Europeans Act to Curb Illegal Immigration

Ministers from 27 European governments Thursday agreed on a series of short-term measures to reduce the rising number of illegal immigrants pouring into the Continent’s rich Western countries, threatening to cause social and political instability.

After a two-day meeting here, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the group has endorsed a package that includes a call for police crackdowns on organized gangs that have made a lucrative business out of smuggling illegal immigrants into Western Europe from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.

The ministers also committed their governments to intensify frontier surveillance, move toward a closer standardization of border controls, enforce air travel rules that require airlines to check the travel documents of their passengers and increase cooperation among themselves by sharing information, equipment and training of border forces.

The sharp influx of foreigners into several European countries has become one of the Continent’s most serious, urgent problems of the post-Communist era, endangering the prosperity of its rich social democracies and draining poorer, newly free nations of important manpower desperately needed to rebuild their shattered economies.

The arrival of these immigrants has also generated social tensions that, in some European countries, have given new life to the once-discredited political course of right-wing extremism.

Germany has been one of the nations most profoundly affected, with immigrants from Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and Asia. France, too, has seen a migrant wave from Morocco and the Maghreb countries, with refugees traveling via Spain. Italy, meantime, has had its troubles with refugees from Albania.

The ministers set up a working party under the chairmanship of Austrian Interior Minister Franz Loeschnak to oversee implementation of the agreed-upon plan and to offer new proposals.

At a press conference after the meeting, Schaeuble stressed that the measures agreed on Thursday constitute only a short-term plan to contain a problem, whose principal cause--dramatically different levels of prosperity and economic opportunity--can only be solved with longer-term cooperation.

He denied that steps such as the tightening of border checks represent the beginning of the end of the dream of a Europe where freedom of movement was guaranteed to all.

“We are not thinking along those lines, quite the contrary” he insisted. “We do want freedom of travel and freedom of movement in the future . . . but this can’t also mean freedom to resettle for everybody.”

By its very nature, the shadowy realm of illegal immigration into Europe is hard to quantify. German Interior Ministry officials said that more than 6,000 persons have been detained during the first seven months of 1991 trying to cross illegally into Germany along the country’s 265-mile frontier with Poland.

They estimated that roughly four people succeed in crossing illegally for every one that is caught.

Hungary’s minister responsible for immigration questions, Andras Galszecsy, said that 21,000 immigrants have entered his country illegally so far this year. “Typically, the immigrants are pooled together in Romania, then pay between $500 to $2,000 a head and are brought across the border,” he said.

“There are accomplices in Hungary who help move these immigrants to other countries.”

Those trying to sneak into prosperous Western Europe constitute only a part of a larger immigration that many fear poses a threat to the region’s social and political fabric.

In Germany, for example, a far larger number of illegal immigrants attempt to enter the country by falsely declaring themselves as politically persecuted and declaring political asylum. Schaeuble said he estimates that as many as a quarter of a million asylum seekers will enter Germany this year. More than 90% of these are eventually rejected. But the German constitution requires elaborate checks that sometimes take years before anyone seeking asylum is expelled.

The origin of illegal immigrants seeking to resettle in Western Europe has also dramatically changed since the fall of the Iron Curtain two years ago. For example, in Germany, Eastern Europeans, who were about 10% of all asylum seekers in recent years, are expected this year to constitute roughly 50% of the total.

The participants in the Berlin conference were: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Soviet Union, Spain, Switzerland, the Ukraine, Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) and Yugoslavia.