Madam President, we have said a thousand times in this House that a global European immigration policy must be based, firstly, on the establishment of legal immigration rules and then on strong instruments to ensure that these rules are complied with. We are today discussing a proposed directive which would constitute the cornerstone of this policy, a directive on which the Council, of course, has not made much progress. Parliament should also have given its opinion some time ago, but we always lag behind on these issues. I have chosen this moment to present my report because, for the first time in a long time, the Greek Presidency has included the issue of legal immigration on the political agenda, something which I am glad about. The Commission’s proposed directive is intended to harmonise the conditions for entry and residence for nationals of third countries who intend to enter a Member State for employment reasons. It allows the entry of workers from a third country in the event that the post cannot be filled by a national worker or a worker from another Member State of the Union or by a resident of a third country with the right to access the labour market. The proposal lays down a contract at origin for the immigrant worker, except for those who reside legally within the European Union for other reasons. The residence permit and the work permit would be combined as one single document. The adoption of this directive would involved the recognition of the need for legal channels for immigration and would create a more transparent framework with simpler procedures, which would provide economic actors with more facilities and also reinforce the rights of immigrants. For my part, I welcome the Commission’s proposal. I only regret that the Commission, no doubt as a result of realism, has not been able to reflect in this proposed directive some of the ideas it put forward in previous communications, because I sincerely believe that we cannot continue to copy models of immigration control employed during the last century, when the industrial society was at its height, but that we must be able to imagine new procedures suited to our world, to a society and a labour market which operate according to principles which are very different to those of the decades following the war. Some of the measures studied by the Commission, such as mobility, moved in the right direction and reality will oblige us to return to them. Madam President, this is just an opinion report. I would have preferred to have produced a resolution rather than a package of amendments – which are unlikely to be read or taken into account by those people with real decision-making powers. But for procedural reasons we have had to present a package of amendments and these must reflect two fundamental issues. Firstly, a strong will and a strong signal in favour of a European immigration policy. We need clear rules which can be complied with. We have therefore rejected the amendments, above all those presented by the Group, which intended to convert the directive into a kind of recommendation which the States could comply with or not. Neither have we accepted the amendments which introduced requirements other than employment and which were difficult to verify. If we accept that the possibility of performing a job of work is what legitimises entry and residence in the Union, we must then ensure that this system works. By requiring that the immigrant has a contract or a firm offer while still in the country of origin, we are thereby regulating access in accordance with the labour market. Even in a situation of unemployment, this would simply become paralysed. Secondly, we must establish rules which can be complied with, thereby incentivising the arrival of immigrants through regular channels and preventing illegal contracts; preventing immigrant workers from ending up in an illegal situation, for bureaucratic reasons, once in the Union; and discourage, as far as possible, the entry of immigrants without permits. We proposed three things in this regard: that people legally residing in the Union, or who are here legally for any reason or have entered with a residency permit and have lost it, can recover their legal situation and not remain permanently in an irregular situation and that the States can, if they wish, establish a six-month visa for seeking work. Other elements we have introduced are the strengthening of equal conditions amongst workers, with a view to preventing all types of discrimination and the creation of a second-class labour market to which both immigrants and native workers would fall victim. We also intend for workers to be given equal rights and obligations, for workers to be allowed to move freely within the Member State – for obvious reasons I do not believe we have to go further – and, in general, to reduce the time periods and bureaucratic obstacles to establishing this immigration policy. Like our citizens and their representatives, like the employers and the unions, I hope that we can create clear rules based on the criteria of efficiency and not on ideological problems, which are of little help.

Political group: PSE