French president François Hollande says quotas are ‘out of the question’ 24 hours after Spanish foreign minister flatly rejects proposal

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

An EU plan to impose migrant quotas on member states – stipulating how many refugees each country should accept – appeared close to collapse on Tuesday after France and Spain withdrew their support.

The UK said last week it would opt out of the scheme, saying it opposed compulsory quotas for immigrants on principle, but insisting it would continue to accept asylum seekers.

Now the future of the plan, part of a package of proposals for addressing the Mediterranean migrant crisis drawn up by the European commission, is in doubt.

The package also includes potential military action against smuggling networks, including the destruction of smugglers’ boats. The EU is awaiting approval from the UN security council for such action.

France’s president, François Hollande, said he supported a fairer distribution of refugees among EU states – but quotas were unacceptable.

“It’s out of the question to have immigrant quotas because we have rules on border checks and policies for overseeing immigration,” Hollande said at a joint press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel.

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Hollande’s remarks came a day after Spain signalled it would reject a quota system. Foreign minister José Manuel García-Margallo firmly rejected the plans on Monday, arguing that the country’s double-digit unemployment rate meant it could not take in more migrants.



“Pledging to take in migrants to whom you cannot provide work would be, in my opinion, providing a bad service,” he said.

Speaking to Spanish radio broadcaster Cadena Ser on Tuesday morning, he emphasised the economic motivations behind migration.



“It’s logical that people want to seek a better future where they can find it – for that reason one of the parameters that you have to keep in mind is unemployment,” he said. “The first priority is in providing work. A country that has 23% unemployment isn’t the same as one that is below 5%.”

García-Margallo said the commission’s call for solidarity had to be “proportionate, just and realistic”, adding that it took no account of the “huge effort we are making to control migration from Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal which impacts the whole EU.”

The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia have also opposed the quota system.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Hollande insisted that all purely economic migrants would be deported. “People who come because they think that Europe is a prosperous continent, even when they are not hired by companies ... must be escorted back, that’s the rule,” he said.

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But he said Germany, France and Sweden were accepting a large number of asylum seekers among the migrants. “We must ensure that other countries can also play their part,” he said. “This is what we call distribution.”



Merkel was non-committal, noting that she and Hollande had each asked their interior ministers to “reflect” on the proposals from the European commission.

“There are many questions that deserve examination,” she said. These include how to deal with people who do not have the possibility of asking for political asylum. “I am sure that on that we will have a Franco-German position soon.”

The unease in national capitals has thrown into sharp focus an emergency relocation scheme that the commission had been expected to announce next week.



While the quota plans are not expected to be finalised before a summit in June, countries sceptical of the idea are already pointing to potential devils in the detail.

“You can’t resettle or relocate someone from one member state to another,” one EU diplomat told the Guardian.



“We have free movement in the EU so there is nothing to stop them from going on somewhere else. There is a bit of a flaw in the thinking there.”

Migration experts point out that refugees will tend to concentrate in areas where there are established networks of kith and kin, regardless of formalised quotas.

Michael Diedring, secretary general of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, said: “We have some difficult understanding why member states would not be willing to provide protection to these people.



“The quota system is a step towards more European solidarity, but it concerns us that, at this stage, it seems to be mainly a statistical model that is convenient for member states but does not take the best interests of individuals into account.”