An EU plan to impose migrant quotas on member states — stipulating how many refugees each country should accept — appeared close to collapse on Tuesday after France and Spain withdrew their support.
The UK said last week it would opt out of the scheme, saying it opposed compulsory quotas for immigrants on principle, but insisting it would continue to accept asylum seekers.
Now the future of the plan, part of a package of proposals for addressing the Mediterranean migrant crisis drawn up by the European Commission, is in doubt.
The package also includes potential military action against smuggling networks, including the destruction of smugglers’ boats.
The EU is awaiting approval from the UN Security Council for such action.
French President Francois Hollande said he supported a fairer distribution of refugees among EU states, but that quotas were unacceptable.
“It’s out of the question to have immigrant quotas, because we have rules on border checks and policies for overseeing immigration,” Hollande said at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Hollande’s remarks came a day after Spain signaled it would reject a quota system.
Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo firmly rejected the plans on Monday, saying the country’s double-digit unemployment rate meant it could not take in more migrants.
“Pledging to take in migrants to whom you cannot provide work would be, in my opinion, providing a bad service,” he said.
Speaking to Spanish radio broadcaster Cadena Ser on Tuesday morning, he emphasized the economic motivations behind migration.
“It’s logical that people want to seek a better future where they can find it — for that reason one of the parameters that you have to keep in mind is unemployment,” he said. “The first priority is in providing work. A country that has 23 percent unemployment isn’t the same as one that is below 5 percent.”
Garcia-Margallo said the commission’s call for solidarity had to be “proportionate, just and realistic,” adding that it took no account of the “huge effort we are making to control migration from Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal which impacts the whole EU.”
The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia have also opposed the quota system.
In his remarks on Tuesday, Hollande said that all purely economic migrants would be deported.
“People who come because they think that Europe is a prosperous continent, even when they are not hired by companies ... must be escorted back; that’s the rule,” he said.
However, he said Germany, France and Sweden were accepting a large number of asylum seekers among the migrants.
“We must ensure that other countries can also play their part,” he said. “This is what we call distribution.”
Merkel was non-committal, saying that she and Hollande had each asked their interior ministers to “reflect” on the proposals from the European commission.
“There are many questions that deserve examination,” she said.
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