Immigration and European Integration

Abstract

Immigration and related issues such as asylum, human trafficking, drug smuggling and terrorism are the ‘talk of the town’ in Brussels these days. The need to control human migration in order to prevent terrorist activity, by way of fingerprinting and ‘biometric’ passports for example, was a topic that quickly emerged on the Union’s agenda after the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001. Asylum, for that matter, another issue high on the current agenda, was hotly debated throughout the 1990s and reflected some governments’ attempts to achieve common control and a more equitable distribution of refugee flows. In fact, with the abolition of internal borders and the promotion of free movement of persons, immigration is a policy issue that quite naturally seems to call for a common European approach.