Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-03-Speech-2-062"

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"en.20090203.5.2-062"2
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". Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, there are between four and a half and eight million non-EU citizens in an irregular situation in Europe – these are the Commission’s figures. This is an utterly negligible number: just over 1% of the resident population of the European Union. It is clearly a problem that has been over-exaggerated. These are workers who perform useful services, such as personal services and work in the tourist industry and, in the vast majority of cases, they have been absorbed by the job market. These are workers who are useful to our economy, but they are exploited workers – exploited to reduce labour costs and to enrich unscrupulous employers. These are workers who often do jobs not performed by EU citizens. We need these people, but they have entered Europe illegally for a simple reason, which is that there is no legal way for them to come in. The same thing happened to the great majority of citizens whose situation is now legal but who entered the European Union illegally. What was needed was another measure: one that regularised the situation of these millions of people. What was needed was a measure to free them from slavery, blackmail and exploitation. Instead we have a directive that carries on where the Return Directive left off. First we decided on the expulsion procedures; today we are deciding on the potential expulsion catchment area and are even specifying who will pay for the expulsions. With this directive, the exploited pay more than the exploiters. Unfortunately, there is no provision for a general regularisation measure, not even for those who report their own status, or who report their exploiters or the crime that is being committed. They go straight from being exploited in illegal work to being expelled. We needed something different. We needed a measure to favour legality, and not the criminalisation of those who are currently here illegally. We needed a measure to curb xenophobia. Yesterday, the Italian Minister for Home Affairs said specifically, ‘We have to be hard on illegal immigrants’; in other words, we have to be hard on the vulnerable. I believe we are fostering this kind of xenophobic attitude with this directive. We in the European Union need immigrants – the Commission says so itself: 50 million by 2060 – because we are in the middle of a demographic crisis, but we are doing nothing to help them enter. Instead, we are harmonising the expulsion system and today we are deciding to expel those who are here illegally even though they may be workers who have been absorbed into the European job market. I think the effects of this directive will be devastating, because it will make immigrants and the job market go even further underground and increase the exploitative crimes of unscrupulous bosses."@en1
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