France must control its borders better, says PM Barnier

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PARIS (Reuters) -France must control its borders better, Prime Minister Michel Barnier said in a keynote speech to parliament on Tuesday, making immigration one of his government’s priorities.

Immigration has become a hot issue across Europe, fuelling the rise of far-right parties, including in France where Marine Le Pen’s party has made curbing immigration one of its conditions for tacit support to Barnier’s minority government.

“We are no longer managing to control our immigration policy in a satisfactory manner,” Barnier said. “We must urgently get immigration out of the ideological deadlock it’s been put in by some.”

He added that France would look to follow a similar move by Germany in terms of controlling its own borders within Europe, while still complying with European Union rules.

“France will continue, as long as it is necessary, to re-establish checks at its own borders, as EU rules allow and as Germany has just done,” he said, without elaborating.

In September, Germany reintroduced temporary border checks including at its frontiers with France, Belgium and the Netherlands on Monday as part of efforts to combat irregular migration and cross-border crime.

Under EU rules, countries in the Schengen area, which encompasses all of the bloc bar Cyprus and Ireland, are only allowed to introduce border checks as a last resort to avert threats to internal security or public policy.

Barnier also said he would not refrain from reopening talks with some countries on bilateral immigration deals, referring to a 1968 agreement with Algeria that gives special employment and movement rights to Algerian citizens in France.

He further said he could make visas to foreign visitors more conditional on their home countries’ agreeing to take back those foreign nationals France wants to return, alluding to some North African states.

(Reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten, Tassilo Hummel and Michel Rose; editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Mark Heinrich)