Ester Salis
4. policy trEnds, bEForE And during thE crisis
Which are the policy choices behind the heterogeneous immigration trends described above, and how are they evolving? This comparative review cannot avoid assuming that the crisis is a watershed and a turning point in migration policy trends at the continental level. We will therefore structure this paragraph along this chronological cleavage. Nevertheless, it has to be stressed that the crisis, as it is hitting countries and regions in Europe in a very asymmetrical way, is also affecting differently migration policy-making. As a result, as we will see, the pre-crisis map of similarities and differences among national approaches is emerging deeply transformed by the structural changes of the last five years.
4.1 pre-crisis diverging evolution, but...
In the decade before the outburst of the crisis, the European Union as a whole experienced an impressive, but very uneven, immigration boom (See table below).
table 1: Foreign population as % of the total population in selected eU countries, 2001 and 2011
2001 2011
France 5.3 5.9
germany 8.8 8.8
Italy 2.2 7.5
spain 2.9 12.3
sweden 5.4 6.6
United Kingdom 4.5 7.2
source: EURosTAT, 2012.
Two very different areas – Southern Europe (primarily Spain and Italy, followed by Portugal and Greece) and the Atlantic isles (UK and Ireland) – emerged as the main motors of such strong expansion in immigration, largely made up of low-skilled and demand-driven labour flows: the share of the foreign population in Italy and Spain of the total resident population has more than doubled in the last decade and substantial increases have been observed in the United Kingdom and Sweden7, while the indicator has remained stable overall in both France and Germany. In both these geographical areas, the first three-quarters of the 2000s were a period of intensive experimentation in the field of migrant labour supply policies, aimed at steering – although in very different forms – the expansive migratory trend.
On the other hand, in the European core, represented by France, Germany and the Benelux, (but also in Northern European countries) the same period was marked by a more
7 When considering these figures, one should also bear in mind that Sweden and the UK have more open citizenship laws compared to those adopted in Italy and Spain. This could determine greater naturalization rates and, therefore, an unknown but significant share of the foreign population may gradually disappear from official statistics.
Migration and Integration
conservative approach, which did not depart from the restrictive management of labour mi-gration which had been prevailing during the previous two decades.8
The policy experimentation carried out in some EU countries since the late 1990s in the field of labour migration management focused mainly on two fundamental technical challenges:
I) How to assess domestic labour shortages, i.e., labour force needs which cannot be satisfied properly (both in terms of quality and timing) through domestic offer and, therefore, require ad hoc immigrant admissions. In this field, for instance, the practice developed in the UK since the establishment of the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) is of particular interest;9
II) How to single out and, if necessary, train potential labour migration candidates prior to migration, i.e., when they are still in the sending countries. Whereas in some of the coun-tries we have studied – such as the UK or Sweden – this selection has been entirely left to market dynamics, in some Southern European countries experiments have been made to set up screening (and, in some cases, also training) mechanisms on the basis of bilateral agreements with sending countries.10
In another important policy area, however, policy innovation has been much less substan-tial. We are referring to the design of procedures aimed at facilitating the matching between specific employers experiencing labour shortages and specific foreign workers/candidates for migration. In theory, such crucial passage can be regulated in two opposite ways: by putting on the employer the burden (and the opportunity) to go and look for his/her prospective employees abroad (employer-led, or demand-driven matching mechanisms); or, instead, by al-lowing the job-seeking migrant to enter the immigration country in order to look for an appropriate employer (worker-led, or supply-driven mechanisms).
These two approaches are evidently very different in terms of both the basic pre-condi-tions for their functioning and their broader implicapre-condi-tions. Employer-led systems can operate effectively and smoothly only if employers are practically able to screen and select candidates in the countries of origin, either by entrusting an agent there or at distance, by electronic means. This selection abroad can realistically be expected to take place only when the em-ployer is a large enough company and/or when the sought-after worker is highly skilled and his/her skills can be assessed at distance (through a CV, an interview via computer and simi-lar means). On the contrary, small and medium-sized enterprises, where the bulk of existing labour needs concentrates, typically face greater difficulties in engaging in transnational re-cruitment activities and lack the financial and organizational resources to undertake complex and long-lasting procedures to bring the needed workers from abroad.
8 For a more analytical overview of similarities and differences in the main EU countries’ approaches to labour migration, before and during the crisis, see Pastore, 2011.
9 See the paper on the UK case, written by Camilla Devitt on the framework of the EU-Asia Dialogue project.
10 For more details, see LAB-MIG-GOV country studies and Claudia Finotelli’s paper on Spain produced for the EU-Asia Dialogue project.
Managing Labour Migration in Times of Crisis
On the other hand, worker-led/supply-driven systems raise the politically sensitive ques-tion of what happens if and when the job-seeker does not find a job within a reasonable lapse of time (and before the expiry of the visa, in all cases in which an entry visa is required).
In Western Europe, over the last few years, the concern that the admission of foreign job-seekers might lead to irregular immigration through overstaying has been felt very strongly by political elites and policy-makers, pushing them to give systematic priority to employer-led matching mechanisms while increasingly neglecting the experimentation of supply-driven schemes.
Over the 2000s, this technical (but politically motivated) convergence on demand-driven systems took place in a rather wide and undifferentiated way, in countries that – as illustrated at the beginning of this paragraph – were otherwise diverging in their overall attitude towards labour migration. The growing subordination of admission for working purposes to the pre-existence of a binding job offer (or even of a work contract, as with the Italian “contratto di soggiorno”, introduced in 2002) brought a general increase in the rigidity of European admission systems. An important consequence is that – particularly in Southern European countries, where the demand for immigrant labour is largely issuing from small and medium-sized enterprises and predominantly targeting low-skilled workers – admission systems largely failed in their institutional task. In spite of the efforts in needs assessment and in increasing cooperation with sending countries, labour migration policies continued to score poorly in terms of their capacity to actually fill labour shortages with foreign workers admitted on an ad hoc basis. As a consequence, alternative channels of foreign labour supply, primarily ex post regularisation of undocumented immigrants and (since 2004) free movement of EU citizens from newly accessed Eastern European states, maintained or even increased their importance.
4.2 converging responses to the crisis, but...
The financial and economic crisis, with its heavy occupational toll, has obviously affected in a profound way the policy landscape sketched above. As a first response, most governments used their leverage on the so-called “discretionary migration” (as opposed to the sphere of rights-based migration, where constitutional and international legal obligations reduce the scope for legislators’ discretion) by reducing entry quotas (where existing), cutting shortage occupations lists or raising stakes for individual admission (e.g., by setting higher thresholds for minimum salary upon entry).
Although not central to our argument, a paradoxical, although hardly avoidable, side-ef-fect of this sort of anti-crisis migration policy strategy is worth mentioning here: with brakes put on labour admission channels, the relative weight of non-labour-oriented entries on the total migratory inflows obviously tends to increase. Typically, the share of family reunions
Migration and Integration
and other categories of migration on average marked by lower activity rates11 therefore grows in a phase in which just the opposite would be economically desirable.
Besides tightening admission taps, a small minority of European governments has ad-opted voluntary return schemes in an attempt to drain, at least in part, the expanding pool of unemployed immigrants. In most cases, as in the Spanish one, however, such schemes have been virtually dropped rather quickly, after having proven to be unable to attract sizeable numbers of candidates for repatriation, partly as an effect of the limited size of financial incentives, but more importantly due to the wide reach of the crisis, which is affecting heavily also many sending countries and, therefore, discouraging attempts to return.
Another spreading policy trend, which goes beyond the sphere of immigration policies stricto sensu, is worth mentioning here. Faced with high levels of unemployment, which are growing even faster among immigrants than among natives, public authorities are putting increasing emphasis on the necessity to better target active labour policies in order to enhance their inclusive potential with regard to foreign workers. Such a trend is particularly hard to map and assess because, in most EU member states, labour market policies are strongly de-centralised and vary significantly on a regional basis. Taking the Italian case as an example, it is interesting to note that enhanced labour market integration of foreign workers, particularly through active policies such as training and re-training, has been set as one of the strategic priorities of recent integration policies set in 2010 (Salis, forthcoming).
Besides the reduction of immigrant workers’ unemployment, the objective to raise the ac-tivity rate of non-discretionary migrants has also often been cited by the officials interviewed for this research as a growing priority in a context of crisis.
In spite of the restrictive policy trends that we have been referring to, the crisis is not erasing labour shortages altogether, and it is not suppressing the need for selective admis-sions. But, as the OECD stresses, in such a difficult economic context, the approach to active labour migration policies is changing in some fundamental way, with growing attention and emphasis on selection criteria:
Migration policies as a factor of economic development also remain. 2011 witnessed many labour immigration schemes maintained, often with a more selective approach, giving less attention to “quantity” and more to the presumed “quality” of immigrants. (OECD 2012, p. 120).
But, given this general tendency towards greater selectivity based on the individual quali-ties of would-be migrants, the European geography of labour migration policies is shifting.
The set of studies carried out for this project and for LAB-MIG-GOV show clearly that the countries less affected by the economic and occupational crisis (Germany and Sweden, among our case studies) are also the ones where a more persistent policy dynamism is observed,
11 Family and humanitarian migrants or international students typically display lower activity rates and higher unemployment rates compared to labour migrants, with systematic gender differences within their respective categories. According to data of the 2008 EU-LFS analyzed by Cangiano (2012), inactivity rates of recent (i.e., arrived between 1998 and 2007) non-EU immigrants range from 5% for male labour migrants entered with a job offer to 63%
for female humanitarian immigrants.
Managing Labour Migration in Times of Crisis
with the landmark migration policy reform adopted at the end of 2008 in Sweden and with the important (although less mediatized) series of legislative and administrative adjustments implemented in Germany since 2010.12 On the other hand, the countries which had been driving policy change in the pre-crisis phase (see above, par. 4.1) are currently going through a restrictive phase, in which work-oriented admission schemes are being either frozen or ac-tively dismantled.
The European political geography of labour migration management which had marked the 2000s, with Southern European countries and the UK standing out as the main en-gines of policy change and a less dynamic continental core, is not actual any more. The new economic cleavages produced by the asymmetrical impact of the economic crisis – with a renewed German centrality and ever more acute challenges for European peripheries – are clearly reflected also in the sphere of labour migration and its regulation.
5. WAys AhEAd: EconoMic iMpErAtiVEs And politicAl constrAints
By deeply transforming Europe’s economic and political geography, the crisis is also high-lighting the continent’s structurally problematic relations with labour migration.
On the one hand, it is hard to deny that some of the worst-hit countries are also those where some of the most migrant-intensive economic models had been gaining ground in the previous years (the most evident examples being Ireland and Spain, but similar arguments can apply to most Southern European countries). With hindsight, it is easy to state that these member states have been too little selective in their management of labour inflows, focusing more on short-term gains associated with large-scale, low-skilled immigration than on long-term sustainability.13 In order to turn labour immigration into an ingredient for an effective exit strategy from the crisis, rather than let it become a worsening factor, all these countries need deep reforms in their migrant labour supply policies.
On the other hand, however, and somehow symmetrically, some of the countries which are faring better in the crisis (Germany, in the first place), are also among those which, in the previous phase, had adopted a more cautious and selective attitude in the field of admission of migrant workers. Without obviously suggesting any causal relation between these two dimen-sions, it is undisputable, however, that precisely the better economic outlook of these latter countries, associated with their more or less gloomy demographic profiles, call for further liberalizing innovation in their labour migration management strategies. As we have shown in the case studies, some of these countries (e.g., Sweden) have already started picking up the challenge, but these reforms need constant maintenance and adjustment: as a matter of fact, migration policies (more than other sectoral policies, which deal with an intrinsically dynamic phenomenon) cannot be but a work in progress, and even more so in times of deep economic uncertainty.
12 See the papers on Germany and Sweden written, respectively, by Barbara Laubenthal and Monica Quirico for the EU-Asia Dialogue project.
Migration and Integration
Labour migration policy reform thus imposes itself throughout the EU, albeit in very dif-ferent forms, with quite heterogeneous sets of priorities and constraints. These fundamental differences, by the way, are likely to hamper substantial progress in the EU agenda on labour migration also in the future, unless (or until) the deepening of common European economic governance reaches the stage where autonomous labour market policies at the national level would not be possible anymore.
Are European intellectual and political elites aware of the urgency to innovate in the field of labour migration? And if so, what are their strategic orientations? Unfortunately, there are no positive and easy answers to these questions. As already stressed (see par. 2), the crisis is pushing down immigration in the ladder of political priorities, although not everywhere to the same extent. As for the possible paths of policy innovation, the main ideas which are floating around in the EU are controversial and based on weak bases, in terms of both em-pirical evidence and political consensus.
Should an observer condense the dominant European thinking on labour migration into three attributes, these would probably be: regular (i.e., no more regularisations)14, temporary (as reflected in the strong programmatic emphasis on “circular migration schemes”)15 and selective (meaning that highly skilled immigrants are generally welcome, unlike low- and medium-skilled ones).
Most scholars are suggesting caution on all these three mots d’ordre, in that regularisa-tions are often pragmatically defended as the “least worst” solution in certain circumstances, circular migration is often described as a spontaneous reality which risks being hampered by restrictive mobility regimes, and the exclusive priority given to high-skilled migration is often denounced as wishful thinking at risk of backfiring (and, thus, either remains on paper or generates skill/brain waste).
This is not the place to discuss these important and complex issues in any detail. It is however useful to point out that the three normative principles synthesised above, besides resting on weak empirical foundations, seem to suffer also from a (still too) weak political legitimacy. As a matter of fact, available opinion surveys seem to show that: a) sizeable mi-norities are everywhere in favour (or not a priori against) regularizations (see below, Figure 7); b) substantial majorities of European citizens almost everywhere have a preference for permanent over temporary admission (see Fig. 8); c) Europeans tend to prefer (and probably feel less threatened by) a labour migration policy targeting the low-skilled (but on the basis of a definite job offer) rather than a supply-driven approach giving priority to the high-skilled (see Fig. 9).
14 See the following passage of the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum of 24 September 2008: “…the European Council agrees: […] to use only case-by-case regularisation, rather than generalised regularisation, under national law, for humanitarian or economic reasons” (full text available at http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/
justice_freedom_security/free_movement_of_persons_asylum_immigration/jl0038_en.htm.
15 At EU level, the concept was introduced by the European Commission’s Communication of 16 May 2007 on
“circular migration and mobility partnerships between the European Union and third countries”, COM(2007) 248 final, available at page: http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/justice_freedom_security/free_movement_of_persons_
asylum_immigration/l14564_en.htm.
Managing Labour Migration in Times of Crisis
Fig. 7: Distribution of respondents to the question: “should illegal immigrants be required to return to the country of origin, or should they be given the opportunity to obtain legal status allowing them to stay?” (based on ttI 2011, table Q12).16
Fig. 8: Distribution of respondents to the question: “some people think that legal immigrants who come to (CoUntRY) to work should only be admitted temporarily and then be required to return to their country of origin. others feel that they should be given the opportunity to stay permanently. Which comes closer to your point of view?” (based on ttI 2011, table Q11).
16 In this figure and the following ones, column totals may not amount to 100, because refusals to answer and “I don’t
Migration and Integration
Fig. 9: Distribution of respondents to the question: “In deciding which immigrants to admit to CoUntRY, should the government give preference to immigrants who have a high level of education but no job offer, or should it give preference to immigrants who have a job offer in the CoUntRY but a lower level of education?”
(based on ttI 2011, table Q7).
What can be drawn from the analysis of these opinion survey data is that there is a substan-tial and persistent gap between public opinions’ policy preferences and the dominant political thinking of European elites on labour migration. In order to fill this gap, and to reconcile economic imperatives and political constraints, a long-term work of evidence-gathering, policy evaluation and pedagogical communication is needed.
References
Cangiano, A. (2012). “Immigration policy and migrant labour market outcomes in the European Union: New evidence from the EU Labour Force Survey.” FIERI Working Papers. Turin,
Cangiano, A. (2012). “Immigration policy and migrant labour market outcomes in the European Union: New evidence from the EU Labour Force Survey.” FIERI Working Papers. Turin,