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

Immigration has re-emerged as a highly politicized and contested policy domain throughout Europe. Demographic trends, skill shortages despite high unemployment rates, and advocacy by employers are leading governments to jettison "zero immigration" policies. The newly emerging paradigm of "managed migration" entails more permissive access channels for coveted labor migrants, while access by unsolicited asylum seekers and beneficiaries of family reunion is curtailed. Governments are subject to influential lobbying by employers, trade unions, and humanitarian non-governmental organizations, but the effectiveness of such lobbying is mitigated by important institutional-organizational characteristics. The nature and number of labor migrants desired is conditioned by the respective system of political economy; thus liberal economies such as the UK and Ireland accommodate different types of migrants then Germany and France. But migration policy is also increasingly Europeanized and the interactive effects of top-down and bottom-up Europeanization shape and recast national migration regulation, despite divergent national traditions. Based on original research in France, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Poland, this book marks an important contribution to the fields of migration studies, European Union studies and comparative political economy.

Georg Menz is Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, London. 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" (Palgrave 2005). His work has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Social Policy, German Politics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Politique europeenne. He is currently co-editing a study of labour migration to Europe.