The Political Economy of Managed Migration: Nonstate Actors, Europeanization, and the Politics of Designing Migration Policies

European governments have re-discovered labor migration, but are eager to be perceived as controlling unsolicited forms of migration, especially through asylum and family reunion. The emerging paradigm of managed migration combines the construction of more permissive channels for desirable and actively recruited labor migrants with ever more restrictive approaches towards asylum seekers. Non-state actors, especially employer organizations, trade unions, and humanitarian non-governmental organizations, attempt to shape regulatory measures, but their success varies depending on organizational characteristics. Labor market interest associations’ lobbying strategies regarding quantities and skill profile of labor migrants will be influenced by the respective system of political economy they are embedded in. Trade unions are generally supportive of well-managed labor recruitment strategies. But migration policy-making also proceeds at the European Union (EU) level. While national actors seek to upload their national model as a blueprint for future EU policy to avoid costly adaptation, top-down Europeanization is re-casting national regulation in important ways, notwithstanding highly divergent national regulatory philosophies.

Based on field work in and analysis of primary documents from six European countries (France, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Poland), The Political Economy of Managed Migration makes an important contribution to the study of a rapidly Europeanized policy domain. Combining insights from the literature on comparative political economy, Europeanization, and migration studies, the book makes important contributions to all three, while demonstrating how migration policy can be fruitfully studied by employing tools from mainstream political science, rather than treating it as a distinct subfield.

Georg Menz is Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, London University. He has served as Chateaubriand Fellow at the National Foundation for Political Science in Paris, as DAAD Fellow at Humboldt Universitat Berlin and Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute. He is the author of Varieties of Capitalism and Europeanization (OUP 2005), which won the UACES Best Book Award in European Studies in 2006, and co-editor of Internalizing Globalization. His work has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Social Policy, GermanPolitics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Politique europeenne.