Immigration, financial crisis cast doubt on border free Europe

Immigration, financial crisis cast doubt on border free Europe

Press quote (Voice of America)
27 September 2011

The bottom line, says Brussels based immigration expert Hugo Brady of the Centre for European Reform, is a lack of trust. "The politics of the Schengen area is that everyone wants more control over other people's borders while maintaining the same amount of control over their own... and that's the paradox of the matter ... If the eurozone breaks up which is now looking like a possibility the resulting political and economic calamity would also spread to other major projects like Schengen ... They would say, 'basically these people (the Greeks) have destroyed the next 10 years, how the hell would we trust them with something so sensitive as borders and immigration policy?'"