The Governance of International Migration in Europe and North America: Looking at the Interaction between Migration Policies and Migrants' Strategies

ABSTRACT

This special issue questions the assumption that migrant populations have near complete information about the policies of their country of destination/settlement and that they take these policy measures into account, be they policies on control or on integration. Our pilot case studies ask first of all what kind of information migrants have with regard to the migration control and integration policies of their receiving country. Second, we check where or from whom migrants get this information. Third, and most importantly, we investigate whether and in what ways do migrants take these policy measures into account in designing and executing their migration plans. In other words, we ask whether migrants meet the migration policies at specific points of their migration journey and what the impact of this ‘meeting’ is on the migrants' plans. In this chapter we put the case studies into their theoretical and empirical context: we discuss the notion of migrant today, the new forms of international migration and the notion of migration system. We also explain the research design adopted in the study and the structure of the case chapters that follow.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• migration policy
• migration system
• migrant strategies
• migration definitions

Notes

1. Studies such as Vogel (2000) for instance mainly concentrate on the USA and one European country (more often than not Germany or Britain) and focus on one specific aspect of the migration phenomenon, e.g. border or internal controls.

2. Most recently, Germany has started keeping records of ‘migration background’ of German citizens in the national statistics.

3. Research Project ‘Does implementation matter? Informal administration practices and shifting immigrant strategies in four member-states’ (IAPASIS) (2000–2003) funded by the European Commission DG RTD, Fifth Framework Programme, contract no. HPSE-CT-1999-00001, co-ordinated by Anna Triandafyllidou and Bo Stråth, at the European University Institute in Florence, http://www.iue.it/RSCAS/Research/IAPASIS/Index.shtml. It concentrated on two immigrant groups, Poles as a comparative control group and a nationally relevant group, notably Albanians in Greece and Italy, Poles and Bosnians in Germany, Indians in the U.K. The study was organised into three phases: a background research, an empirical study of implementation practices and immigrant strategies, and a feedback phase. During the second and most importantly during the third phase, we looked for the links between the immigrant survival strategies, the specific policies adopted by the receiving countries in question and most importantly the ways these were implemented at the day to day level. Moreover, during the third phase, we compared our fieldwork and informants' (state actors and immigrants) views with that of other actors involved in immigration policy design and implementation including other policy actors, non governmental organisations, trade unions, immigrant associations. We were thus able to trace some of the links between immigrants' plans and tactics and selected policies (we concentrated on migration management with particular reference to the issuing and renewal of stay/work permits).