(AP) French President Emmanuel Macron is taking aim at migration — a core issue in the country’s presidential campaign — by pushing to strengthen the European Union’s external borders against people illegally entering the bloc’s passport-free area.
Macron is expected to run for a second term in France’s April 3 presidential election. Conservative and far-right candidates have made migration a top campaign theme, criticizing what they see as Macron’s inaction on stemming migration.
“Our passport-free area (in Europe) is being threatened if we don’t know how to guard our external borders and monitor who is entering in,” Macron told the La Voix du Nord newspaper.
Macron met with the EU’s interior ministers in northern France on Wednesday evening, as the country holds the bloc’s six-month rotating presidency. He also met earlier in the day with local officials to discuss economic issues in the former mining region.
