Frattini plan won’t set slave workers free

Date: 22/12/05

Before joining the European Commission last year, Franco Frattini sat in Italy's government, where one of his ministerial colleagues was Umberto Bossi who infamously called for the country's navy to open fire on ships carrying immigrants.

Nonetheless, the commissioner for justice, freedom and security will present migration in a largely positive light today (21 December), when he unveils plans to allow foreign professionals to live and work in the EU.

Frattini has admitted that he is in favour of a system partly based on the US Green Card system to accelerate applications from engineers, medical staff and scientists for work and residence permits.

He can draw on a variety of forecasts to support the argument that Europe will need well-qualified migrants to address the demographic factors which could imperil the Union's economic success in the future. Eurostat, the Commission's data collection office, predicts that deaths in the EU's 25 countries could outstrip births by the end of this decade. Should current trends continue, that could lead to a shortfall of 20 million workers across the EU, while the pension needs of the increasingly ageing nature of the population would put extra strains on the exchequers of national capitals.

Migration to Europe has also brought some benefits to poor countries. Statistics from the World Bank indicate that the amount of money which migrant workers send home is about EUR 100 billion per year - almost EUR 40bn more than what poor countries receive in development aid.

Frattini knows, however, that his room for manoeuvre is limited. He has made clear that any fast-track procedures he proposes will only apply to well-educated professionals. He acknowledged last week that member states would not accept a common approach to permits for less-skilled workers.

This point was stressed recently by the woman who will chair the Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers during Austria's EU presidency in the first half of 2006. Liese Prokop, the interior minister in the Austrian government, said: "The principle of 'one size fits all' does not seem appropriate to me. The baseline situations and the admission and integration capacities of the member states still vary greatly across the EU, as do the job markets and the requirements of different economic sectors."

Justice officials in the Commission have been studying the existing fast-track initiatives for work permits already in place in many EU countries to see if these can be introduced across the Union. It is common, for example, that EU countries process applications for nurses within a matter of days so that gaps in healthcare services can be plugged, whereas decisions for other categories of workers can take several months.

Although Frattini has not shied away from muttering the words 'Green Card', some officials are nervous about using the term. This is largely because the best-known recent attempt by an EU government to introduce a Green Card was something of a failure.

In 2000, Germany launched a Green Card system for 10,000 information technology workers, with a view to making use of the skills acquired by those employed in India's burgeoning computer industry. Two years later, only 3,000 such permits had been issued. Among the reasons cited for the poor performance were the restrictions placed on workers from bringing their families to Germany, the limitation of the contracts on offer to two years and the requirement that the workers would have to leave the country once the contracts had expired.

According to Frattini, the main focus of his work on low-skilled migrants will be to prevent them working outside the formal labour market.

As well as depriving the state of revenue, many jobs in the 'informal sector' or black market are dubbed by the International Organisation for Migration as '3D': dirty, dangerous and degrading.

German Socialist MEP Wolfgang Kreissl-D�rfler said that he had heard of examples where immigrants were refused wages by their employers when a designated pay-day arrived. If the immigrants then protested, he added, the bosses threatened to notify the authorities of their illegal status.

No doubt, it will take much more than the new Commission plans to free large numbers of migrant workers from effective slavery.

Preview analysis of the European Commission's Communication 'Policy Plan on Legal Migration', jointly presented 21 December 2005 by Vice-President Franco Frattini, Commissioner responsible for Justice, Freedom and Security, and Commissioner Vladimir Špidla, responsible for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. This plan has been developed in order to comply with a request in the Hague Programme, the EU multi-annual work programme in the field of Justice, Freedom and Security. The Hague programme explicitly asked the Commission to present, before the end of 2005, 'a policy plan on legal migration, including admission procedures capable of responding promptly to fluctuating demands for migrant labour in the labour market'.

European Commission: Press Release: IP/05/1664 http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/05/1664&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

---