There are three main migration challenges for Europe:

Flow. Migratory pressure is on the increase as the populations of poorer countries in the greater neighbourhood of the European Union become more mobile.

Stock. EU member states with a significant stock of immigrants are confronted with a major integration challenge as the aspirations of many second-generation migrants are frustrated by poor education and poor labour market performance. If integration policies fail, large ethnic underclasses may become a permanent feature in the EU.

Talent. Global competition for high-skilled workers has intensified owing to skillbiased technological change and globalisation, and the EU struggles to attract and retain top talent.

With the internal mobility agenda in the aftermath of EU enlargement settled for better or for worse, the time to address the external migration challenge is now. But which part of these challenges needs to be addressed at the EU as opposed to the national level? Ultimately, this is the key question underlying the current debate on the ’pact on immigration‘ that is to be adopted during the French EU presidency. Past experience shows that the development of a common European immigration policy is, politically, a particularly difficult undertaking:

• History. There are major differences in tradition, outlook and migration experiences between member states, so that preferences are diverse.

•Politics. Immigration continues to be a politically divisive subject within most member states. As a consequence, national priorities can be volatile.

• Sovereignty. There is a natural reluctance to delegate decisions about who is allowed to enter a country and who is not to the European level since such decisions are often seen as one of the defining elements of national sovereignty.

Bearing these difficulties in mind, three priority areas for EU policy action are identified and concrete policy suggestions are developed:

• High-skilled migration. For the EU successfully to participate in the global competition for talent, the Blue Card draft directive needs to be strengthened. In particular, the Blue Card needs to become more readily transferable so that it genuinely offers access to the entire EU labour market. At the same time, concerns about brain drain should be taken seriously, not least by offering developing countries an opt-out clause.

• Irregular migration. The EU agenda on irregular migration must be balanced to succeed. The currently envisaged efforts to reduce irregular migration through tighter controls will only be able to slow the inflow of irregular migrants somewhat but will not make the problem of irregular migration disappear. Therefore, it is proposed that tighter controls should be combined with better humanitarian standards and an agreement on continuous ‘earned regularisation’ as a realistic alternative to sporadic mass regularisations.

• Asylum. Not least because of past coordination efforts, asylum applications in Europe have dropped considerably in recent years while wars and political persecution continue to make people flee their home countries on a large scale. In order for Europe to help these refugees more effectively, a ‘new Nansen’ scheme offering 25,000 additional humanitarian immigration slots per annum is proposed, the funding and allocation of which are to be organised at the European level.

BRUEGEL BLUEPRINT SERIES
Volume VI
Divisions of labour: rethinking Europe’s migration policy (FULL REPORT)
by Jakob von Weizsäcker