Liberal senator proposes measures to "limit immigration and improve integration"

Liberal senator proposes measures to "limit immigration and improve integration"

Liberal Brussels senator and parliamentarian, Alain Destexhe, is proposing 15 measures to significantly limit immigration in Belgium, which he would like to see included in an upcoming government statement. The proposals are contained in the conclusion of a new book authored by Destexhe, titled "Immigration et intégration: avant qu'il ne soit trop tard..." (“Immigration and integration: before it’s too late”). The presentation of the book was introduced on Thursday morning by the former Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Theo Francken (New Flemish Alliance, N-VA).

The book presents statistics to support ideas that the Reformist Movement (MR) legislator has been defending for a long time, and seeks to address what he terms “the failure of the immigration and integration policies pursued since the year 2000”.

Its proposals include: the drastic reduction of family reunifications and the revision of the 1951 Geneva Convention, which defines the modalities under which a State must grant refugee status to people who request it. According to Destexhe, the application of the Convention “no longer corresponds to its spirit and letter”.

The revision of conditions for acquiring Belgian nationality, the elimination of reasonable accommodation and of the rights and duties of such persons, a ban on the financing of Islam by foreign entities and the scrapping of subsidies for pro-Muslim lobbies, such as the CIRE, MRAX and LDH, figure prominently among the proposals that conclude the 251-page book written, according to the author, over many years.

Destexhe’s central focus is that Belgium is much more open than its neighbours on the issue of immigration, which is reflected by the fact that since 2000, the country has been the sixth largest recipient of asylum seekers in the world in absolute terms.  At the same time, Belgium has followed a very open family reunification policy that accounts for half of legal immigration, much higher than the European average, according to the MR legislator.

He said he was also worried at the evolution of Islam in terms of statistics and of the primacy which, he claims, 70% of Muslims give to religious laws over State laws.

For the MR senator, German Chancellor Angela Merkel bears great responsibility for the 2015 migration crisis in Europe since, in his eyes, she enabled the reception of “many people who were not threatened”.

N-VA’s Francken said he concurred with the book’s conclusions and the MR legislator’s proposals, which, he stressed, were in line with his own goals of moving from an “inflicted immigration to selected immigration”.


The Brussels Times


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