Immigration issue grips Europe

Although ideas such as the British suggestion that Royal Navy vessels patrol the straits of Gibraltar attract a lot of attention, migration experts say such ideas aren't much of a solution.

Most illegal immigrants in Europe do not arrive bedraggled on the beach, struggling from rusty boats, as the popular imagination would have it. Instead they arrive by plane or bus, quite legally, with tourist visas that they then overstay.

More visible, however, are the desperate asylum seekers, like the 1,300 refugees – mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq – sheltering in Sangatte, near Calais in northern France, while they wait for their nightly chance to hop a train through the Channel tunnel to England.

In fact, the number of foreigners seeking political asylum in the EU last year was 384,530 – well down from the peak in 1992, when the war in Bosnia and Croatia pushed 675,460 people to seek shelter in Western Europe. Last year's figure was only marginally higher than the annual average over the past decade, according to UNHCR statistics.

That fact would not be obvious by reading many of the European papers or listening to politicians. And the debate has spurred a number of countries to toughen up their laws on foreigners. In Denmark, for example, a three-week-old law gives only long-term residents full welfare payments. Newcomers will have to wait seven years before they are entitled to normal unemployment benefits.

In Britain, the government recently announced it will open three camps in remote rural areas to house asylum applicants, and has suggested that their children should be educated in separate schools.

In Italy, a draft law aims to expel more illegal immigrants when they are caught, ensures that legal immigrants have a job contract before they leave home, and requires that all non-EU immigrants – Americans included – be fingerprinted on arrival.

Often lost in all the uproar is the fact that Europe needs immigrants to ensure its economic growth and to fund the pension systems in countries where aging and shrinking populations cannot sustain them.

"[Immigration] is a fountain of vitality and energy that is indispensable for a Europe that's aging," said European Commission president Romano Prodi earlier this week.

And Italian businessmen have been trying to water down Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's toughnew legislation, fearing that it might dry up a valuable source of labor in a country where Indians and Pakistanis now do jobs such as cow herding.

In the long term, European officials say, the goal is for the 15 EU countries to harmonize their rules on asylum and on legal channels of immigration, so as to reduce the human traffickers' scope for action.

In the current atmosphere, however, it seems more likely that they will concentrate on clamping down, to show voters that they are doing something.

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