanently – depends on a range of economic, cultural as well as purely personal factors. The proportions of these may of course change from situation to situation but they have some common characteristics.

What is the result of this? On one hand, it is clear that when we are trying to formulate European policy for immigrants from the third countries, this is of course a different policy – subject to certain legitimate restrictions – than the policy of free movement inside the European Union where we are trying to eliminate all the restrictions. On the other hand, however, in my opinion we must not forget, even for policies about immigration from the third countries, the clear parallels with past migration flows between (then still sovereign) states of Europe and the general characteristics of migration processes, whether at the societal or individual level.

Arguments in favour of a European dimension of immigration policy

When I spoke at the beginning about the significance of a successful immigration policy for the overall success of "Europe", I meant individual Member States as well as the European Union as a whole. This is because immigration policy still has a constantly growing

European dimension, despite the fact that some of its most important tools remain and evidently will for a long time, the responsibility of the Member States themselves.

Some of you may ask why immigration policy should even have a European dimension. And what actually is the argument for migration questions being also resolved at the European level as well as on the national level?

I am convinced that there are a series of arguments – from purely practical ones through to conceptual as well as ideological ones. Therefore, I will not try to discuss three of them that I believe are the most important.

Firstly, the argument of solidarity between Member States. This is above all about illegal or undesirable migration that affects disproportionably those states in the "border area" of the European Union. This problem tends to be associated with the states along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea but it looks as if it will also increasingly concern the states on the eastern border of the EU. As we well know, since the immigration policy has developed in the third pillar i.e. the interior and justice – border control, the fight against international crime and co-operation in criminal and civil law matters. It can be said that this focus of European immigration policy on control or restrictive immigration lasted throughout the 1990s. However, in the last decade, additional dimensions have been added to the European immigration policy.

Secondly the argument justice, fair play, equal rights – with regard to both what is "fair" among individual Member States as well as what is "fair" for those arriving from the third countries. (If I say that this argument is in second place, I do not mean its importance – for me it has the same importance as the solidarity argument – but I refer to its status in the historical development.)

If legal migrants have diametrically different rights in various Member States this is not fair to these migrants nor vis-a-vis to these Member States. If these migrants are satisfactorily protected from exploitation in one Member State but not in another this is unacceptable both ethically because fundamental rights should be guaranteed in the EU zone and the semi-slavery conditions of migrants contradict European values – as well as practically. States without sufficient protection for their legal migrants can therefore, at least in the short-term, obtain an unauthorised competitive advantage.

I say "short-term", as I am convinced that the practice of integrating migrants into the lowest strata of society and wringing the maximum out from them for the lowest pay brings only temporary economic benefits. On the contrary, however, experience shows that in the long- run it is beneficial, for the states receiving these migrants if they enable migrants to become fully-fledged members of the society with the greatest professional mobility. But this does not change the fact that even short- term economic "benefits" from the insufficient protection of legal migrants are clearly unfair. This is why a European directive regulating the rights of citizens of the third countries with a long- term residency permit exists. And this is also why during this period the has submitted a draft framework directive that is somewhat akin to minimum harmonisation even for the rights of those legal migrants who have yet to acquire long-term residency status.

The solidarity argument, like the justice and fair play argument, also involves questions of a uniform asylum policy. Solidarity was applied in creating the ‘Dublin System’ (since 2003), which determines the rules for "receiving" asylum applications according to which state the applicant entered first. The European Union is striving for justice and fair play by gradually unifying the fundamental rules for granting international protection. But the asylum practices of individual Member States still contain significant and in essence unjustified differences. As my colleague , Vice-President of the European Commission, says: It is unacceptable for an asylum applicant from Iraq or Chechnya to have a 75% chance of success in one Member State and only a 0-1% chance in a neighbouring Member State! This is why the “second phase” of unifying asylum procedures to attain the same (or at least a comparable) degree of legal certainty throughout EU is now being launched. This second phase is due to be completed by 2010. It includes changes to both substantive and procedural law. It also includes the recently proposed creation of a new Office for Support in Asylum Issues, which will provide Member States with a joint database of information not only on asylum court practice developments but also, for example, on the situation in the individual countries from which applicants for international protection originate.

Of course, applicants for international protection are a specific category that at the legal level cannot be confused either with legal migrants or with the illegal ones. In reality, however, these categories often overlap. Because of the difficulties faced by the citizens of various problematic countries, in particular, in obtaining a visa to enter EU states it is not at all surprising that a significant number of international protection applicants, including those whose applications are subsequently acknowledged as justified, have entered the EU in a more or less illegal way. It can even be claimed with certainty that the more restrictive visa regimes are the more this will be the case. And, on the other hand, included among unsuccessful international protection applicants are a number of people who during the course of the proceedings legalise their residency in the state by other means, thus joining the category of legal migrants.

The third argument most frequently employed in recent years for bolstering the European dimension of the immigration policy is a pragmatic one. We can say it consists of two main pillars: (1) the existence of a domestic border-free European territory and (2) labour market needs.

A shared domestic EU territory, i.e. its core, consisting of the Schengen system, forces us to think about drafting a common European immigration policy because migrants –wanted or not, legal or illegal in one way or another – can move from one Member State to another to a great extent. Insisting on the sovereignty of Member States for migrants from the third countries is, in this context, hypothetically possible but difficult to implement in practice. This is because the fact is (which, however, various "guardians of national sovereignty" rather not mention), that eliminating internal borders is an entirely fundamental step away from the exclusive sovereignty of states towards a shared one. What has been a more powerful and clearer symbol of state sovereignty over the centuries than the right to control its borders and to regulate who to let into the state? However, it is then very difficult for us to find a method of applying this otherwise abandoned dimension of national sovereignty solely to those with non EU passports...

The second pillar of this argument, labour market needs, is about wanted and desired migration. In the last decade labour markets’ demand for migrants has grown progressively. This was a change from the 1990s, when there was a far more restrictive approach to labour migration and labour markets were relatively saturated. In the 1990s it was shown that the period of extensive industrial growth, and the associated need for an influx of new labour, had ended and jobs in industry were being replaced by new ones in the service sector. Qualification demands increased so that, in many cases, neither new migrants nor the original migrants or their descendants could fill the newly-created positions. An unusually high unemployment rate among ethnic minorities from abroad was a typical characteristic of the situation in the 1990s and with this came the potential for social exclusion and inter-ethnic tension. However, the situation in the last decade has started to change to renewed interest in European employers in labour migration. This was mainly because of more favourable economic indicators and also the new demographic development.

In 2005 when the European Commission published the ‘Green Book’ on Demographic Changes this led to a truly pan-European discussion on this topic. It was clear from the very beginning that it would not be entirely possible to fully set-off the decline in the labour force caused by the approaching retirement of the baby boomers but that certain measures lessening its effect had to taken. It was also clear that one of the answers to this problem, other than extending the productive life span of the middle-aged, is labour migration from the third countries. I emphasise: from the third countries, as intra-European mobility will not solve this problem. If, for example, citizens of the new Member States fill vacant positions on the labour market in the old Member States this must be viewed from the context of Europe’s demographic development as a whole not excluding the new Member States. This is because even these new EU Member States, in fact particularly these states, will face a sharp decline in both the relative and absolute number of people of a productive age in the

coming decades.

The European Commission’s response to this development was to prepare four legislative drafts on legal migration. They do not intend to set the number of migrants that Member States must accept but instead to put in place comparable rules across Europe and to eliminate some barriers that currently prevent applicants

from successfully migrating to Europe legally.

The Commission has already submitted one of these directives on highly qualified workers – a ’blue card’ will allow these workers to circulate among Member States. The other legislative drafts currently being prepared should ease the conditions for seasonal workers, giving them guaranteed access to a certain Member State for several years in advance; for those relocating within one company (’intra- corporate transferees’); and for paid trainees.

Besides this, the European Commission has published a statement on the ‘circular migration’ question. Its purpose is to replace the brain drain with brain circulation. In principle, the aim is for citizens of the third countries not to forfeit the rights they have acquired and can therefore temporarily return to their state of origin without hassles, something many of them currently want to do but simply cannot because their return to Europe would be blocked (or, more accurately, they would have to start the whole process again). This could markedly decrease illegal migration and be beneficial for all three parties – for the host country, the country of origin as well as the actual migrant.

Let me to add a third reason to these two practical reasons usually given for a pan-European approach that I firmly believe exists. This involves the link between legal and illegal migration.

We will certainly all agree that there is a fundamental difference between legal and illegal migration from the legal, ethical as well as the economic viewpoint; that we should regulate the first form of migration in a reasonable manner while restricting the second as much as possible. There is probably less agreement on what the priority is, whether to regulate legal migration or to restrict the illegal variety and whether these two processes are in any way connected.

The European Commission is more and more inclined to the opinion that these two processes are connected: Many migrants find themselves in an unregulated category not because they prefer a lesser legal status and exploitation on the black market but because they have not managed to secure a better legal status for themselves. (Only a few prefer an unregulated status; and some people, particularly members of criminal networks, tend to be very (word missing) with regard to legalising their status.) In other words, many unregulated migrants are potential legal migrants.

What is the result of this? That not even the question of illegal migration and illegal employment can be resolved solely by repression. That besides measures against illegal migration – such as the recently approved directive on punishing employers who employ illegal migrants – legitimate channels must also be opened for legal work migration. Also therefore the European Commission submits these legislative initiatives on the various categories of legal migrants; this is also why it stimulates the development of circular migration and the reason why we published an announcement two years ago on the entire wider phenomenon of illegal work, i.e. not just illegal migrants. This is because it is appropriate to apply measures that generally limit the motivation to work illegally – not just regressive measures but also fiscal ones for example.

You may think: that it is all well and good for the European Commission to consider the needs of European labour markets as one of the reasons for creating a pro-active legal immigration policy but isn’t this approach now obsolete? As recently as the middle of last year most economic experts were predicting further GDP growth and the associated growth in the demand for labour, today Europe is suffering an economic crisis, jobs are being reduced and foreign citizens are often the first to

be retrenched.

Therefore, I must repeat what I have been saying all these years when I came across a unilaterally instrumental approach to legal work migration – and that is that the immigration policy was approached

SOLELY from the aspect of labour market’s current needs.

I have always emphasised that such reductionism is unacceptable; that a sound immigration policy can not be formed without taking into account the needs of the migrants themselves. In this respect, I have always emphasised the need for integration from the first minute onwards, not only through work but also via targeted integration programmes. I also expressed the opinion that the aim of integration programmes should be to gain inter-cultural know-how and skills that can be applied in a person’s practical life and not merely learning the local language, however important this may be, and should certainly not indoctrinate the migrant with the ethno-national mythology of the given state, as we can encounter in some Member

States.

I must remind you that migrants are above all people with the usual human needs; they are not mere numbers in a table who fulfil someone else’s needs. Instrumentalising people does not always pay off. Many Member States have already gone through this experience back in the previous waves of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s, which they treated as merely reserves of cheap and undemanding labour; today they are harvesting the bitter fruit of this short-sighted approach. As one wise German politician said (and this is a quote I often repeat):

"We invited a labour force but got people."

Thus, in the context of the current economic crisis, I would like to warn Member States against suddenly turning 180 degrees and quickly getting rid of those migrants that they actively enticed into their states just a few months ago. It would evoke the impression that these states wanted to attract migrants solely for very instrumental reasons, just to fill the "holes" in their labour forces, or, in a worse-case scenario, for contemptible motives i.e. because various “mediators” or de facto extortionists, who siphoned off a significant portion of their pay, lobbied to have these workers hired.

Conclusion

Of course, no one can say with certainty how long this crisis will last. It is, however, obvious that it will be over sooner or later and that new demand will arise on the labour markets. Even more obvious is that the current crisis will not in any way delay the onset of the demographic changes already mentioned. In ten years there will simply be less Europeans of a productive age than today because, even from a purely instrumental viewpoint, it is probable that, in the long-run, the “need” for migrants will once again rise after some fluctuations. But at the conclusion of my speech I suggest that we view this crisis as an opportunity to depart from a purely instrumental approach and try to use an approach that will emphasise the NEEDS OF BOTH PARTIES – i.e. the companies hiring the migrants (in the widest sense of the word, not limited to employers!), but also the migrants themselves and their family members.

I trust this conference will provide you with further inspiration in preparing a well-considered and balanced immigration policy to attain long-term objectives at the Member States level, the local and regional level, and also at the European level. Thank you for your attention.