The EU's Role in Managing Economic Migration: State of Play and Future Perspectives

Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is to: map out the development of the EU's
approaches to management of economic migration, to explain causes of
slow europeanisation in this policy area and to outline future perspectives.
The text describes: (1) the establishment of an asymmetric constitutional
framework for EU migration policies, with unfinished communitarisation in
the field of legal migration, (2) the development of policies for managing
economic migration in 1993-2006, and (3) current debates launched by the
Commission in 2005.
Finally (4), the author outlines the causes of the current situation. Despite
the limitations, she predicts the further europeanisation of economic
migration policies. The main reasons for this prediction are the continued
trend towards a piecemeal adoption of specific measures to regulate
economic migration, the links of economic migration policies to more
dynamic segments of migration policies and the need for a global approach
to migration in the EU's external policies. The likely scenario is subsidiary
and selective EU intervention.