Regional integration and (hauled) migration policy: what does the European experience teach us?1

1. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments.

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on selected pieces from the growing literature on international migration to Europe from a regional and policy-making perspective. The analysis identifies lessons from the European experience with respect to two issues: the relationship between policies of regional integration and international migration, and the conditions under which a common (regional) policy of incorporation of immigrants into the host societies might be agreed upon. The purpose is twofold: to provide a critical assessment of the state of the art and to advance the debate through the suggestion of new research venues. We argue that most of the selected literature misses the relation of mutual causation between migration and regional integration policies, partly due to an overemphasis on the benefits of supranational institutionalization, and partly due to the difficulties of conceptualizing the hybrid character of the EU institutional supranationality and the peculiar nature of its politics of migration. We also suggest exploring a distinctive process that characterizes the migration policy area: ‘hauled’ policy convergence; that is, the development of a common policy which occurs largely because it is necessary for other dimensions of the regional integration process to continue, but which countries are reluctant to engage in. In other words, hauled convergence is the minimum policy harmonization needed in a very sensitive policy area (such as migration) for regional integration to advance deeper and further in other areas.

Keywords:

• International migration
• policy convergence
• policy-making
• regional integration

Notes

1. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments.

2. See ‘Old Doubts Hang Over Celebrations of a New Europe,’ New York Times, May 3, 2004.

3. See the Treaty establishing the European Community, Part Three, Title IV, articles 61, 62, and 63.

4. See Communication de la Commission au Conseil et au Parliament Européen. Espace de Liberté, de Sécurité et de Justice: bilan du programme de Tampere et futures orientations, SEC (2004) 680 et SEC (2004) 693, and its annexes COM (2004) 401 final, Brussels, June 2, 2004.

5. For a detailed description of the demographic composition of the foreign-born population in Europe, see Münz and Fassmann (2004).

6. Examples of milestones in this institutionalization process are: The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 (including anti-discrimination provisions and their application to questions of employment, social security, healthcare, education), the European Council held in Tampere in 1999 (designing guidelines for a common immigration and asylum policy, partnership with countries of origin, fair treatment of third-country nationals, and management of migration flows), the Lisbon strategy of 2000 (an attempt to make the EU the most competitive, dynamic economy in the world while providing better jobs and greater social cohesion), and the adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2001 (containing provisions that are applicable to all persons, irrespective of their nationality).

7. On the problematic character of assumptions that turn nation states into the natural social and political form of the modern world, see Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002).

8. As part of a broader research project on the same subject, 12 interviews with EU officials and members of migration-related NGOs were conducted by one of the authors in Brussels in June 2004.

9. For the social construction of immigration, see Koser and Lutz (1998), especially the chapters by A. Phoenix on race, J. Andall on religion, P. Barbesino on national statistics, and R. Kaye on the role of the media.

10. See the special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy of October 2005, in which the authors account for 26 typologies and processes associated with policy convergence.

11. See A. Caviedes' (2004) analysis of the reluctance of EU member states to apply the so-called ‘open method of co-ordination’ in immigration policy.

12. Neo-functionalism (in the seminal works of Ernst B. Haas and Leon N. Lindberg) claims that regional integration processes have a dynamics of their own that is composed of several endogenous functions. According to this theory, integration in one sector will inevitably spread to other sectors and generate a drive for ongoing integration; self-interested rational actors will do the trick by virtue of three automatic spillover mechanisms (functional, political, and geographical). See Haas (1958, 1964), and Lindberg (1963).

13. Welfare policies play a more decisive role in incorporation in those cases where immigrants are families rather than individuals (i.e., cases of family reunification or cases where geographical proximity allows for immigration of the whole family). See, for instance, the cases of Tunisians in Italy, Moroccans in Catalonia, and Albanians in Greece, in Anthias and Larardis (1999).