• IU’s MEP Marina Albiol says Trump-style restrictions on refugees underway
• Draft legislative amendments would change EU policies toward asylum seekers
The spokesperson at the European parliament for Spain’s Izquierda Unida (IU, United Left) party has called out the European Union for what the party says is preparation of a new package of legislative reforms that will restrict the right of asylum and free movement of peoples within Europe.
Marina Albiol, a member of the IU delegation at the European Parliament in Strasbourg said the legislative measures currently being drafted would enshrine “racist and xenophobic” policies more akin to the immigration bans just enacted by U.S. President Donald Trump in America than to official EU policies on immigration and refugees.
Albiol said that five different amendments to existing European norms and standards on immigration and refugee policy are currently being drafted and could be presented to the European Parliament and European Council for ratification within six months.
She said that current practices by some countries in Europe — the erecting of hard barriers on the borders of Bulgaria, Austria or Hungary, or the returns of asylum seekers en masse in Spain’s North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla — predate the Trump clampdown on immigration and refugees and that the amendments now being proposed to EU legislation would bring the official policies on both sides of the Atlantic more in line.
► Read More in Spanish at Europa Press and EFE via El Día …
