EU Referendum


Immigration: an over-the-top response


12/11/2014



000a Express-012 benefits.jpg

To judge from some of he newspaper headlines today – such as the Express, illustrated above - one might think that some great victory had been achieved on the issue of migrant benefits payments. 

Nothing can be adduced from the Express report that Elisabeta Dano, the subject of the ECJ ruling, was already getting child benefit amounting to €184 per month and an advance on maintenance payments of €133 per month, and will continue to be paid these sums.

The crux of this matter – as we point out in our earlier piece is that Ms Dano had simply been refused jobseekers benefit – not least on the grounds that she was not looking for a job and had no intention of taking on gainful employment.

While the Express chirps about the ECJ decision being "hailed as a rare outbreak of common sense", the main thrust of the judgement was to re-iterate that which was set out in Directive 2004/38/EC, confirming that the authorities had been perfectly correct in refusing this specific benefit.

A further point that emerges from a more detailed evaluation of this issue is that this is by no means the first time the ECJ has ventured into this territory. There is a scattering of cases going back to the year 2000 (Case C-184/99) and beyond, all making the same point that freedom of movement is "qualified and limited", specifically by "the requirement that a person prove that he has sufficient resources".

In relation to C-184/99, the Court was working under Directives 90/364/EEC, 90/365/EEC and 90/366/EEC and then Directive 93/96, all of which have been incorporated in one way or another into 2004/38, setting out precisely the point which was being emphasised by yesterday's judgement.

The same principle is then highlighted by the European Commission, recorded by the Guardian, in responding to the judgement. It was too early to determine how the ruling would affect the UK, its spokesman said, but "it had always stressed that free movement was a qualified right and not an unconditional one".

Yet, across the political spectrum, we are getting reports falling to the same trap, with the Mirror aligning with the Express, and the Telegraph, the latter running its front-page headline on the possibility of deporting immigrants unable to sustain themselves economically – something we've always been able to do, but have rarely pressed.

The New Statesman attempts to do something of a more thorough job, but still takes the line that the ECJ is "cracking down", rather than simply reiterating an oft-stated principle.

What we are actually confronting, therefore, is a long-term failure of national governments to use the tools already available to them, to contain the migrant problem, a failure that runs across the board, from the inability to enforce housing standards, the minimum wage, employment conditions and much else, all of which creates gaps which can be exploited by migrants and less than ethical employers.

There is also - of course - the elephant in the room, the ECHR, explored further by Boiling Frog. The last thing we are going to get from the medai is joined-up thinking.

Unsurprisingly, though, it is the Guardian which is keenest to rain on the parade. This ruling, it asserts, circumscribes quite severely the scope for any more fundamental revision of free movement.

By pointing to what are probably "minuscule flaws in the system", it writes, the court also upholds and arguably bolsters freedom of movement within the EU, making it harder for Cameron to argue for reform especially "when the court has ruled that welfare abuse is not on".

With that, not one of the published accounts I have read really get to grips with this judgement. More worryingly, if the media are generally so ecstatic about what amounts to so little, how are they going to react, say, to Cameron's great "renegotiations" that he is set to unleash on the unsuspecting public at some time in the future?

If editorial writers are so easily pleased with this development, one can see them applauding another of Mr Cameron's great "victories", to add to his "veto", cutting the EU budget and "halving" the £1.7bn surcharge. Unless we find ways of countering this, the "in" campaign might begin to think that they already have the referendum in the bag.