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About Migration Dialogue

Migration Dialogue provides timely, factual and nonpartisan information and analysis of international migration issues through five major activities: the newsletters Migration News and Rural Migration News, Changing Face and other Research & Seminars, and the Sloan West Coast Program on Science and Engineering Workers.

Contact us at migrant@primal.ucdavis.edu.

Migration News: EU: Recession, Sanctions

Leading EU nations are in recession. The unemployment rate in the 15-member Euro area was 8.5 percent in February 2009, and ranged from less than three percent in the Netherlands to over 15 percent in Spain.

The European Parliament approved the so-called sanctions directive in February 2009, requiring member states to set minimum penalties for employers of unauthorized workers. There are an estimated four to eight million unauthorized workers in the EU, with 500,000 to a million new arrivals each year. The directive requires EU member states to impose civil penalties on employers of unauthorized workers by 2011, and to provide for criminal sanctions in the case of repeat offenders.

National governments are to enact laws that fine employers of unauthorized workers, require them to pay any payroll taxes evaded, and bar them from EU-funded public contracts for up to five years. General contractors on, for instance, construction sites are to be made jointly liable with the subcontractors they use, and the names of employers found with unauthorized workers are to be published.

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