The global recession is going to significantly alter the realities of migration, and it will also aggravate the difficulties of managing immigration into the EU. It’s still too early to predict the impact of recession on employment in the EU economies, but past downturns suggest that a major reduction in the recruitment of immigrant labour seems certain. Yet with the recession likely to hit poorer countries very hard indeed, the pressures of economic and refugee migration are set to increase; increases both irregular migration and in asylum seeking seems guaranteed.
Is Europe prepared? The EU has been preoccupied with the creation of a ‘Blue Card’ to recruit highly-skilled workers – Europe’s supposed answer to the U.S. ‘Green Card’. Empirical studies across the former EU-15 countries show fairly conclusively that highly-skilled third-country workers are predominantly employed in low-skilled work: This is primarily caused by inflexible bureaucratic rules about educational and vocational qualifications, yet rather than reform rigid labour market and qualification rules, the EU has chosen to compete with the United States to recruit highly-skilled workers. This is a competition lost before it has even started. The U.S. distinguishes permanent highly-skilled workers from temporary ones – awarding permanent residence rights via the Green Card to the former, and disallowing permanent residence to the latter, while the EU’s Blue Card proposal is a mish-mash of incoherent ideas. In the first place, it awards only an inferior temporary status to a highly-skilled worker and allows the possibility of a two-year extension, after which the migrant is potentially eligible for an EU long-term residence permit. Secondly, it prohibits the worker from moving to another EU member state for an initial period, and then permits movement only after following a complex bureaucratic procedure. Family members accompanying the highly-skilled worker are not automatically given access to the labour market in the second member state. Thirdly, the highly-skilled migrant may not take up self-employment. Given the nature of contemporary employment conditions, this clearly reflects political interests and not the interests of economic development. In fact, the whole policy is predicated not on high skills but on employment that is deemed to be highly-skilled. What the fate will be of individuals and their families who engage in this process is uncertain, but what is certain is that the U.S. offers a better deal on all counts.
In filling semi-skilled and low-skilled vacancies, EU recruitment policies tend to be exclusionary and ineffective. Job vacancies – especially those such as cleaning, construction work, or restaurant and bar work deemed undesirable by the indigenous population are frequently filled by rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants, rather than legally-recruited workers from overseas. Yet everyone wonders why illegal migration and informal employment are out of control across the EU; governments engage in passionate condemnations of the evils of illegal migration and complain about spending large amounts of money to keep out workers who are actually needed. The EU’s FRONTEX agency has been created to police the frontiers of Europe; however, it is located in Poland where no frontier is under threat, instead of in Spain, Italy or Greece. Over the last decade, 17 EU countries regularised a minimum of five million irregular migrants, suggesting that the policy of exclusion is simply not working.
The EU’s policy on asylum seeking has been equally unproductive. Instead of constructing an intelligent EU-wide policy, member states have 27 different approaches, 27 different potentials for hosting refugees, and many different geographical exposures to refugee flight. Legal text after legal text has been promulgated, setting out minimum standards to which almost nobody adheres, and proclaiming the first-country principle of asylum, enacted through the Dublin Convention. The result is that between 2002-06, two EU countries with strong traditions of humanitarian assistance – Sweden and Denmark – received refugees making up more than 1% of their total populations, thus bearing the brunt of Europe’s refugee burden. More recently, Greece and Malta have experienced unexpectedly large inflows of irregular migrants and asylum seekers which they cannot handle. Yet, in accordance with the Dublin Convention, asylum seekers are returned to such countries, as the first port of call in the EU; several member states are now not implementing the Dublin Convention in order to adhere to the principles of the Geneva Convention.
No discussion of migration management in Europe can fail to mention Schengen, or to be more precise the two Schengen Conventions of 1985 and 1990. The first absurdity is that Schengen is now included as part of the EU acquis communautaire, but several countries – most notably the UK – refuse to participate. However, a Schengen visa is the principal means of legal access into the EU – meaning that it is also the principal mechanism by which tourist overstayers or irregular migrants come to work illegally in Europe.
Instead of rigorous data collection and monitoring of which tourists go where and when they leave the Schengen zone, the statistical data do not even record the nationalities of tourists. Crude data show only the consulate issuing the visa and the rejection rate for each type of visa: this is a bureaucratic exercise that has little to do with managing migration. Class C visas that allow tourism for up to 90 days account for 84% of all visas issued, with just over 9.5 million issued in 2007. Class D visas, which are national visas for employment or residence, are the second largest category awarded to 950,000 people in 2007, with Spain and Italy between them responsible for 57% of the total. These visas permit travel across Schengen countries without the right to work (class C) or the right to work in only one country (class D). This restrictionist approach is not supported by real enforcement mechanisms, such as careful monitoring of labour markets, and results in Schengen being the primary gateway by which irregular migrants gain access to employment and residence in Europe.
There are unfilled vacancies in certain skilled sectors, but Europe’s Blue Card will not attract the world’s elite. The motivations for this policy are anyway highly suspect, containing a thinly-veiled political message that highly-skilled migrants are not seen as a cultural threat.
The Blue Card scheme should be abandoned in its entirety. What Europe needs is a common policy for all types of labour migration, be it unskilled, semi-skilled or highly-skilled. Balancing supply and demand across the EU is more likely to be achieved with free movement of third-country nationals, since EU citizens are less inclined to move around. Yet this is expressly forbidden, other than under the untested provisions of the EU’s Long Term Residence Permit. Europe desperately needs a Common Labour Market, and this goal should take priority in the years ahead so as to maximise resource allocation and economic growth. Legally resident third-country national workers should have the right to work anywhere in the EU.
As to unskilled and semi-skilled work, Europe’s dependence on irregular immigrants is a folly that needs urgent attention. EU governments’ refusal to adopt labour immigration policies, with the notable exception of Ireland and to some extent the UK and Germany, has only fuelled people-smuggling. Even during a recession, legal recruitment of immigrant workers is needed to combat the attractions of irregular migration routes. Proper oversight of labour markets is needed, with adequate criminal penalties imposed on employers of undocumented or uninsured migrants. The largely illicit labour market is likely to increase in the coming years, as businesses try to cut costs, yet the long-term cost to society for tolerating these practices will be high.
Although asylum seeking has significantly diminished in the EU in recent years, and now affects only a small number of countries, both irregular migration and asylum seeking are likely to increase with the global recession. And given the geographical and political make-up of the EU, it will impact some countries more than others. The European Commission announced in December of last year its intention to modify the Dublin II Convention to account for problem zones such as the Mediterranean and Aegean islands. This is reactive policy-making and inadequate. What is needed is real political will amongst European governments to create policy solutions.
The EU needs a burden-sharing instrument, not a coordinating instrument like the Dublin Convention. The Convention should therefore be terminated and replaced with an EU-wide asylum policy based on standardised EU procedures and the relocation of asylum seekers across the EU. In this way, the present unfair burden on Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries would be redistributed. The policy should, of course, be humanitarian in objective and attempt to permit location of recognised refugees in countries where they can be culturally and economically hosted in a way that benefits both parties.
Schengen needs radical reform and restructuring as it now stands as a tourist visa system that provides few controls, gathers little information and plays no part in the management of migration. First, it should be used as a policy instrument for labour migration. There is no reason why a Schengen-wide work visa cannot be issued, other than the fact that governments dislike the idea. Free movement of labour is a necessity for the success of European economies, and Schengen is a mechanism through which that can be accomplished. Second, for visiting businessmen and seasonal workers, a multiple-entry visa should be developed with long-term validity. Employment-related issues are all dealt with at a national level, so statistical monitoring and operational analysis of Schengen tourist visas needs to be overhauled. As it stands, we know next to nothing about who enters, who leaves and who remains illegally in the European Union. Is it really any surprise that Europe is host to so many irregular migrants?