Europe and Immigration

This European column forms part of the extensive special dossier on migration issues in this summer issue. Jean-François Drevet begins by recalling the importance of immigration to the European Union in a context of ageing populations. He goes on to stress the extent to which international migration in Europe is both poorly understood, badly measured and ineffectively controlled, before detailing more precisely the Union’s immigration policy, its evolution and the prospects for its future development, the ambition being to make it a fully-fledged community policy by 2014. Lastly, he shows that an immigration policy can neither leave out of account cooperation with the migrants’ countries of origin, nor choose to overlook human rights questions. Here, Jean-François Drevet concludes that there is a danger today, that European policy will develop as national policies have done in Europe, bringing heightened repression without genuine effectiveness.