Adding border checks to Europe's passport-free area would cost 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) a year in lost business, the bloc's chief executive said on Wednesday, seeking to reinforce a message that impulsive measures to curb migrant flows would hurt the economy.
With some 1.7 million workers crossing EU internal borders every day and with 57 million journeys made across those frontiers every year, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said every hour of waiting time at borders had a cost. "One after another, we close the borders and once they are all closed we will see that the economic cost is huge," Juncker told the European Parliament in Strasbourg. "If we close the borders, if the internal market begins to suffer ... then one day we will be wondering whether or not we really need a common currency if there is no single market, no free movement of workers any more," he said, warning of the threat to the euro. Juncker, whose EU executive is working on revising the bloc's asylum and migration policy, said he decided to stress the economic impact because of EU governments' "cavalier" attitude to the Schengen zone of passport-free travel.
FE
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