EU conference on migration

For decades, the nations of the expanded European Union, now comprising 27 countries, have wrangled over the integration of its 30 million foreign residents. The question posed by the German broadcaster in an article published Monday: How to deal with those who try to enter what human-rights advocates call "Fortress Europe"?At the Berlin conference, the catchwords will be "monitoring" and "benchmarking," in other words, how to measure the success or failure of efforts to integrate so-called "legal migrants" across Europe.Residents with foreign passports make up about 5 percent of the EU’s total population of nearly 500 million. Luxembourg tops the list with 38 percent of its population listed as foreigners. Germany is in mid-field at 8.9 percent, or about 7 million foreign residents.The German Federal Statistics Office pointed out recently, however, that the underlying trend is far greater. When it counted those with "migratory backgrounds," including people who have adopted German citizenship and children raised in families with origins abroad, the total soared to 15 million, or more than 18 percent of Germany’s population of 82 million.Since the 1980s, go-it-alone policies pursued by individual nations have been superseded by an EU Commission drive to coordinate a patchwork of policies on asylum and integration under the so-called Global Approach to Migration. Adopted in 2007, its measures range from promoting language acquisition and job skills among newcomers, to worker mobility within the EU’s visa-free internal borders, to Frontex, the EU agency that patrols waters off northern Africa.Ahead of the EU’s Berlin conference, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s federal interior minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, from her conservative Christian Democratic Union party, praised the integrative efforts of the more than 2 million so-called Russian-Germans who have resettled in Germany. Schaeuble also insisted that potential immigrants had to make the first steps. "If you know nothing about where you live or where you’re going to and if you don’t have a basic knowledge of the language, then you’ll have only a small chance of making it in the new country," he said.