By IPS Correspondents
MADRID, Jun 20 2000 (IPS)

Immigration is desirable in the European Union (EU) as long as it is controlled and selective, agreed several government leaders at the close of a two-day summit Tuesday in the Portuguese city of Santa Maria da Feira.

Such statements are, at least in part, a response to recent events in Spain and Britain, which revealed the deep roots of crime organisations that are involved in the illegal trafficking of immigrants, profiting from the desperate needs of citizens from countries as varied as Morocco and China.

Tuesday, Spain’s Civil Guard (militarised police) detained a van in Malaga, on the northern Mediterranean coast, finding 36 people who had not eaten in four days and lacked identification papers and immigration visas.

The case involved four Algerians and 32 Moroccans, six of them minors.

According to the Civil Guard, the driver, whose identity was not released, has a criminal record and is thought to be part of a criminal group dedicated to smuggling and transporting illegal immigrants.

Monday, 58 Chinese would-be immigrants arrived at the British port of Dover, dead – asphyxiated inside the truck that had illegally brought them, by ferry, from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.

In Feira, French President Jacques Chirac and Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar joined in calling on the European Council, made up of the presidents of the EU’s 15 member countries, to accelerate application of the immigration measures approved last year in Tampere, Finland.

The heads of the 15 countries accepted the petition and Tuesday committed to implementing the measures, which establish that only immigrants with entry visas may enter the EU, those without are subject to immediate deportation.

Aznar also called on the EU to adopt “standardised policies to confront the immigration mafias,” referring to the organised crime rings that smuggle people without legal immigration documents into EU countries.

The Spanish prime minister stated he had directed his Foreign Affairs minister Abel Matutes to draft an urgent document on concrete steps for the “accelerated” implementation of the Tampere measures.

The European Council called on France, which begins its six months at the helm of the EU July 1, and on the European Commission (the EU executive body) to tighten cooperation between member countries and Europol (European Police) in order to “detect and dismantle the criminal networks” involved in trafficking of illegal immigrants.

The policies approved in Tampere last year establish that entrance visas into the EU would be granted on the basis of quotas, to be established by the individual member countries, and would reflect the labour needs of the local economies.

In Germany, the government has approved the entry of 20,000 computer experts, while in Spain, the autonomous governments of Catalonia, Andalusia, Extremadura and Valencia are calling for increases in visas for farm labourers.

Spain’s governing Popular Party (PP), which has a majority in parliament, has announced it will approve changes to the Law on Foreigners, in effect since the beginning of the year, to adapt the legislation to the more-restrictive Tampere principles.

The increased flow of immigrants from African nations coming to Europe through Spain has won the country the reputation as the region’s “southern gate.”

Portuguese writer José Saramago, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and resident of the Canary Islands, has criticised the former European colonial powers that exploited Africa and its people for now responding to the flow of immigrants “with forts, walls and machine guns.”

If Africa were a developed continent, the people would stay there and come here as tourists, said Saramago, because with the natural wealth of Africa, they should be able to live well there.

The Spanish government’s announced changes in the Law on Foreigners sparked a wave of protest from labour unions, the Catholic Church, legal associations and opposition political parties.

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