Claudia Finotelli and Irene Ponzo (Eds.) Migration Control Logics and Strategies in Europe: A North-South Comparison Springer International, 2023, xiv + 340 p., $59.99 (Open Access online).

Abstract

The European Union's migration policy, as it plays out, is far from a coherent, deliberated program designed in Brussels or Strasbourg. But nor is it an amalgam of the separate policies on admission and residence, varying in effectiveness, of autonomous member states. Between these two figments, however, there is a widely held depiction of the EU reality: that of a North-South migration policy divide in which the disciplined northern member states coexist with a “soft underbelly” of lax southern states, haplessly policing the Mediterranean front-lines—and shepherding migrants northward. This collection of case studies is an extended rejection of such a view. Its contributors illustrate the evolving aims and practices of migration governance among selected countries across the EU. There are 15 chapters, organized in thematic sections covering visa policy, externalization (offshoring) of migrant selection, regularization (usually amnesty) for irregular entrants, labor migration, “welfare chauvinism” (restrictions on migrant eligibility for welfare benefits), and asylum procedures. The editors draw the contents together in introductory and concluding chapters, identifying fields where harmonization is in train and others that are insistently idiosyncratic—finding, in sum, that the European migration system is “a complex, ambiguous reality, where convergence dynamics must come to terms with persisting variance.”

One source of complexity and ambiguity is the elusiveness of the target. In the last two decades the migration regime has experienced surging numbers of workers from Eastern Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis, burgeoning numbers attempting the hazardous Mediterranean crossings, and the massed Ukraine war exodus, as well as the effects of the Great Recession and, lately, Covid. Country impacts and responses have necessarily depended on specific economic and geopolitical circumstances, only later reflected in European Commission dictates such as the 2020 New Pact on Migration and Asylum. The use of development aid conditioned on migrant deterrence as a policy instrument is one case in point, begun initially in bilateral agreements between Spain (and then Italy and France) and individual African countries and later taken up by the Commission. (Reciprocally, migrant transit and origin countries have found that their control of numbers gave them a means of exacting a “geographical rent” from the EU.) On asylum, the basic problem is the conflict between the legal principle—increasingly seen as ill-suited to the scale of the problem—and the political imperative to limit inflows. The procedures to determine refugee status are lengthy and administrative decisions denying asylum are frequently overturned by the courts. Orders to leave are widely disregarded. (Germany, the most effective country at carrying out such orders, expels just 24 percent; France, 11 percent.) Irregular migration aside from asylum-seeking is periodically rewarded with some form of regularization.

A large proportion of EU migrants are intra-EU, mostly easterners after the 2000s enlargement. Another portion are northern retirees in the south. Delaying or limiting migrants' entitlement to welfare-state benefits is a common means of deterrence or cost-offsetting. (Brexit was deterrence taken to an extreme.) Migrant workers, of course, are also sought from further afield, raising the issue of “source-country particularism.” Germany for a time practiced blindness to migrants' ethnic origins, recruiting by qualifications only, but has retreated to its earlier practice, now favoring workers from the Western Balkans. Other countries with particularistic connections to the EU labor market (that of Spain especially) are the Maghreb states: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

The volume offers a sophisticated treatment of the migration topics the editors have selected, but does not claim to cover all aspects of the EU's migration regime where there are North-South differences to be contested. An issue of growing significance that would deserve such consideration is the range of attitudes toward migrant diversity by race and religion and toward the absolute numbers of newcomers—the looming scale of Europe's demographic predicament, the source of the threatened “great replacement.”

Claudia Finotelli, a political scientist, is in the Department of Applied Sociology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a research associate of the International and European Forum of Migration Research (FIERI), Turin, Italy. Irene Ponzo, a political sociologist, is Deputy Director of FIERI. The contributors are from European universities and research institutes.—G.McN.