EU ‘Conservative’ Leader: Europeans ‘Must Open Hearts’ to Mass Migration

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Virginia Hale

European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) leader Syed Kamall has slammed policies to limit mass migration from the third world, blasting EU nations’ “hypocrisy” for refusing to open the border to Africa while their own citizens move abroad.

“We must learn to open our hearts to genuine asylum seekers – people who are fleeing persecution,” the UK Conservative MEP told delegates at the ‘Africa Summit 2019’ at EU Parliament last week.

Opening the ECR-sponsored conference, which was promoted as an opportunity to exchange best practice between the EU and African nations, Kamall complained, “Some [European countries] have not even managed to make the distinction between asylum and immigration.”

“The problem is that there is a terrible hypocrisy when it comes to immigration. Lots of countries are willing to see their own nationals go to live and work in other parts of the world but shut themselves off when it comes to accepting immigrants.”

“This is not necessarily racist but a huge hypocrisy exists and this has to be addressed,” he added, according to the Parliament Magazine, which reported the MEP’s comments.

With the ECR largely comprised of national conservative parties which are strongly opposed to migration from the global south, including Poland’s governing Law and Justice, the Sweden Democrats, and the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), it is unclear what ECR representatives from mainland Europe thought of their leader’s remarks at the EU-Africa conference last week.

Though the leader of a staunchly conservative parliament grouping, Kamall appeared in a leaked document of MEPs considered “allies” of the globalist George Soros network and has often campaigned for mass migration in his political career.

Kamall was hailed by Eurosceptics as a “principled” Brexiteer when, a month before the referendum in 2016, he announced he would reject pressure from David Cameron’s government to support the then prime minister’s “renegotiation package” brokered with Brussels and back a Leave vote.

But in a statement, the London MEP explained that his decision to support Brexit was based primarily on his desire to see Britain welcome much more third world migration, a policy goal he described as being “incompatible with our membership of the EU”.

“As the son of immigrants who came from a non-EU country, this is my deeply held conviction on an issue that matters deeply to me,” he said, adding that his position on the referendum was “personal and not that of the ECR Group”, the “vast majority” of whose MEPs he said want Britain to remain in Europe.

Denouncing a “shocking” lack of ethnic diversity in Brussels, Kamall was a leading figure in campaigns blasting the EU as “too white” last year, alongside his fellow UK ‘Conservative’ MEP Sajjad Karim, who claimed the European Parliament “has been pale, male and stale for far too long” and that this must change in order for the body to “actively oppose Islamophobia” and populism.

In Britain meanwhile, the ECR chief pointed to the general election results in 2017, in which just 11 per cent of “BME” (black and ethnic minority) voters backed the Conservatives, to claim in August that the party risks “being out of power for generations” unless it works to “vigorously” fight “Islamophobic” sentiments and to fill its ranks with people from ethnic minority communities.

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