This week in the European Parliament in Brussels, Andrew Brons MEP made two speeches which were highly critical of the European Union’s handling of the immigration crisis facing Southern Italy and Malta.

In his first speech he said that many of the immigrants arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa were not asylum seekers, as the EU claimed, but economic migrants.

He said, “Many of these so-called asylum seekers come from Tunisia, in which the revolution was apparently successful and the autocracy was overthrown with the effect of making Tunisia, potentially at least, a safer, freer and more democratic place. Are these Tunisians fleeing from freedom and democracy or at least from the hope of achieving these? “The truth, of course, is that they aren’t genuine asylum seekers but illegal economic migrants.”

In his second speech, Andrew said that the European Union was in fact rewarding illegal immigrants for their clandestine trips to Europe.

Speaking on the work of FRONTEX – the EU’s border guards, he said, “With regard to their work at sea, if they find illegal migrants, often accompanied by children, in dangerous vessels or even in the sea, they must be rescued. There must be no doubt about that. However, I find it unacceptable that, by rescuing them, the member states of the EU or the EU itself should take on a responsibility for accepting them for asylum. That is to reward an attempt to enter the EU and its member states illegally.”

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