EU proposes new door for legal immigration
BERLIN - With a newly empowered Germany at the helm, the European Union is making surprising strides toward expanding legal immigration into the bloc as a whole for the first time.
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This week, EU justice and home affairs ministers announced their intent to create new temporary visas with African countries. The initiative -essentially a guest-worker program- comes at a crucial time for Europe, which has been overwhelmed with record numbers of immigrants, and may see a new wave this spring. Officials hope to promote a pattern of ”circular migration” - likely offering sending countries incentives to make sure their nationals return home and instituting penalties if they don’t.
The initiative is an attempt to manage a problem that shocked Europeans last year as they witnessed the desperate efforts of more than 30,000 African migrants -about six times the total for 2005- to transit north through the Canary Islands. For some, however, it echoes Germany’s postwar Gastarbeiter program -similar to the US Bracero program for Mexicans that ended in the 1960s- which brought in more than 7 million workers, many of whom simply stayed on.
The outcome will be determined by the plan’s structure and its implementation across the EU, analysts say. „It’s both an old idea and a new idea at the same time”, says Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. „The question is how do you really set up the system - what are the incentives the disincentives.” (The Christian Science Monitor)
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