Strategic contextualisation: free movement, labour migration policies and the governance of foreign workers in Europe

Abstract

Heightened levels of internal labour mobility since the European Union (EU)'s Eastern enlargements in 2004 and 2007 have shifted the context for member state policies geared towards the admission of non-EU workers. This article contends that the strategic use of the internal mobility regime by member states, as a justification for selective recruitment of labour from outside the EU, deserves more analytical attention. This contribution examines how labour migration policies (LMP) in the United Kingdom, France and Germany make use of the EU free-movement framework in current legislation, and how associated policy rationales are justified. In an interpretive policy analysis of legislative documents and decision-makers' meaning-making, as related in semi-structured interviews, the article identifies the logics, tools and rationales which link LMP to EU free movement. These links are shown to be highly selective and they serve common as well as nationally distinct governance goals. Across all three cases LMPs ascribe various degrees of relevance to EU internal labour supply, depending on the different skill levels of migrants targeted in respective policies. This shared pattern of economic coordination of LMP by skill level – in which the EU common labour market plays the role of delimiting additional migration in the skilled and especially low-skilled segments – is conflated with national migration control agendas. Member states draw on EU free movement to justify migration restrictions targeted at specific sending countries. As a result, the governance of the foreign workforce produces skills- and origin-based privileges rather than granting rights to mobile migrant workers in Europe.

Keywords:

• labour migration
• EU free movement
• EU enlargement
• cultural political economy
• governance

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the opportunity to pilot some of the conceptual thoughts developed here in a research mini forum of the Council for European Studies newsletter, especially to the editors Claes Belfrage and Caroline de la Porte who also offered valuable feedback (Paul 2011a). Thanks are further due to two anonymous reviewers and to Ferruccio Pastore for detailed comments on a version presented at the 2012 IMISCOE conference.

Notes

1. These three have, for instance, consistently been among the top 10 destinations for foreign workers over the last decades (Eurostat 2011b, OECD 2009).

2. Poland, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Slovenia.

3. Other contextual factors structurally embed LMP, too. Unemployment, poverty and violent conflict in sending countries or labour demand in informal economies in receiving states certainly matter, but they are not part of the analysis presented in this article.

4. I disregard the intra-corporate transfer route within tier 2 here which is exempted from the annual cap.

5. UK1, UK3, UK7.

6. UK8, similar statements by UK1, UK4, UK5, UK7.

7. This is critically acknowledged in an interview by a Migration Advisory Committee official whose task was to define annual caps. They wondered whether tiers 1 and 2 were ‘asked to do too much’ to achieve overall reductions.

8. Several interviewees explain that this route is about facilitating the logic of global business rather than migration control (UK1, UK3, UK4, UK5, UK8) and therefore does not need to be checked against EU internal labour supply.

9. This term covers Commonwealth countries who gained independence after 1945, mostly situated in Africa and Asia, as opposed to the Old Commonwealth countries Australia, New Zealand or Canada for example.

10. UK2.

11. FRA1, FRA6.

12. FRA1, FRA5, FRA6.

13. FRA7.

14. The French expression ‘se rouler par terre’ is usually translated as ‘to roll on the ground laughing’; however, the interviewee intended an ironic comment on previous fears about ‘invasions’ of Polish plumbers in France and actual low levels of entries after the 2008 end to transitional limitations here.

15. FRA6, similar statements by FRA2, FRA7.

16. FRA3, FRA6.

17. FRA1, FRA2, FRA3, FRA4, FRA6.

18. FRA1.

19. GER2, GER 3, GER4, GER5.

20. GER7.

21. GER3, GER5.

22. GER4, GER5, GER6.

23. GER5, similar statement by GER2, GER6. Of course, the negation of the potential relevance of imperialism and its racialised effects before the end of the Second World War is deeply flawed.

24. GER9, similar statements by GER10.