Labour MEPs call for effective solidarity mechanisms as EU Presidency vows to seal migration pact

With the Portuguese Presidency of the European Council vowing to “fight until the last minute of its term of office” for an agreement on the Pact on Migration and Asylum tabled by the European Commission, Maltese MEP Josianne Cutajar has stressed that there cannot be “an effective immigration system without an effective solidarity system – a real one that is obligatory on a European level ands which increases the responsibility of member states”.

Cutajar was speaking alongside fellow Labour MEP Alex Agius Saliba at a press conference organised by the European Parliament Office in Malta, where outlined their stances for  this week’s European Parliament plenary session.

One good way to address the irregular migration phenomenon, Cutajar said, is through legal immigration avenues. Referring to the EU Blue Card agreement struck this week by the European Parliament and the Portuguese presidency to facilitate entry into the bloc for highly qualified economic migrants.

The agreement on the EU’s blue card directive, which allows for the immigration of highly-skilled non-EU nationals into the EU, and the previously stringent qualifications are being made more flexible with the aim of attracting workers where there are actually noted skills shortages.

“It is important to recall that the EU and Malta too depend to a certain point on certain economic migrants from third countries. As such, schemes like this are important but we cannot, in the process, forget about the workers with lower skill sets, wherever they come from.

“We need to safeguard the dignity of these workers as well, and Parliament is requesting this be taken into consideration as well.”

Cutajar is also adamant that, when it comes to legal migration, there should be a focus on what skills are actually needed by which member states.  Additionally, in what Cutajar describes as a “win-win” situation, such admissions of workers from third countries should be tied to those countries’ cooperation in the area of irregular migration.

Malta cannot be a migrant rescue centre – Agius Saliba

Her colleague, Labour MEP Alex Agius Saliba, meanwhile, referring to ongoing migration debates within the European Parliament was adamant that, “unlike our leader of the Opposition [Bernard Grech], we do not want Malta to become a rescue centre in the middle of the Mediterranean”.

The Maltese government, he said, has always been very clear on a European level and we have made it clear on a European parliamentary level that each and every member state has at the end of the day to fulfil its international obligations and live up to their responsibilities in terms of the EU’s principle of solidarity.

But, on the other hand, he warned how there have been numerous boats of migrants traversing the central Mediterranean over recent months.

“We have been proactive,” Agius Saliba says, “we have made arrangements with Libya, which were public, so that our interests, especially when it comes to security, are always protected.”

Appealing for and effective pan-EU solidarity mechanism, and noting that people are losing their lives in the Mediterranean, Cutajar added, however, that “we cannot ignore the fact that our country is in the middle of all this. We have, along with other member states. We have always been consistent in that we cannot be left alone in this respect.

On Tuesday in a European Parliament debate on the deaths of irregular migrants deaths in the Mediterranean, Portuguese Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva on behalf of the European Council said the EU needs to “continue to save lives and save more and more lives”, and bemoaned the fact that only “a group of member states cooperating among themselves” voluntarily. This group would presumably include Malta, which had recently struck a number agreements to share irregular migrants arriving in Malta.

“We need to continue to work to achieve accountability mechanisms that would allow the relocation of rescued people.  We need to combat trafficking, we need to combat people-smuggling networks, which are highly organised criminals and are, for all practical purposes, murderers.”

Along such lines, he stressed the need to consider the responsibility of frontline states, such as Malta, and match that with solidarity from of all other states.