The Guardian has an opinion piece up which paints a darker picture of skilled immigration into the European Union, saying that the EU is sifting potential migrants with skills from those without, regardless of their need to immigrate.

Les Back, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, says that initiatives such as the European Union blue card have "hardened the attitude of European states on the issues of border control."

Professor Back takes issue with agreements between some EU countries and home countries for many of their immigrants. These agreements of "friendship" allow quick deportations without the benefit of an appeal in some cases. He stated that hundreds of children were deported from the UK through such means.

"People are more mobile than at any other point in European history," Back said. Unfortunately, he also says that Europe is utilizing deportation as an official policy, one rarely used during the 20th Century.

"The historian Perry Anderson describes the recent depictions of Europe's success and civility as being inhibited by an 'illimitable narcissism', a kind of self-satisfied political vanity that congratulates itself on the European checkpoints devoid of their power, the comparative success of the euro and the mobility of people within the enlarged EU," Back writes in his article.

"This vision of what Europe is turns away from its complicity with human rights abuses experienced by the deported in places such as Libya and the faces behind the fence at Melilla."

It's not doubt that the European Union is turning to skilled immigration for its own benefit (to alleviate a looming aging-population problem) but the bloc should not lose site of its humanitarian obligations in the process.

The UK is a good example of the hardening attitudes towards immigration that have gripped Europe. What was once called the Immigration and Nationality Directorate is now the UK Border Agency. The front page of their website touts the swift action taken against illegal immigrants and recent limits placed on immigration, rather than promoting the country as a place of innovation and future growth.

In fact, the UK is one country that will most likely decline to take part in the EU blue card, instead focusing on its points-based system which has become increasingly more strict over the years.