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

Border Controls 61
Any Colombian, Russian or Nigerian who had legally entered the EU through
Rome, Vienna or Paris would be free to waltz into Britain with no checks on them. ...
Thus, the Portuguese consulate in Mozambique, or the German consulate in
Colombia, by issuing a visa, could determine who ultimately entered Britain. ...
This was a bombshell. ...
We had never envisaged that freedom of movement within the European Union
meant that we would be obliged to admit non-EU citizens without any right to control
their numbers.
The British, of course, flattered themselves if they thought that people who
had managed to enter Germany or Portugal would then wish to ‘waltz’ into
Britain in any numbers.
The Amsterdam Treaty, negotiated in 1998, stated that within a five-year
period there should be agreement on measures with respect to external
borders to allow free movement of persons in line with article 7a of the
Maastricht Treaty; measures to implement an ‘absence of any controls on
persons, be they citizens of the Union or nationals of third countries, when
crossing internal borders’; and measures to harmonise the treatment of
refugees. In an initial three-year period decisions were to be made by the
Council of Ministers, acting unanimously; subsequently decisions could be
by qualified majority. The Schengen agreements were absorbed into the
Maastricht Treaty and became law, with a protocol enabling Britain to opt
in to its provisions. In March 1999 the British Home Secretary Jack Straw
announced in Brussels that Britain now wished to opt in to aspects of the
Schengen Convention which related to police and judicial cooperation and
information-gathering, such as the strengthening of Europol, and to
participate in the Schengen information system (SIS), set up to provide a
computer database on ‘criminals, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants’.
Europol is a European police organisation originally set up under the
Maastricht Treaty as the ‘European Drugs Unit’, which has recently become
involved in the hunting and detention of migrants, including asylum seekers.
The SIS is a massive system, which has been condemned by both Amnesty
International and the UNHCR, designed to increase internal controls on
migration; it has more than 30,000 terminals and contains large amounts
of personal information, including fingerprints. Almost 90 per cent of those
registered on the SIS are ‘unwanted immigrants’, including many asylum
seekers. The British were also enthusiastic promoters of such control
measures at the special EU justice and home affairs summit at Tampere in
Finland in October 1999. Straw was said to hope that agreement on asylum
criteria at Tampere and afterwards might help to curb what he considered to
be the excessive liberalism of British judges. The likelihood was that the
search for common procedures and criteria would lead to agreement on the
lowest common denominator.
The curbing of migration and asylum seeking, and in particular of what
is called in the jargon the ‘trafficking’ of migrants and refugees, has become
an obsession with the authorities of European states. According to John