Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-26-Speech-3-023"
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"en.20070926.2.3-023"2
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"Mr President, poor Mr Frattini is still lost in the Hampton Court maze as we see the EU moving ever further from democracy. Let us contrast our position – and not for the first time – with Switzerland.
Switzerland knows that local knowledge is the key to immigration policy. The EU seeks to centralise immigration control above the level of national governments. The Swiss, in contrast, devolve it downwards, wherever possible, to the level of their cantons. In Switzerland the annual quota for immigrants is partly decided by the Federal Government and partly by the cantons. Proposals for a federal migration agency have been rejected there.
The Swiss cantons and their long tradition of direct democracy have been the historic drivers of an immigration policy which works to the benefit of the national economy and ensures that immigrants are well integrated into Swiss society. As Professor Windisch of the University of Geneva told the French Foundation for Political Innovation in its April 2006 newsletter, Swiss direct democracy had to – openly and very early on – confront issues involving immigration and integration by means – perish the thought! – of referendums and popular initiatives. He continued: ‘Unlike an extremely centralist country such as France, the debate was led both at the federal level and on a canton and commune scale, calling for community-based responses, and involved initiatives such as setting up an integration office in every canton and the geographic dispersion of new arrivals.’
The lesson for those of us who, unlike the Swiss, have not had the good fortune to stay outside the EU is this: immigration policy works in Switzerland because it is decided according to local needs as well as national ones and because local communities, not faceless, centralised bureaucracy, are responsible for the integration of migrants on the basis of those needs. In the UK, subject as it is temporarily to EU membership, immigration policy moves ever further away from that fount of local knowledge, and we in the UK Independence Party have been quick to point out the shortcomings of that approach."@en1
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