After Enlargement - Europe’s new migration system and its hidden political economy of immigration

Favell, Adrian (2009) After Enlargement - Europe’s new migration system and its hidden political economy of immigration. In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Because of an overiding focus on policy and political talk, rather than the underlying social and economic phenomena, scholars typically underestimate the importance of underlying demographics and labour market dynamics on immigration politics in Europe. Despite rhetoric about “fortress Europe” and fears of “floods” to richer nations, flows have generally been demand driven, and have therefore been drawn by European nations with the most open and informal labour markets – such as Britain, Ireland, Italy and Spain – rather than more highly regulated welfare states such as Denmark. They are also more likely to be circular and temporary than one way immigration. I discuss the desirability of the apparently inevitable trend in Europe towards a more US style international political economy that strongly parallels the migration system between the US and Mexico. This effectively has seen the emergence of a dual level governance system of immigration, in which “smoke and mirrors” style politics talks about controlled policing of borders and migration management, whereas the underlying trends are much less controlled and much more porous. I consider four possible scenarios for this “new migration system”, before concluding with evidence that suggests that the dominant trend in Europe is towards the emergence of a more regionalised system, in which West European societies come to rely on East European movers to fill secondary labour market needs in the service economy – in an exploitative fashion – as well as encouraging a more effective racial or ethnically-based exclusion of migrants from the south or further afield.

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