Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-04-Speech-3-121"
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"en.20010404.5.3-121"2
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"Mr President
[I should now like to speak in French]. Everything was for the best in the best of all worlds. Everyone knew that there were several million illegal immigrants in Western Europe, everyone knew that they were coming in every day, trickling through our sieve-like borders, coming from all over the world, everyone knows the routes that they take and the main countries of entry, but at least, until now, all this has been going on quietly and discreetly, so as not to disturb good bourgeois consciences and the sleep of the self-righteous.
Everyone finds their own particular satisfaction in this: this is how the pro-immigrant associations justify their existence, and the public subsidies that they enjoy. Governments end up regularising everybody, or almost everybody, thereby demonstrating their attachment to the essential values of tolerance, human rights and openness towards others. The bishops fill the desperately empty churches with illegal immigrants. Trades unions and industry find, thanks to immigration, the reinforcements that they so much require to make up for European workers’ lack of interest, and, of course, the bosses welcome the new labour force arriving on the market.
In short, it was an ill wind, and then suddenly, catastrophe: on 17 February, the cargo of the “East Sea” was deliberately beached on the French coast. On board were 912 illegal immigrants, of which 420 were children. And there you are, they landed, they are there, or rather – it has to be said – they
there. For the question we are asking now, regardless of the reasons why they were beached and the conditions in which it happened, is this: what has become of them? They have disappeared, melted into the background, over 600 of these illegal immigrants have miraculously vanished, they have done a disappearing act. For example, when the camp was closed by the prefect of Var, on 1 March, 449 people were supposed to have been taken into custody. Since then, more than 200 of them have disappeared. At Modane, the destination of the first people leaving via the Fréjus Pass, of the 82 Kurds welcomed with such ceremony, 40 have vanished into thin air.
But why has this happened? Why, when all the politicians, the various interest groups and others have all called unanimously for these immigrants to be permanently received here? Why, when the French government has arranged everything so well, giving them an eight-day pass of safe conduct so as to allow them to complete the formalities that will enable them to obtain official status as political refugees? Simply because these illegal immigrants preferred to use parallel secret networks for slipping into France and slipping out again.
What a psychological shock, what a cause for concern to the self-righteous. Unfortunately, this business is purely symbolic, it is a drop in the ocean, because every month there are thousands of illegal immigrants who succeed in getting into France. But others will follow, millions of others, who will arrive on foot and by train. Our problem is to organise their return to their own countries so that they can live and work in those countries with dignity."@en1
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