COSTA TEGUISE (Spain) April 4: The European Union and 10 east Asian nations inched closer Thursday to their first-ever joint position on ways to roll back the tide of illegal immigration flowing from Asia to Europe.

“There is broad agreement between the Asian and EU countries on four basic principles,” said Spanish Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy as a two-day meeting got underway in this resort town on Lanzarote, one of Spain’s Canary islands.

Those principles include Europe asserting that it welcomes foreigners “seeking an honourable life and ready to contribute to growth,” the promotion of legal immigration, better efforts to integrate immigrants to Europe, and the need to combat illegal immigration and those who profit from it, he said.

The joint declaration was expected to be issued late Friday, Spanish officials said, following three plenary sessions focusing on all aspects of immigration policy.

Spain is hosting the meeting of interior ministers and senior officials as part of its turn at the EU presidency, and in the run-up to the biannual ASEM summit of EU and Asian leaders in Copenhagen on September 22-24.

China has led the push for more inter-regional action on immigration, after 58 Chinese trying to get into Britain suffocated to death in June 2000 inside a Dutch truck filled with tomatoes at the English port of Dover.

Two others survived the ordeal, which involved paying traffickers around 30,000 dollars per person for a journey that took them from Beijing to Belgrade, then overland from Austria through France and on into Holland.

Best known as a sunny destination for British and German package tourists, the Canary Islands are also a prime target for North and West African boat people desperate to make their way onto the European mainland.

On Wednesday alone, and as the officials were meeting, 22 people from Morocco, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Gambia and Mauritania were detained on Lanzarote when they landed on the island’s south coast in a small boat.

While there is growing pressure in Europe to curb immigration, its richer countries — with shrinking and aging populations — face a looming shortage of skilled workers that can only be filled by welcoming more foreigners.

Coordinating meetings on Thursday were to be followed Friday by plenary sessions focusing on migratory flows, and legal and illegal immigration.

Though the gathering is billed as a ministerial conference, only a handful of countries were being represented by their interior or justice ministers. Others sent vice ministers or top-level senior servants.

Britain was one of the EU member states that opted to send a civil servant, even though it is the number-one destination in Europe for illegal immigrants from Asia.

Asian members of ASEM — founded in 1996 to foster closer ties between the EU and Asia — include Brunei, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The European Union comprises Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland and Luxembourg.

Battling illegal immigration was a top item on Wednesday in Beijing, where EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten held talks with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

An EU diplomat said Patten proposed a “readmission agreement” between Brussels and Beijing to formalise the return of illegal immigrants from China discovered in Europe.—AFP