Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

58 Open Borders
differ, for example, from the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), which excludes labour from its freedoms. The Treaty of Rome
contained a chapter entitled ‘Freedom of Movement for Workers’. The
intention was not only that labour should be treated as one of the
commodities traded across frontiers, for the benefit of capital, but that this
freedom of movement should be a means of increasing popular support for
European integration. Migrants within Europe were to have full social and
family rights. When Greece joined the EEC in 1980 and Spain and Portugal
in 1986, this meant that people who had traditionally emigrated to northern
Europe for work now had freedom to do so. In 1986 the Single Europe Act
was adopted. Its article 7a states that:
The internal market shall comprise an area without internal frontiers in which the
free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured in accordance with
the provisions of this Treaty.
The implication was that, just as there are no controls between regions in
national markets, there should be none at frontiers between member states.
However in the 1970s two different sets of immigration rights began to be
created. Not only was immigration from outside Europe virtually stopped,
but the rights of ‘third-country nationals’ who were already settled in Europe
differed sharply from those of migrants with the nationality of one of the
member countries. The prospect of the elimination of border controls at
frontiers aroused irrational fears in the authorities of uncontrolled
movements of hordes of non-European nationals across frontiers. Although
they had been prepared to take the risk that Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese
and Greeks might migrate en masse to northern Europe, apparently they
were unwilling to contemplate the prospect that, for example, all Turkish
people settled in Europe might choose to migrate to Germany, North
Africans might all travel to France and Pakistanis to Britain. ‘Third country
nationals’ therefore continued to have severely restricted rights to move
around Europe and limited rights to family reunification and social
protections if they did move.
In addition, while internal borders were being dismantled, the west
European states became more concerned about the joint enforcement of their
external borders. There was pressure from northern countries for southern
countries to introduce and tighten immigration controls. There had been an
almost total absence of immigration controls in Greece, Italy, Spain and
Portugal, traditionally countries of emigration rather than immigration, but
now more attractive as destinations because of their membership of the
European Community. In Italy, for example, a decision was made to stop
issuing new labour permits in 1982, but foreign workers continued to work
without them; it was not until 1986 that immigration legislation was
enacted to prohibit illegal immigration, followed by the ‘Martelli law’ of 1990
which set annual quotas for admitting immigrants, and established asylum
procedures. In Portugal, an Aliens Law was passed in 1992; it established