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IMMIGRATION

Switzerland awaits EU verdict on immigration solution

Will the EU accept that Switzerland’s ‘light’ immigration solution doesn’t contravene the free movement of people?

Published: 14 December 2016 10:12 CET

Switzerland awaits EU verdict on immigration solution

The Swiss President (L) will be hoping it will be all smiles again when EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker gives his verdict. Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP

That’s the question on politicians’ lips after parliament came to an agreement earlier this week about how to implement the ‘against mass immigration’ initiative, voted for in a February 2014 referendum, which called for quotas to be placed on immigration from the EU.

After nearly three years of debate, MPs decided to water down the original text, rejecting quotas in favour of a 'light' solution giving Swiss workers preference over EU workers in the job market.

The move was designed to preserve country’s relationship with the EU, which would have been thrown in disarray by fixed quotas, deemed a breach of the two parties’ bilateral agreement on the free movement of people.

The new law is subject to a final vote on Friday but is likely to be passed, given the political parties in favour have a majority over the dissenting Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and the Christian Democrats (CVP), which the Tages Anzeiger reported is likely to abstain.

However, despite the country finally deciding on a way forward, there’s still no guarantee the EU Commission will consider the Swiss solution acceptable.

If it does, the two parties can to some extent put the last three years behind them and move on with their bilateral agreements intact.

Switzerland will then be able to ratify the protocol granting free movement to Croatia. As a result, the EU should once again allow Swiss scientists’ full participation in the EU-wide Horizon 2020 research project and Swiss students’ inclusion in the Erasmus+ student exchange scheme, both of which were frozen by the EU as a result of the February 2014 referendum.

However if the EU Commission judges the Swiss solution to contravene the free movement of people, Switzerland will face the prospect of imposing its new rules unilaterally, since it is bound by law to implement its solution by February 2017.

To do so would be to risk many other bilateral agreements between the two.

An EU source of newspaper Le Temps told the paper that the initial rumblings in Brussels were positive, with many feeling the Swiss solution “goes in the right direction”.

However the EU Commission will reserve any official comment until after Friday when the Swiss parliament takes its final vote on the subject.

“If there aren’t any changes to this latest vision then there’s no reason that their assessment will be negative,” a source told Le Temps.

“There’s nothing in the text that can be suspected of contravening the agreement on the free movement of people”.

However Swiss media has reported that some fear the new Swiss rules could lead to the discrimination of EU nationals in the Swiss job market, something unlikely to be accepted by Brussels.

The Swiss solution is likely to be the subject of a meeting by an EU-Swiss committee on December 22nd, said Le Temps.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.