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.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
The Philippines yesterday slammed an “irresponsible” Chinese state media report claiming a disputed reef in the South China Sea was under Beijing’s control, saying the “status quo” was unchanged. Tiexian Reef (鐵線礁), also known as Sandy Cay Reef, lies near Thitu Island, or Pagasa, where the Philippines stations troops and maintains a coast guard monitoring base. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on Saturday said that the China Coast Guard had “implemented maritime control” over Tiexian Reef in the middle of this month. The Philippines and China have been engaged in months of confrontations over the South China Sea, which Beijing claims nearly in its
RSS