Migration Regime/s, the Multiculturalism Question and Regularisation Policies in Europe

Abstract

The migration regime emerging in the European Union attempts to use the recruitment of third-country nationals from outside the Union to give flexibility and mobility to labour markets. Vacancies are often filled by non-EU workers, as undocumented non-EU labour from the poorest, most politically unstable parts of the world is drawn into certain niches within the informal labour market. But, at the same time, it makes stringent efforts to distinguish between wanted and unwanted migrants, and forms of migration. The Schengen Agreement was signed in June 1984, creating the Schengen Area, which operates very much like a single state for international travel, with external border controls for travellers moving in and out of the area, but with no internal border controls (and incorporated into mainstream EU law under the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 — see Chapter 8, for details). Through the Agreement, European countries have increased their willingness and capacity to control unwanted inflows, thus remaining exclusionary. They often use nationalistic values to justify the exclusion of migrants ‘on the grounds that the moral relevance of community membership supersedes the openness of liberal universalism’ (Geddes 2003: 22).