The matter of immigration leads to a paradox, of which I am unable, speaking before you today, to give you the solution.
 
On the one hand, you have thousands of people who take their chances to find a job in Europe. The conditions of their transfer to Europe and working conditions here are often quite scary.

The paradox that we have to clarify is this demand of work going along with the high level of unemployment. You can have long discussions about the relevancy of unemployement statistics, but I suppose all people who get an employment benefit are not housewives, disabled, retired, lazy or irreductible social cases.
 
I don’t really have an answer to that paradox, but there is no other reason to seek for the negative feelings immigration often causes by the employees.
 
Some weeks ago, we were asked if Belgium was ready to open its labour market for the nationals of the 10 new member States of the EU. Our answer was that it was first necessary to take some measures about illegal working and employment of youth; and since those measures could not be ready on time, we asked the decision would be postponed.
 
You could regret -I regret personally, if only for the sake of symbol- that we were unable to deliver a more positive message to those new fellow countries and their nationals. It could have been better that those problems would have been considered separately. But it is a fact that both aspect are intricated, and that you will have no substantial progress in the one without progress in the other.
 
About immigration on the whole, our position is that we welcome people because of humanitarian reasons, but we see no reason to open the labour market for economic reasons. Here too, you could say that our expression is to be adapted, since there is not always clear distinction between economic and humanitarian immigration, as explained this morning by Mr Wets, even if the distinction is not wholly irrelevant, according to the existing rules of international law.
 
This morning, we heard about the action of several international organisations. So far, nobody spoke about the International Labour Organisation. The question of migration was one of the topics on the agenda of the General Conference in 2004. I was present at that event, and had even the opportunity to sit in the “drafting group” who wrote the report of the Conference on the subject. The report in itself is a perfect illustration of the proverb that the camel is a race horse drawn by a committee. But the introductory report by the International Labour Office -the administration of the ILO- is a very interesting document, which could help countries and other institutions in their work.
A basic topic in the ILO document is the so called “rights based approach”.
 
This does not mean that there is a absolute free circulation of people like in the EU.
 
It means well that the welcoming of new migrants is subject tot the rule of law, on the base of clear, legal criteria, not of administrative, arbitrary individual decisions. Just that idea was a subject of social and political mobilisation in the ‘70s, when one seek the replace of the old 1952 legislation on “alien’s police” by a new legislation on the “administrative status of foreigners”, based on the recognition of a right to establish in Belgium, e.g. for students and family grouping. Among other organisations, the CSC/ACV and other trade unions took an important place in that mobilisation. In the last months, both Flemish and French speaking branches of the Christian Worker’s Movement, of which the CSC/ACV is a part, called for such an approach of the regularisation of the so called illegal migrants.
 
“Rights based approach” could also mean that the legal stay status should have no consequence for the application of fundamental human rights and labour rights. Legally speaking, that is embedded in the legislation in Belgium; practically there is work to do.
 
And eventually, once they have been regularised, people of foreign origin should be treated without discrimination. That has been executed in Belgium, but still a lot of things have to be resolved, such as the transfer of social funds.
 
The CSC/ACV and trade unions in general have a long tradition of welcoming migrant workers. In the ‘50s, they set up a special service for that purpose. And when I was a student in the ‘70s, the CSC/ACV was really a prominent figure in the fighting for the rights of migrants. When I began to work in the trade-union, I realised that it was not only a matter of writings approved by intellectuals; people set up actions and assisted people with social security services. There were a lot of publications in different languages.
 
But I confess that we lost the momentum in the ‘80s. The Trade Unions didn’t catch up with the new migratory flows in the ’90s. More and more people are aware of that, especially in the different local branches.
 
I hope -actually I believe- that these services will be expanded in the months and years to come. The trade unions have an important role to play in the integration and welcoming of the new migrants and for those who are living here for a longer time. One of worriest things of the present situation is that extreme right parties claim they say what real people think, and that trade unions are mislead by marxist intellectuals.
 
Migration is not longer the same as it was 40 years ago. The companies that are recruiting people are no longer the big mines and factories. There are a lot of smaller companies, and even particulars. Migrants are no longer just men that are being hired to work in specific sectors. Also women are working, in the services often for individuals or small companies.
 
Migration people and Belgian population do not confront each other any more on the job floor. Belgian population is scared of the multicultural society. If you see how difficult it is for companies, for administrations, not to speak for politics, to manage the coexistence of our two national communities, you can imagine how complicated it can be to manage a so called multicultural society. Belgians fear migrants might come with demands, like wearing a scarf at work, who break the difficult compromises we inherited from our national history.
We don’t have any miracle solutions. The crisis that our French and Dutch neighbours go through show anyway, in my opinion, that there are very little principles that come from our own political and social inheritance, who offer a solution to the questions to come.
 
Belgium has few principles of its own, except our tradition of compromise on pragmatic base, which we self are accustomed to laugh with, but which could be very helpfull in this context. As part of this “compromising system”, we trade unions have, I think, an experience to show.
 
Thank you for your attention.