Limits of the competition state? The cultural political economy of European labor migration policies

Abstract

Labor migration has been revitalized as part of economic competition and growth strategies across Europe over the last decade. Scholars have framed policy changes towards more liberal recruitment as a turn towards ‘competition state’ and Schumpeterian innovation goals. This article evaluates the extent to which British, French and German labor admission policies are dominated by competition state logics. I apply a cultural political economy perspective, thereby substantiating this relatively new approach analytically and testing its usefulness for capturing the economic governance of labor migration. I argue that the highly selective arrangement of admissions – with regard to skill-level targeted, and causal, spatial, and operational foci of recruitment – creates a fragmented cultural political economy of labor migration. While competition state logics shape the economic imaginary of ‘high-skilled global labor competiveness’, rival logics dominate the imaginaries of ‘skilled national labor shortages’, and ‘lower skilled EU labor self-sufficiency’. Findings pinpoint limits of competition state theory in explaining contemporary labor migration policy. I demonstrate that semiotic and regulatory selectivity is a key remedy for coping with competing state projects and associated policy tensions. The political ordering of labor migration simultaneously entails amplification and silencing of competition state logics in policies.

Keywords:

• labor migration policy
• cultural political economy
• competition state theory
• governance
• comparative policy analysis

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the time and effort interviewees dedicated to this research. I thank Hannah Durrant, Juan Pablo Ferrero, Bastian Loges, Holger Niemann and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful critical comments. Many thanks also to Allan Dreyer Hansen, Steven Griggs and David Howarth who organized the panel ‘The logics of hegemonic projects. Neo-liberalism and more’ at the Cardiff IPA conference and created a stimulating intellectual environment for discussing an early version. I am indebted to Emma Carmel for her enthusiastic support, and to the Governance Research Group at the University of Bath for rewarding intellectual exchange. All remaining mistakes are mine.

Notes

1. With ‘labor migration’ I refer to those migrant flows admitted into host countries in their function as ‘worker’. Of course, that does not deny that other migrants (i.e. refugees, students or family members) participate in the labor market as well.

2. Drawing on comparative capitalist coordination theories I explore the comparative nuances of LMP when being contextualized in different capitalisms elsewhere (Paul 2011).

3. Potential socio-political, ethno-cultural or electoral agendas are not captured in this paper. I trace the comparative contextualization of cross-nationally shared economic imaginaries of labor migration in individual societal environments in the larger project of which this article constitutes but a small part (see Paul 2011).

4. I draw on category analysis (Yanow 2000): a mapping of selection mechanisms and associated policy tools in legal documents is used to identify selection principles (i.e. the principles according to which migrant workers are selected and stratified in different access routes) and, ultimately, emerging categories of ‘admissible’ migrant workers. Interview data then elucidated the meanings of these categories and selection principles and allowed a tracing of underpinning economic imaginaries that selectively assemble these meanings and hold them together.

5. The assumption of quasi complete domestic labor market control through state policy within the skilled shortage imaginary is striking. The identification and filling of shortages is presented as a mere technicality; domestic ‘upskilling’ efforts are conceived as a functional prospect. This disregards well-researched phenomena like the lack of funding for training (especially in the United Kingdom), wage constraints, unattractive working conditions, and the structural reliance on informal labor in some sectors (Morice and Potot 2010, Ruhs and Anderson 2010).

6. The specific embeddedness within this geography varies, for example France and Germany embraced EU free movement for new accession country nationals more cautiously than the United Kingdom and restricted access initially.