Good – if depressing – piece from the London Sunday Times on the situation in Holland. One interesting angle in the story is the way in which the phenomenon of mass immigration has now intersected with membership of the EU to make an already tricky problem unmanageable.

“And what of the EU? “Migration has to be managed at a European level,” Aboutaleb says. “But there is no common sense on asylum or illegals,” he adds. Because EU passports are recognised throughout the union, the action of one country in accepting — or refusing — migrants affects others. Aboutaleb cites Spain as an example. In 2000, it had an amnesty of 250,000 sin papeles (illegals). This month, at a time of increasing controls elsewhere, it announced another amnesty. “Spain has perhaps a million illegals, in agriculture and construction,” Aboutaleb says. “The moment they get an EU passport, they can move all over Europe.” Fears that other countries would be affected have been confirmed. Within a few days, 10,000 illegals from other countries who hoped to benefit from the amnesty, many with false papers showing Spanish addresses, were turned back by Spanish border police.”

The Sunday Times then goes on to note that, when it comes to immigration, EU authorities are pursuing their own agenda. “Vladimir Spidla, the labour and social affairs commissioner in Brussels, claimed this month that rising age levels mean that Europe “needs to accept large numbers of economic migrants. Naturally, if you only look at the next two weeks, things look different. But in the EU we have to work on the long term and we definitely need immigration”.”

Spidla, is, quite simply, talking nonsense. While a degree of controlled immigration of the skilled and the well-qualified into Europe is a good idea, the idea that in a continent of high unemployment there is a need to import a large number of workers is implausible in the extreme. What there is is a need to increase – and reward – productivity, but that’s another question altogether.

What’s more, as this report from today’s New York Times notes, there are clear signs that discomfort with the effects of mass immigration into the Netherlands may be prompting emigration from that country, and that, Mr. Spidla, is not exactly the way to remedy a labor ’shortage’.

Reasonably enough, the Sunday Times writer goes on to ask whether the EU is “part of the problem, or should it impose a solution? Some say that it is undermining the validity of the nation state, without creating a coherent alternative. The EU is fine for the elimination of customs barriers, but can it cope with more? “Europe has no cultural or political identity,” argues Shmuel Trigano, a professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre. “Nor does it have common values. Its capital in Brussels is only an administrative and bureaucratic centre.” The crisis in European identity, he has written, is likely to have “unforeseen and profound consequences”.

Yes it is, and those who urge – or support – a deeper federalization of the EU (at least as currently envisaged) are being profoundly irresponsible.