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

Border Controls 59
detention centres for migrants and introduced visa requirements. Spain
passed an Aliens Act in 1985, with a labour permit scheme. Both Spain and
Portugal have regularised large numbers of foreign workers and granted
amnesties.
Pressure on these countries to enforce their border controls, and other
attempts to coordinate the policing of immigration policies, took place under
what was called ‘ad hoc’ intergovernmental cooperation. This meant that
discussions were secret and outside the political arena, not open to
questioning by the European Parliament. States were unwilling to hand over
any control of their national borders, which they considered a sensitive
matter of national sovereignty, to European institutions, believing the latter
were too favourably disposed towards migration and the human rights of
migrants. But France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg
signed an agreement at Schengen in 1985 under which border controls
between themselves were to be abolished by 1 January 1990. A further
agreement on procedures for people crossing the external frontiers of the
Schengen group, and a procedure for determining the country responsible for
considering asylum applications, was signed in June 1990, when the
agreement became the Schengen Convention. Subsequently all other EU
states except Ireland and Britain have joined or stated their intention to ratify
the Schengen Convention. The British objection to Schengen was based on
its unwillingness to abandon immigration controls on people travelling from
the rest of the EU. But the British Home Office was keen to participate in other
Schengen activities, such as the exchange of information between
immigration authorities and sanctions against airlines and shipping
companies carrying undocumented refugees. The British had also been
enthusiastic participants and founder members in the earlier Trevi Group,
set up in 1975 to formulate policies on terrorism, drugs and illegal
immigration.
In 1986 an Ad Hoc Group on Immigration was set up, following a
proposal from the British government. It was concerned with the harmonisation
of asylum policies, to examine ‘the measures to be taken to reach a
common policy to put an end to the abusive use of the right to asylum’, and
also with the harmonisation of visa requirements. In 1987 a list of 50
countries, whose nationals would require visas to enter the EU, was agreed.
By 1993 the list had expanded to 73 countries, with a further 92 countries
from which visas were required by only some European states. The list now
contains virtually all Third World countries, and all the ‘refugee-producing’
countries. In 1990 the Dublin Convention was signed, following closely an
arrangement already agreed by the Schengen countries. This stated that
asylum seekers had the right to make only one application in the territory
of the European Community. Rather than giving asylum seekers a choice in
the matter, the convention laid down that the state responsible for
considering an application should be either the one in which the refugee first
arrived, or the state which had issued a visa or otherwise facilitated entry. If