The Diplomat
The Vice-President of the European Commission and responsible for the Promotion of the European Way of Life, Margaritis Schinas, yesterday expressed his confidence that the European Pact on Migration and Asylum will go ahead during the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council, which will take place from July 1.
“It cannot be that we have the largest internal market and the second strongest currency in the world, but we have not developed this common migration policy,” Schinas said during his speech at an event organized in Madrid by New Economy Forum.
Therefore, he declared, it is necessary to move forward with the European Pact on Migration and Asylum and “present it to the Europeans for the 2024 elections”, because, “if we don’t do it, the Europhobes, the populists of the right and left, will attack the EU again”.
“There is not much time,” he warned. “We have the Spanish and Belgian presidencies”, but the presidencies prior to the European elections, as is the case of the Belgian one, “do not usually have much room for action” and, therefore, the desirable thing is that the Spanish presidency “manages to approve this Pact”, Schinas assured, “without wanting to put pressure on the Spaniards”.
“It is necessary to evolve towards a legal migration in the EU” that allows to regulate the arrival of the labor force needed by the European labor market and that can be achieved with this Pact, which he described as “a house with three floors: management with the countries of origin and transit, border control and solidarity”. “Leaving aside all the political toxicity, we must do it, and not all States are in favor of it,” he lamented. “There is 60% agreement on its content and we are missing that other 40%, but, for the first time, there is some convergence between the Commission, the States and the Parliament,” he added.
According to the Vice-President, “we Europeans have been more successful as firefighters than as architects” in managing migration policy. “We have succeeded in managing crises and in responding to attempts to instrumentalize migration at borders by authoritarian regimes such as Turkey, Belarus or Morocco.” “We have also managed to put an end to the shame of Moria (on the Greek islands)” and to achieve quality standards in these centers. However, he regretted, “we lack this work of architects and to conclude once and for all this internal migration policy.”
