Round-Robin Charters Will Collect Illegal Immigrants In Six Nations

Over the last year, incidents like the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by unassimilated immigrants who came for the welfare, and stayed to commit crime, have caused the nations of the European Union to reassess their open -- and flagrantly abused -- immigration policies. Following a suggestion by Spanish Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso, French Foreign Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced Tuesday that five European nations will work together to deport illegal aliens by air, as France has been doing for some time.

The participating nations are the five largest countries in Western Europe: Britain, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. Each flight will originate in one nation and then fly to the other four in turn, collecting deportees for a single destination, before bringing them home -- wherever that is. The Associated Press quoted Italian Interior Minister Guiseppe Pisanu as saying that the flights would begin in "days".

The plan was agreed upon at a European summit meeting in Evian, France.

It is believed, but not confirmed, that the French charter operator Euralair-Horizons, which has operated deportee charters for France, will provide the aircraft and crews. The Paris-based airline has operated both Boeing and Airbus aircraft before, and now has a fleet of six 737s, mostly 737-800s. Apart from deportee flights, Euralair-Horizons has specialized in regular passenger charter flights to Africa and Asia.

The deportees will primarily be aliens who have entered the European nations illegally, but some of them may be criminals whose sentences are complete.

Most of the illegal immigrants will be deported to Africa and the Middle East, although some European nations also have trouble with illegal immigration from Asia and from some non-EU European nations.

The story hit many Europeans as a surprise, but it is actually just an extension of a successful French program that's over two years old. In the 1990s, France mostly deported aliens on scheduled aircraft, trying to avoid landing-rights issues in deportee destinations like the Ivory Coast, Algeria and Senegal. But starting in 2003, France chartered flights weekly, sometimes alone, sometimes in a bilateral arrangement with another European nation, to bring deportees home.

Along with the African nations mentioned above, destinations for the French flights have also included Afghanistan, Romania, and China.

Nothing has been said about security measures, which would seem like a serious concern. Activists have targeted airlines that charter aircraft for deportation, with the result that KLM and Lufthansa, to name two, will not participate in deportations either as charter providers or on scheduled flights.

Sarkozy also noted that deportations in France are up 50% this year, and called for an annual debate on immigration in the French, and other European, parliaments. His goal is to have desirable immigrants admitted readily, and allowed to bring their families, and to exclude "those that nobody wants."

France and Britain have already streamlined asylum applications, at one time a boondoggle tied up with bogus applications from tens of thousands of immigrants from democratic, but poor, countries. Other proposals raised in Evian included document copying at flight origin (many illegal immigrants destroy their travel documents enroute to make it hard for the receiving nation to determine who they actually are) and restricting the issuance of visas to nationals of countries that refuse to take deported migrants back.

FMI: www.eu.int