“Europe’s point of departure is that at the end of the day common immigration rules and implementation depends on the will of  every EU country. In practice this means that final important decisions on immigration are still taken at Member State level; a situation which followed a decade of constant patchwork which hardly led to mutually agreed policy breakthroughs.” 

This was stated by MEP Therese Comodini Cachia during a summer seminar organised by the European Democrat Students, hosted by SDM, entitled ‘Successful Migration and Immigration Policy’. The seminar was held at Skyparks Luqa and hosted around one hundred foreign students from different European countries.

Comodini Cachia referred to repeated calls by the European Parliament for a holistic EU approach to migration which somehow managed to set a binding quota for distributing asylum seekers among all EU countries, and bigger contributions to resettlement programmes; adding however that more could have been done towards better cooperation with third countries and on the fight against human traffickers.

The Maltese MEP, a member of the Human Rights Sub-Committee of the European Parliament, expressed agreement with the Commission’s approach to look at the external dimension such that of stabilising Libya and engaging with third countries to help address the root causes of migration.  Comodini Cachia also placed emphasis on legal migratory options and visa policies which need to be studied and put in place.