Immigration Policy in Europe

The Politics of Control

Virginie Guiraudon, Gallya Lahav

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781136779107
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Previously published as a special issue of West European Politics, this edited volume evaluates the extent to which a policy gap between inputs and outcomes exists with regard to immigration control. In exploring an expanded migration policy-field which includes the extreme right, the media and actors, this book goes beyond traditional analyses tha

Actors and Venues in Immigration Control: Closing the Gap between Political Demands and Policy Outcomes

GALLYA LAHAV and VIRGINIE GUIRAUDON

Scholarship on immigration policy has evolved dramatically since 1994, when West European Politics published a special issue on ‘The Politics of Immigration in Western Europe’ edited by Martin Baldwin-Edwards and Martin Schain. Noting the emergence of immigration on the political agenda, the volume identified key trends in the politics of immigration of the time, which, as noted in a recent review essay in the journal (Luedtke 2005), have since amplified. Among the themes explored in the 1994 volume were the supra-nationalisation of policy-making, the transformation of former emigration countries into receiving states, the conflation of immigration and asylum, and the role of the immigration issue in party politics. To a large degree, they remain key topics today.

Since 1994, immigration control, asylum and the integration of migrant minorities have been at the centre of electoral campaigns across European countries and on the agenda of European Union (EU) forums and other international venues. What has changed most since the Baldwin Edwards/Schain volume is not so much the nature of immigration politics as the fact that mainstream political scientists are now analysing its dynamics, its impact on policy, on migration patterns and migrant incorporation. While the 1994 collection was the earliest of its kind – a broad and fairly comprehensive survey of national models of both immigration and immigrant policies in different European countries – many scholars in the field continued to focus on their own national context and remained largely descriptive and/or normative in their approach.

This bias was particularly flagrant when studies focused on policies aimed at immigrants once they had settled in Europe. As Adrian Favell (2001) wrote in an incisive survey of that literature, despite the proliferation of migration studies, many remained descriptive and were produced under material and/or policy constraints Some were greatly dependent on state funding whereas those that were not had too little means to generate data. In both cases, national settings spewed a range of ‘Republican’ or Marxist ideological stances that favoured some research questions and findings while overlooking others. In the end, these biases made it difficult to generate cutting edge cross-national comparative research. The paucity of conceptualisation beyond nation-state-centred context-specific cases and the lack of comparable data sets have created formidable challenges for the next generation of migration researchers.

As immigration politics has gone from ‘low’ politics to ‘high politics’, governments and international organisations have invested more in policy-relevant scholarship. The dangers of skewing the research towards yet another agenda evoke the need to avoid the pitfalls that research on the integration of migrants has faced. As Christopher Rudolph (2003: 31) pointed out in a recent article, ‘migration ha[d] long been considered peripheral to international relations scholarship, especially security studies’ and to a great extent international political economy. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world, security studies are becoming interested in issue areas such as immigration that have become linked to security concerns and many are tempted to ‘jump on this bandwagon’. There is thus a risk and an opportunity for migration scholars. On the one hand, there is more political and academic attention paid to the issue. On the other hand, more funding and the introduction of imposed problématiques can be a mixed blessing, as they may bias the research agenda, and thus compromise the quality of research in this area.

These caveats notwithstanding, the migration field has matured, producing its own theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded work. The last decade has witnessed the development of comparative studies seeking to systematically test hypotheses about political and policy developments. While the proliferation of research suggests that migration studies is now a specialisation in its own right, scholars are increasingly espousing classical questions in the discipline. As Maarten Vink (2002: 204) well captures, immigration is becoming a distinct field of study in political science and part of the mainstream discipline – epitomised by his own research on the impact of European-level decision-making on domestic policies illustrates (Vink 2005). The papers collected here, while limited mostly to questions of immigration control, reflect this growing interest in theory and a sophistication of the methods that scholars are using. The ambition of this current collection then is to take stock of this new scholarship. We want to showcase new contributions to our understanding of policy choices and variation in policy outcomes.

It is important to underscore that the essays focus on immigration control. This term has been used in the European literature at least since Tomas Hammar (1985) distinguished it from immigrant policy: the former regards the framework that regulates the entry and stay of foreigners whereas the latter is concerned with their integration into host societies. The very notion that immigration can be controlled has been at the core of most of the literature in migration studies. Broadly speaking, countries solicit and/or stem immigration flows. Yet a popular discourse among migration scholars as immigration policy-making has become more complex and multi-tiered is that states have ‘lost control’ over immigration (Sassen 1996). The notion of a policy ‘gap’ (Cornelius et al. 2004) between restrictive goals and ‘liberal’ or ‘expansive’ outcomes has gained credence. There are however different versions of that argument.

For most sociologists in the field, the gap stems from the irrelevance of policy in their view when analysing migration dynamics. States are plainly misguided in their belief that policy can influence inevitable migration flows. A notable work in this vein is Douglas Massey's ‘March of Folly’ (1998) article in which he argued that when governments such as that of the US believe that stimulating the development of countries of origin and erecting borders in the sending countries stem flows they risk increasing them instead. In this logic, development is seen to increase migration as migrants tend to be rather educated persons feeling dislocated and relatively deprived. Borders then make the process uni-directional rather than circular (i.e. immigration becomes permanent since border-crossing has a high cost). There are in fact European examples of counterproductive deterrence policies, including the shift from circular to permanent immigration, exemplified by the case of East—West migrants as the Schengen border becomes more of a reality and strict visa policies are in force in the new member states.

We agree with the premises of such immigration studies that policies are only one element affecting the dynamics of migration and the destination of immigrants, and their effects are not always those intended. One could add that policies in the migrants’ country of origin and in other domains can better explain changes in migration flows than measures regulating the entry and stay of foreigners. Political scientists such as Eiko Thielemann, whose research is featured in this volume, have also underlined that policies do not always matter. He reminds us that governments attribute the ebb and flow of asylum applications to their (restrictive) reforms while changes may depend on the shift in conflict areas and the colonial or kinship ties between the country from which refugees are fleeing and a particular EU member state (Thielemann 2003). In fact, political scientists take for granted that policies are not rational solutions based on social science models of migration dynamics but stem from compromises between various interest groups, mediated by media pressure and party politics. The complex politics that lead to policy choices are the nitty-gritty that several articles in this volume seek to disaggregate.

Another strand of the migration policy literature also envisages a gap between goals and outcomes. Gary Freeman (1995, 2002), in particular, who contributes an updated version of his theory of migration politics to this collection, has long pointed out that there has been a discrepancy between the desires of a largely anti-immigration public and the expansive bias of policies. In his view, this reflects the importance of organised interests in some but not all aspects of migration policy. Freeman's theory is revisited and tested in several of the contributions to this volume. Furthermore, the notion of a gap between policy inputs and outcomes – stated goals and migration patterns – is examined in a more comprehensive manner by Freeman here than has been done before.

In addressing the gap hypotheses, scholars represented here examine various types of policy demands, as well as a broad range of policy instruments at the disposal of national governments taking into account the entire policy process. Several contributions tackle the issue of policy implementation – an oft-missing variable in the public policy literature, especially with respect to immigration control. Others study policy-making beyond the state at the supranational level, in intergovernmental forums, and in bilateral and multilateral contexts whereby states seek to externalise migration control functions. In these ways, we aim to test the ‘gap hypothesis’ anew by contemplating the relationship between policy outputs and policy outcomes.

The need for a more comprehensive analysis of the policy process and a more nuanced analysis of policy choices derives not only from theoretical questions about policy gaps. It stems in part from the complexity of the current demographic situation in Europe with respect to temporary and permanent migration (see Appendix A for current figures). That is, despite the widespread ‘fortress Europe’ rhetoric, the political turn towards restrictionism, and the securitisation of migration, there are substantial legal entries each year in Europe. Almost two and half million international migrants arrived legally in the European Economic Area and Switzerland in 2003, the last year when data were available (OECD 2005). The number is greater than in the late 1990s when the annual average was 1.9 million.

While most migrants are unsolicited, such as family members of foreign residents or nationals and asylum-seekers, since the 1990s the demographic situation has become very nuanced, as the need for foreign workers has coincided with the decline of the native labour force. Indeed, there has been a developing trend of labour recruitment – including skilled and unskilled, seasonal, temporary and permanent migrants. European governments have also been actively recruiting foreign students, the competition for brains having been accelerated by a drop in foreign student visas in the US following 9/11. The number of foreign students increased by 30% in the UK and 36% in France from 2001 to 2003, for example. The number of intra-company transferees has also become significant, since the principle of freedom of services in the European Union allows member state firms to employ foreign workers.

To add to these trends, consider unwanted migrants such as asylum-seekers, and recall that only 10–20% of rejected asylum-seekers are actually deported. National and EU political leaders alike invoke the need to ‘fight illegal migration’, but they well know in which sectors of the economy these measures are likely to work and they fear upsetting the boom in those sectors that are more dependent on foreign labour (e.g. construction industry, tourism). Several governments hosting large numbers of undocumented migrants have run large-scale regularisation campaigns (e.g. Italy and Spain). Others such as France have set up a case-by-case regularisation system that avoids publicity while serving as a proxy for ‘migration management’ with as many as 20,000 persons a year obtaining legal status (Bribosia and Rea 2002; Weil 2004). In any case, one should consider that rejected asylum-seekers and illegal migrants are part of the ‘immigrant stocks’ in Europe although they do not appear in official statistics.

After the US, the top countries with respect to migration intake in 2004 were Germany, Spain, the UK and Italy. The mere presence of two Southern European countries in the top five immigration countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is not solely the result of their regularisation campaigns. Europe is now an immigration continent to the extent that there are many more receiving than sending countries. Consider, for example, that there are more foreigners relative to the total population in Ireland (5.9%) now than in France (5.6%) (OECD 2005). This is striking, given that France was the first European country to resort to immigration in the nineteenth century while Ireland at the time and until very recently was one of Europe's traditional emigration ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The West European Politics Series
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Actors and Venues in Immigration Control: Closing the Gap between Political Demands and Policy Outcomes
• Formulating Policy
• Implementing Policy
• International Policy-Making
• Index