Former Top EU Official Calls for Immigration Halt 

Former top European Union official Michel Barnier, who led the bloc’s fraught Brexit negotiations, says immigration to France should stop for three to five years and the Schengen system of free movement between member states needs reexamination.  

The French politician, who according to some French media outlets is considering challenging Emmanuel Macron in next year’s presidential election, says immigration in the EU is “not working” and that the bloc’s external borders have become a “sieve.”  His remarks, made to a French television station Tuesday, are likely to be seized on by nationalist populists in central and southern European countries that have been increasingly critical of the Schengen system of free movement between member states on the grounds that the bloc’s external borders are porous.   The former French foreign minister told France Television, “I try to look at the problems as they are, in the way the French people live them every day and to find solutions and I think that effectively we need to take some time over three to five years and suspend immigration.”