Berlin and Paris call on EU to negotiate immigration deal with London – World

Paris and Berlin have called, in a joint letter to the European Commission, for efforts to be stepped up against illegal immigration, in particular through the negotiation of a migration agreement with the United Kingdom.

According to the Agence France Presse, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and his German counterpart Nancy Faeser sent a letter to European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson on Friday evening, in which they considered that Brexit (the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union) had seriously affected “the coherence of migration policies” and asked the European Commission to present “quickly a draft negotiating mandate with a view to an agreement with the United Kingdom on asylum and immigration issues”.

France had already made the same request in early September, following the death of at least twelve migrants off the French coast.

The ministers recalled that migration routes crossing the European continent towards the United Kingdom represent “almost a third of illegal entries” into the Schengen area and considered that “the lack of legal prospects in the United Kingdom encourages clandestinity and feeds smuggling networks”, putting people crossing the English Channel and the North Sea in danger.

New British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said he is ready to speed up the processing of asylum seekers while also stepping up the fight against smugglers.

In the letter, Darmanin and Faeser also deplored the fact that the “Dublin rules are little or not at all applied by some Member States”.

According to this EU regulation, the first EU country an illegal foreigner enters is responsible for his or her asylum application, but countries on the EU’s external borders, such as Italy and Greece, criticise this mechanism, calling for greater solidarity between the 27 Member States.

Recently, following several knife attacks, Germany reintroduced border controls for six months, justifying this with the need to reduce illegal immigration and contain the risk of extremism.