San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina - Countries that are members or associates of the South American trade bloc Mercosur issued a declaration Tuesday voicing "deep rejection" of the European Union's immigration policy. Regional leaders gathered for a summit in San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina, urged the EU to respect human rights in the face of attempts to criminalize illegal immigrants, crystallized in the controversial "return directive" recently approved by the European Parliament.
South American countries complained that the directive was issued by "nations that were traditionally generators of migration currents."
South America welcomed with "generosity and solidarity" millions of European migrants in previous centuries, so the EU decision provokes extra anger, the statement said.
Presidents Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, Michelle Bachelet of Chile and Tabare Vazquez of Uruguay said that their own grandparents migrated to South America from Europe and regretted that their descendants cannot be guaranteed similar receptions from European countries.
"We were very generous with the Europeans who arrived in our land last century, and the truth is it is not fair for our people to get denigrating treatment," Bachelet complained.
Evo Morales - the first president of indigenous descent in Bolivian history - charged that many European immigrants "pillaged natural resources and exploited" South America. Latin American immigrants, however, did not go to Europe "to exploit or to pillage," Morales said.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez compared Europe's migration policies to the barrier being built by the United States along parts of its southern border with Mexico.
"(The US barrier) is a wall of shame. Europeans perhaps want to follow the example of the United States and build a wall in the Atlantic Ocean," Chavez said. "We have to anticipate action if civilized Europe - I say that ironically - has launched and legalized savagery."
For Fernandez de Kirchner, the EU's new, restrictive policies are unacceptable and "far removed from the history of humanity."
"We are particularly hurt by the fact that they try to discriminate against us and fail to respect the human rights of Latin Americans who had to go and look for other lands like (the Europeans') grandparents did at other times," Vazquez said.
The Vazquez complained that "very often the average Latin American is despised," but developed nations take the region's brainpower.
In their formal declaration, presidents of Mercosur - a bloc comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay - rejected "any attempt to criminalize irregular migration and the adoption of restrictive migration policies, particularly those toward the most vulnerable."
They demanded respect for the human rights of migrants and their families and called upon the EU to adopt "policies consistent with the promotion of human rights."
The return directive was approved by the European Parliament on June 18 and allows the detention of illegal immigrants for up to 18 months pending deportation. It forbids those deported from returning to EU territory for five years and allows the detention and deportation of unaccompanied minors.
The directive received widespread criticism in Latin America but also prompted a decision from the Organization of American States (OAS) to send to the EU a high-level mission to discuss the implications of the move.
Mercosur went further, looking into the causes of Latin American migration.
The bloc urged developed countries to adopt "the policies necessary to avoid international economic asymmetries, the multi- million-dollar subsidies that distort competition, the lack of openness of its markets for the produce of emerging and developing markets from deepening the causes of migrations, that is, structural poverty, social exclusion and unequal opportunities."
