Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-07-Speech-2-321"
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"en.20050607.28.2-321"2
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"Mr President, immigration, integration and asylum are still taboo subjects, particularly in the old EU Member States. Everybody attempts to dodge these issues, and this is undoubtedly why there has been no real follow-up to the 1999 Tampere Programme. One of the reasons behind the ‘no’ vote in the constitutional referendum in the Netherlands was the authorities’ failure to take the issue of immigration seriously. I therefore welcome this debate as an opportunity to hold a frank exchange of views, even though I disagree with a great deal of what is said in the report, and even though I fear that this debate will be anything but frank.
Politicians are too cowardly to deal properly with the issues of immigration and integration. It annoys me when people say that the EU is in favour of legal immigration but opposed to illegal immigration. This is entirely hypocritical. There is in fact no such thing as legal immigration, because in practice people can only immigrate illegally. As few as 5 000 of the 50 000 Poles working in Brussels live and work here legally. The figures are even more striking in the case of non-EU citizens.
It annoys me to hear people declaring war on human traffickers, when we are in fact faced with a more pressing problem in the shape of the people arriving in Europe who are grateful to these traffickers for their services, which unfortunately come at a price. We should call a spade a spade, and adopt common European legislation on immigration. We should state in plain terms that for the most part there is no such thing as immigration into Europe, and that we believe Christians integrate better than Muslims. The truth hurts, but it is preferable to lies, and we should rid ourselves of feelings of colonial guilt. We should state the facts and our opinion of them quite openly, and wherever possible, we should provide assistance to the world’s poorer peoples in their own countries, within the framework of intergovernmental programmes."@en1
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