Three concentric circles” “

Before the accession of the ten new member countries, it was estimated that there were some three and half million immigrants from Eastern Europe in the EU, a sixth of the total 20 million immigrants present in the Union. According to data for 2000-2001, the countries with the highest number of Eastern European immigrants are Germany, with 1,990,148 (57.65% of the European total), Italy, with 457,068 (13.2%), Austria, with 395,461 (10%), and Spain, with 145,327 (4.25%). “Their number will grow at a lower rate than in the 1990s, but according to a recent study of the Foundation for the promotion of conditions of life and labour in Dublin, some 1% of the labour force, equivalent to 220,000 persons per year, would have to emigrate to the West”. These are some of the data contained in the book “Europe. Enlargement to Eastern Europe and immigration” edited by Italian Caritas and presented in Rome on 22 June. The book, which involved 33 authors, including 10 from Eastern Europe, presents data and various analyses on migratory flows. A less selfish and more caring Europe. “The aim of the book – explains Msgr. VITTORIO NOZZA, director of Italian Caritas – is to remove the event of 1st May 2004 from those events that are born and die in the media in the space of a few days. It is on the contrary an event of exceptional significance and far-reaching implications. Enlarged Europe can and must serve, in the first place, to share out in a more equitable manner the resources available among EU countries, and better safeguard the workers at home and those who have to emigrate to find work”. In the view of PREDRAG MATVEJEVIC, of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, it would be a good thing if the Europe of the future “were less eurocentric than that of the past, more open to others and less selfish that the Europe of nation states, more conscious of itself, less inclined to americanization, more caring and less arrogant”. New members in the EU, characteristics and problems. The study subdivides Europe “into three concentric circles, with different characteristics and problems”: in the first circle are placed the new member states that already enjoy the right of free circulation, though currently with some restrictions in the field of employment. “Prolonging the restrictive provisions – suggests Italian Caritas – is ineffective, especially since the weapon of expulsion against them is blunted; a method for the optimal use of manpower would be more suitable”. The second circle concerns the states that will become members of the Union in the short term (Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia) or in the longer term, such as the Balkan countries. Caritas recommends involving them ” in a relationship of partnership, the only one that is able to alleviate the migratory pressure and prepare for the future in a harmonious manner”. Turkey is a case in itself: it “poses in innovative terms the co-existence with Islam”. In the third circle are placed countries like Russia, Ukraine, Moldavia and Belarus. In this regard, the editors of the book point out, “it would be a defeat to reduce the frontier to nothing but a barrier instead of an occasion for trade: at the institutional level too, there is a need – the book suggests – for a new policy, as it were, of enlarged neighbourhood”. Free circulation and “transit flows”. The most sought-after goal for irregular migrants – says the book – seems to be Germany, which arrested 28,500 of them in 2001; of these one in five came from Romania or from the former Yugoslavia. But Austrian and Italy too “are strongly involved”. The phenomenon of “transit flows” is also being registered: in other words, the choice of migrants, in spite of the closed frontiers, to stop in third countries for periods of variable duration while awaiting gradually to reach their preferred goal in the West. This creates concerns in the governments of the West about the free circulation of workers permitted by EU membership. In actual fact, “only a portion of these flows succeed in rendering permanent this transfer to the West while the rest settle and find a living in the submerged economy of the country that was supposed to be one of transit, or they develop commercial activities and regional activities while awaiting a more appropriate moment for their successive transfer”. In any case, concludes Caritas, “enlargement will have to tackle a demanding challenge: on the one hand avoiding the creation of a new iron curtain that would divide what is the traditional regional balance of Eastern Europe and, on the other, controlling a new external frontier that is potentially very permeable”.