Markets against Politics:
Migration, EU Enlargement and the Idea of Europe
Adrian Favell
University of California, Los Angeles
afavell@soc.ucla.edu
&
Randall Hansen
Merton College, University of Oxford
randall.hansen@merton.ox.ac.uk
published in:
Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies
vol.28, no.4 (Oct 2002), pp.581-602.
‘EU enlargement and East-West migration’
special edition edited by Adrian Favell and
Randall Hansen
Abstract
Our article examines new migration
to Europe in the context of EU enlargement
and debates about fortress Europe. It argues that the (normatively informed) image of fortress Europe is an inadequate account of
migration and migration policy in Europe in three respects: the movement of family
members, asylum seekers and labour migrants has been substantially positive;
enlargement itself generates dynamics of inclusion as much as exclusion; and
there exists a significant component of intra-European circulatory migration.
Against the fortress account, the article offers a market-driven analysis of
new migration to Europe. In developing this account, we stress how existing theoretical accounts
of immigration policy – dominated by a state-centred institutionalist and
political focus – offer at best only partial explanations of the new European
migration scenario. Both neo-liberal and older Marxian theories of the
international immigration labour market need to be re-introduced to explain the
selective, expansive and reconfiguring effect of market forces on European
immigration policies. Our aim is to underline how new tendencies in East-West
migration in Europe challenge and transform the traditional migrant trajectory
from migrant to citizen that lies at the heart of state-centred accounts.
Keywords
Immigration, labour migration,
asylum, integration, fortress Europe, citizenship, enlargement, Schengen.
Markets against Politics:
Migration, EU Enlargement
and the Idea of Europe
Adrian Favell & Randall Hansen
Without question, migration has
become an issue central to the future of Europe; perhaps the
central issue. Amidst ever increasing public hostility to immigration and
immigrants in the continent, and the rise of far-right anti-immigrant parties,
West European states are trying to steer towards new policies that recognise an
objective economic and demographic demand for new immigration in future decades.
The EU integration process has put the international mobility of persons – the
free movement of workers – at the heart of its economic dynamic. The problem of
growing asylum seeking, and a decline in the receptiveness of member states to
the obligations of post-war international refugee law, remains high on the
political agenda. And the vexing question of potential large-scale East-West
migration, together with the incorporation of new accession states into the
existing free movement and immigration control acquis of the European treaties, has moved to the centre of
enlargement negotiations.
Scholarly reflection on these
issues, however, has not kept pace with developments on the ground. Driven by a
normative attentiveness to the negative and exclusionary aspects of both
current governmental policies and hostile public opinion, scholars have tended
to share the same vision which, in different ways, is also promoted by
pro-migrant activists and control-minded European goverments: that is, the idea
of Europe becoming ‘fortress Europe’. During the 1990s, dozens of articles were
published on or about fortress Europe; journalists placed the term in frequent
public circulation; and pro-migrant groups lined up to advertise and condemn
its construction. Governments, meanwhile, while evading the charge of
xenophobia, have been happy to encourage the questionable assertion implied by
the fortress metaphor that they do indeed have full control of their borders.
For all sides, then, the state is the villain or the victor in the fight
against unwanted immigration. This state-centred approach to explaining
European migration phenomena is echoed throughout the burgeoning international
literature on the politics of immigration, citizenship and sovereignty.
This article articulates an
alternative view, one which brings the market back in to our understanding of
migration in Europe. This in turn reflects the various contributions to this volume, which
add up to a new way of looking at European migration in the light of the EU
enlargement programme. To be sure, our argument involves drawing a line – in a
way that the public often does not – between primary economic immigration and
asylum. But the metaphor of fortress Europe is an inappropriate frame for both types of
migration, albeit for different reasons.
First, in the case of non-asylum
seekers, the fortress has proven, at precisely the moment it was meant to be
under intense construction, anything but beyond breach,. As the 1990s drew to a
close, European governments returned to immigration as a means of addressing
economic and demographic problems. This move was led by Germany and then Britain, the two most notorious examples
of self-proclaimed ‘zero-immigration countries’ in Europe. Second, the wider process of EU
enlargement has itself generated unpredicted and often unnoticed patterns of
migration – some temporary, some permanent, and much of it circular or return
in nature – that have little to do with the mass, one-way East-West migration
feared at the beginning of the 1990s. Third, and more tentatively, circulatory
migration around Europe – a feature of an earlier, pre-nation-state era of intra-European
mobility – may be reappearing as a feature of the new European migration
tapestry. As we will argue, the key to understanding these emergent processes
is the way in which a new international market for labour has responded to demand
by actively recruiting available non-European, and intra-European migrants – at
both the high and low end of the market – despite state-centred forms of
restriction centred on preserving citizenship and welfare rights for recognised
members only; and, further, by transforming the channels by which these
migrants can legitimately move into, around and through Europe. Moreover,
within Europe, the emergence of an increasingly
integrated internal labour market has also enabled migrants to be mobile in
opposition to state attempts to institutionalise more fixed immigrant
residency. Traditionally, this has been achieved through policies of
‘integration’: the granting of citizenship rights alongside national
obligations, aimed at territorially fixing the population of the national
welfare state.
As for asylum, the image and
argument of fortress Europe is correct about aims but wrong about outcomes. Although governments
throughout Western
Europe
have sought to limit the movement of asylum seekers through a battery of
restrictionist measures, they have failed. Asylum applications, though down
from their mid-1990s peak, still number in the hundreds of thousands yearly; in
some countries, such as Britain, they have increased sharply
since the middle of the decade. As intuitionalists have argued, the
incorporation of international treaties into domestic law and the inhibiting
influence of both national and European courts, continues to provide a part of
the explanation for the relative liberalness of asylum regimes (Joppke 1997; Joppke
1998a; Freeman 1995; Hansen 1999).
States do not have the power to control migration. They may erect a vast
battery of measures against asylum seekers trying to reach European soil (Joly
1996; Loescher 1993); but once they reach that soil – usually through of the
help of traffickers – states find it all but impossible to remove them. As a
result, asylum applications remain high, as does the gap between rejections and
removals (Gibney & Hansen2001). Moreover, it is all too clear that the
growth of asylum seeking is aided by an increasing demand for low-skilled,
irregular labour across Europe, and the information flows that transmit ideas of these opportunities
through migrant networks back to those considering the move West.
In what follows, we begin with a
conceptual, historical review of the role of migration and mobility in Europe, and the emergence of the
European nation-state system. We then bring this account up to date by offering
a brief critique of the dominant way in which the present-day idea of Europe is discussed: the idea of Europe as a fortress. Dismantling this
idea requires several distinct stages. First, we offer a brief argument about
the changing place of asylum in European migration questions. We then lay out
two national cases of new thinking on economic immigration – Germany and Britain – which serve as the foundation
of our argument that the dynamics of EU integration have had an influence on
immigration that has been moderately expansive and destructive of the fortress
idea, despite some enhanced control powers for police and frontier security.
The EU integration process has itself underscored and enabled shifts in
national policy towards more open immigration, that have been clearly endorsed
by national governments. In our conclusion, we stress how existing theoretical
accounts of immigration policy – dominated by a state-centred institutionalist
and political focus – offer at best only partial explanations of the new
European migration scenario. Both neo-liberal and older Marxian theories of the
international immigration labour market need to be re-introduced to explain the
selective, expansive and reconfiguring effect of market forces on European
immigration policies. Our aim is to underline how new tendencies in East-West
migration in Europe challenge and transform the traditional migrant trajectory
from migrant to citizen that lies at the heart of state-centred accounts.
Migration, mobility and the idea of Europe
For centuries, a central feature
of Europe’s political space has been the
shifting nature of its borders. The German nationhood question, for example,
was the single most important geo-political factor determining European
international politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. In
recent decades, borders have changed marginally in Western Europe, dramatically and completely in
Central and Eastern Europe. Mobile or immobile, individuals are the human face of these macro-shifts
of power and cartography. They have been the principles over which politicians
and armies fight, the populations they have expelled, the soldiers and
civilians they massacred. To be sure, their mobility as such is not a
peculiarly modern phenomenon. Europeans have always moved, but modernization
and industrialization led them to move more, and to move more frequently for
basic economic reasons rather than inter-ethnic conflict and war (Page Moch 1992).
In the latter part of the 19th century and early years of the 20th
century, the modern political order of European states and European populations
crystallised out of the territorial fixing of previously mobile Europeans,
either nationalising them as territorially defined citizens of a particular
state or expelling minorities who fell within the state’s constructed borders
(Brubaker 1992, 1996). As the era of formally unfettered mobility ended,
migration (or im-migration as
receiving states came to designate it) became bureaucratised, directed, limited
and defined: through passports, visas, border control institutions and sharp
distinctions between the rights of citizens and those of non-members (Torpey
1999; Fahrmier, Faron and Weil 2002). The distinction between legal and illegal
‘migration’ (i.e., state-designated forms of mobility) thus became
institutionalised, as a way of marking out state governance over the
phenomenon. On the other side of borders – for those fortunate enough to be
recognised as legitimate immigrants and future nationals – lay membership
expressed through citizenship rights and entitlements to the pastoral
protection of the thus completed European welfare state.
Paradoxically, though, this
process of state-construction and modernisation has always depended economically on large numbers of
unfixed, temporary labour migrants from outside the territorial ‘national’
citizenry (Olsson 1996). This was dramatically the case in the extraordinarily
free-moving years of empire preceding World War I,, but the economic demand has
not gone away. Hence, the anomalous presence of unstable cross-border
populations has always been a feature of the more-or-less clear nation-state
patchwork of contemporary Europe. Two disastrous European civil wars, the genocide of a (partially nomadic)
religious population (the Jews), and massive forced internal migration (mainly
of Germans), managed to resolve this question to the point that, by 1945, the
political order of Europe was sufficiently re-drawn along strictly nationhood
and welfare-state based lines to aspire to a new era of peace and prosperity
(Mazower 1998). The new order was cemented by the divisions of the Cold War.
But economically, the newly fixed national population containers of post-war Europe – both West and East – were still no less dependent than before on cross-border
economic integration, that would inevitably incur further population mobility
down the road.
During the second half of the 20th
century, the most obvious, brutal and uncompromising form of migration control
was the iron curtain. The journey from Vienna to Budapest or Bratislava, to say nothing of East to West Berlin, had once been as natural and as
uninhibited as the journey from Maastrict to Aachen. For forty years, however, it was
all but unthinkable. One consequence of Europe’s division was the isolation of the European
Community’s member states from possible East-West migration. The only
meaningful form of ‘immigrant’ from the Soviet bloc was a ‘refugee,’ and a
refugee was synonymous in Western eyes with a ‘defector’ (Loescher 1993).
Welcoming the odd Soviet ballet dancer or sportsman was both financially
costless and politically rewarding, an ideal means of emphasising the West’s
moral superiority over Communism. In terms of East-West migration, the rest of
the Europe’s population, meanwhile, seemed remarkably
fixed. The Eastern bloc enforced a dramatic immobility on its citizens,
limiting their rights of movement from region to region even within
nation-states. In the West, intra-regional migration fell to record lows in
modern times (Decressin and Fatas 1995), although south to north European
labour migration (Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Greeks) grew until the early
1970s, when it dramatically began to reverse (King, Black and Fielding 1997).
Western states, instead, filled their need for outside temporary workers by
turning to controlled, state-sponsored guest-worker and colonial immigration
programmes, from peripheral states (Yugoslavia, Turkey, Morocco) and former
colonies (Algeria, India, Pakistan, West Indies, Indonesia, South East Asia).
These migrations did not yet undo state governance, remaining numerically under
control, although many of the migrants refused to return home as planned. With
the broad migration stop of 1973/1974 it was expected that European states
would consolidate these migrations, by integrating those that stayed alongside
strict new immigration controls towards any and all new migrations ((Hollifield
1992).
The end of immigration, and the
triumph of the integrating nation-state, however, did not occur; quite the
contrary. A small part of the reason for this lies in the respect of
international human rights standards that preserved channels of family
reunification and asylum seeking during those years (Hollifield 1992; Joppke
1999). But the bigger, broader reasons are economic. Global economic forces were
pushing regional economic integration, represented in Europe by European integration, and the
legal-political construction of the European Union. European integration is
built on the growing encouragement of cross-border mobility of all kinds –
canonically the free movement of capital, goods, services and persons – and the
giving up of state sovereignty over these processes in deference to the needs
of an integrated market. At the broadest level of abstraction, then, European
integration began to reverse the two historical processes that had led to the
exclusive formation of European nation-state population containers, and the
geo-political isolation of East and West. Through the economic integration
governed by the European integration process, the European nation-state’s
supreme early 20th century control over migration and population
dynamics was being voluntarily dislodged. It is now being dislodged across all
of Europe, including Central and Eastern Europe. Economic integration dictates
that states must give up the discretion they once claimed to designate who is
and is not a legitimate resident of their territory, and rather allow market
forces to dictate supply and demand of migrant labour across economically
interdependent territories. This is encapsulated in the idea of free movement
as a market correction for asymettric shocks and imbalances to the system. And,
in return, as differentials and inequalities are reduced through the
equilibrium mechanism across the continent, the spur to movement falls, and
migration becomes controlled, only now through a market-based rather than a
state-enforced mechanism. The implication is that migrants will not stay where the
market does not want them, if it is the case that their opportunities and
benefits are in fact better back home.
Membership
in the EU, then, implies a radical shock to the nation-state’s pretence to
control and govern migration through its exclusive border controls and its
inclusive citizenship and welfare rights. The institutionalising of the four
freedoms is nothing new: it lay already at the heart of the first European
treaties. Other member states may not have wanted to extend freedom of movement
to persons, but already, in the Treaty of Rome (1956), Italy insisted with success on the
right of Italian workers to move freely within the new European common market
(Romero 1993). By 1992 and Maastricht it was institutionalised as a
full new political space of European integration, under the banner of European
citizenship (Wiener 1997). The EU has thus in effect sanctioned that certain
forms of European mobility can no longer be restrained or contained by national
conceptions of citizenship and welfare-state closure; it has given power to the
market to decide over who moves across borders and how they do it, where they
live and work, and whether they bear any responsibility to the nation-state
they happen to be resident in. As long as there is a demand for workers, the
market-based reasoning for integration allows that the European labour market
can draw on labour from throughout the European Union and beyond, orienting its
demands to geographically proximate countries found in the periphery of Europe and in the newly opened East.
This new logic represents an important challenge to the nation-state centred
conceptions of immigration and citizenship on which the political control of
migration had been premised during most of the 20th century.
A European Fortress?
Such a
historical account flies in the face of the dominant approach taken by academics and policy makers towards the impact
of European economic integration on migration and mobility in contemporary Europe. They have overlooked the
centrality of free movement to the European market-building process, and the
new age of possible mobility heralded by East-West integration understood in
these terms. Instead, they have repeatedly interpreted the interrelation of
immigration and European integration in terms of the construction of a
‘fortress Europe’. The metaphor rests on the
following argument. As the EU expands, and as competencies over internal
cooperation are increasingly transferred to the supranational level, the EU
will seal its external borders to immigrants, and especially to non-white
immigrants.
There
are three basic versions of the fortress Europe argument. The first, which is distinctly
British, and expands on frequent arguments made about British policy on race
and immigration in the 1970s and 80s, holds that the sort of racism that led member
states to close their doors to colonial migrants at that time has simply now
been extended to the Union as a whole (Wrench and Solomos 1993). The European
Union is just a more more effective way of pursuing that project with the help
of like-minded cooperative neighbours. This links with a second argument, in
cultural studies mode, which holds that the explanatory dynamic is on EU
identity, which is being formed – just as national European identities have
been formed for centuries – through a process in which Europeans distinguish
themselves from an inferior, hostile ‘other,’ in this case immigrants (Fulbrook
2000: 10-13). The EU integration process, thus, as one author put it,
has been
constructing a new European identity while it has been constructing the
barriers of Fortress Europe. This new identity is a racialised identity. Europe is being defined
in terms of its imperialist past, with its civilising mission in opposition to
the Third World and the countries of the periphery, and in terms of
Christianity in opposition to Islam (Kushnick 1998: 184).
Enlargement,
it is argued, will cement this new Eurocentric order by creating an implicit
set of concentric circles around Europe, that offers partial integration to Central
and East European nations, and even less to peripheral, non-European dependents
such as Morocco and Turkey. Beyond these will lie the
excluded other, policed out of Europe by increasingly tough immigration
controls externalised to the expanded EU’s new eastern and southern borders (Rogers
2000).
There
is a third, more sophisticated version. This holds that national policymakers,
keen to escape the progressive, human rights bias of domestic constitutions and
constitutional courts, turn to EU forums where, sealed off from activists,
lawyers and national courts, they can pursue the ‘remote control’ restrictive
policies demanded by anti-immigrant publics (Lahav 1998; Guiraudon 2000). Such
things as police and border cooperation are thus seen as the fruits of a
European Realpolitik that is designed
to enhance the protective territorial powers of nation-states. In tandem with
this argument, beyond the academy, ‘fortress Europe’ is denounced by Statewatch,
Pro Asyl, ECRE and other international NGOs, all of whom are deeply suspicious
of European cooperation institutionalised in the Schengen agreement,
particularly the Schengen Information System and the expanded cross-national
collaboration among police forces.
The
implication of all three variants is the same. EU and member state migration
policies converge in one direction: towards effective restrictions and the
exclusion of further non-European migrants. Like the obverse image of Europe’s golden age of ‘free’
immigration in the 1950s and 60s, the argument was always flawed, and its
inadequacies have only become clearer as the last decade progressed. In
particular the ‘fortress Europe’ metaphor/argument cannot capture three basic features of the European
migration experience in recent years. First, from 1985, even leaving aside the
special case of East, net yearly arrival of migrants in Europe have been
substantially positive; this has been true of asylum seekers, family
renuinfication and labour migrants.
The fortress was obviously not beyond breach. Second, and of greater concern to
East-West relations, there been a noticeable increase in temporary labour
migration, particularly between ‘first-round’ candidate countries for EU
accession and EU member states, and in cross-border movements of all kinds (see
Menz, this volume; Williams and Baláž, this volume). Finally, from the middle
of the decade on, just as the fortress was meant to be nearing completion,
member state politicians and EU policymakers alike have explicitly shifted
towards a pro-immigration stance, after years of zero-immigration rhetoric. In
short, accounts that speak of a new European fortress are wrong empirically, a
point which we develop with evidence from Germany, Britain
and Southern Europe. Equally, they are wrong in their characterisation of the impact of
the EU on control capacities; in fact, its market-building drive has led on
balance to a more liberal, expansive, open European immigration scenario, that
does not necessarily end even at the borders of the EU’s accession partners. We
take each of these points in turn.
Europe’s new immigration
experience: forms of permanent and temporary migration
Asylum seeking
It is worth recalling that, for
all the talk of restriction, Europe received substantial net migration
throughout the 1990s. The Netherlands, Britain and (1997 excepted) Germany have been the major destinations.
From 1994-1996 alone, Western Europe had a net gain in foreign population by
migration of 1.26 million, including 526,000 in Germany, 145,600 in the
Netherlands and 216,000 in Britain (Salt 1999: 12). The figure of 1.26 million
from 1994-1996 is striking in that it excludes asylum seekers (though it includes ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union). Once the asylum figures are
added, therefore, a clearer picture of the scale of migration to Europe emerges (see table 1).
TABLE ONE HERE
Despite low recognition rates
(10-20%), the ineffectiveness of liberal states’ return policies means that
securing access to European asylum systems is a good predictor of securing
access to European residence. In fact, incredibly only
10-20% of rejected asylum seekers are ever deported from EU member states (Gibney and Hansen 2001).Asylum thus represents an important net
transfer of population to Europe. International human rights legislation,
therefore, only plays a minor role in accounting for the states’
ineffectiveness in enforcing exclusion; the incapacity of the state to enforce
effective deportation is a much more significant factor, an incapacity that
only exacerbates the patent incapacity of states to prevent entry.
All this is happening at a time
when western states are clearly revising their moral attitudes towards asylum
seeking as an unavoidable obligation of the international state system.
Established in the post-war period, refugee law was fashioned to protect
precisely individuals left high and dry (‘stateless’) as a result of becoming
dissidents or defectors from oppressive political systems. It responded to both
the guilt felt by states towards the Jews they failed to protect in the
inter-war years, plus the new imperative to protect heroes of western
capitalist freedom in a world divided by the Cold War. It was never designed as
a legal framework for dealing with mass forced migration, let alone the blurred
mix of economic and political desperation that pushes so many of the present
day migration crises (Weiner 1995, Loescher 1993). 1989 was indeed the
watershed for this change in perceptions. The image of the refugee as the lone,
individual dissident heroically escaping to the West, gave way to the
astonishing sight of a mass, unsanctioned westwards movement – the highly
political act of East Germans taking the future in their own hands and heading West
via Czechoslavakia across newly opened borders – thus triggering the Eastern
bloc’s final collapse. This welcome movement was soon followed but another
highly unwelcome one: the mass movement of Bosnians and others fleeing war in Yugoslavia. Asylum seeking was never likely
to appear so politically costless after these dramatic events. For several years following die
Wende, Western Europe has waited in unrealised fear of a massive movement of former Warsaw pact
countries’ citizens westwards – because the brute economic differentials, the
bumpy transition from communism, and the expressed intentions of East
Europeans, seemed to suggest only this (Kupiszewski, this volume). Since the collapse of the Eastern
bloc, then, asylum seekers have superseded other migrant groups in numbers and
political importance. The collapse of Yugoslavia meant that 432,000 individuals applied for asylum in one state, Germany,
in 1992 alone. The movement encouraged recourse to the novel ‘legal’ category of ‘temporary protection’ in order
to avoid permanent settlement (( Van Selm-Thorburn 1998; Koser and Black 1999).
None of these East European
examples are uniquely economic in nature, but the growing perception in the
West – with some justification – is that asylum channels have come to be seen
and used as the prime channel for unsolicited, unskilled labour migration. For
sure, the continued flows, and their remarkable global diversity, suggest that
feedback information through migrant networks is clearly painting West European
economic opportunities to work as the ultimate goal of asylum seekers, however
desperate the push factors behind their actual movement. For this to work as a
migration system, there must be more of a grain of truth in this tacit ‘market
demand’: that many of the lowest end economic opportunities in the western
labour market can and have been filled by asylum seekers. This is clearly case
in countries with high levels of asylum seekers – such as Denmark and Sweden –
who have incorporated these persons quickly and in large numbers into service
industries such as cleaning work. Other countries such as Britain have forced
these would-be refugees into informal and illegal work by barring work permits
(for the first six months), with no more success in preventing their de facto incorporation in the labour
market – with the corresponding signal that gets sent back to others waiting in
places like Algeria, Palestine or China that there are abundant job opportunities
awaiting in London for them (Collyer 2002). It is at least arguable that ‘asylum
shopping’ for the most welcoming migrant network and most accessible labour
market is a fact of asylum migrant life in Europe, that the Dublin Convention
has done little to stamp out.
Asylum seeking has thus become a
dirty word, replacing ‘economic migration’ as the least desirable form of
migration experienced by European nations. The suspicion is that the basic
reason for this – beyond nativist hostility to sudden new arrivals of visible
minorities – is that the use of asylum channels for economic migration in fact
distorts the ability of the market to select the best and most appropriate
migrant workers for the low level labour opportunities that exist. The move to
recognise new forms of legitimate economic migration is thus likely to be used
to give governments and private firms the opportunity to hire, more or less
officially, and for the same poorly paid service jobs, less distant-origin
migrants – say, from Eastern Europe, periphery European nations or former
colonies – as opposed to trying to integrate Tamils from Sri Lanka or Sudanese
from East Africa. These can be in the form of visa quotas, or after-the-fact
regularisation programmes. The more ‘white’ or more ‘westernised’ migrants from
Eastern Europe might prove more palatable to a hostile public. In any case, the
future of international refugee law seems doomed in the face of the pressures
to reinstate economic migration as a more legitimate reason for migration than
asylum seeking. By thus re-inserting the market into migrant selection
processes, formerly centred on non-economic criteria such as persecution, human
rights violations or vulnerability to violence, the state may accede to the
creation of new migration opportunities that basically signal a loss of its
sovereignty over migration entry decisions and the granting of migration
rights.
Labour migration
Leaving aside asylum seekers,
there are in any case large numbers of worker migrants from Central and Eastern
European (CEE) countries in the EU. Examining figures of foreign population
from select CEE countries in the EU in the early 1990s, there were, for
example, 421,010 Poles, 159,154 Romanians and 23,028 citizens from the Baltic states in the EU (Salt 1999, table 14).
The main destination countries were Germany (276,753 Poles, 109,256 Romanians,
11,933 Baltic citizens), France (47,127 Poles, 5114 Romanians) and, for Baltic
citizens, Finland (8,627). To be sure, these figures include individuals who
migrated before 1989, but, in the context of the iron curtain, they can be
taken as a rough proxy of migration since then.
Equally significant – and
commanding still less attention – has been temporary Pendeln (back and forth), circulatory and commuter migration in the
region (Wallace and Stola 2001). Austria and Germany saw a two-fold migration
opportunity after 1989. Permitting controlled labour migration would allow
both countries to channel the migration pressures emerging after the fall of
the iron curtain, and – as with previous generations of migrants from Southern
Europe – it would fulfill the strong demand for personnel in relatively
low-wage jobs with harsh conditions and little prestige: construction in
Germany and tourism and gastronomy in Austria (see Menz, this volume). As the
post-unification German economy boomed, Germany negotiated bilateral contracts
with Eastern European countries and Turkey, allowing employers again to bring
in workers for particular posts and specific projects. In
1991, there were 123,000 official seasonal workers, the majority of which were
in agriculture (92%) and food service industries (5%), along with another
51,000 project-related workers. Arrivals peaked at 212,000 official seasonal
workers and 94,000 project-related workers in 1992. Subsequently, in the
context of anti-immigrant public opinion, a few high profile attacks on
foreigners and emerging union opposition, numbers were reduced to a still steady
164,000/76,000 in 1993; 141,000/41,000 in 1994; 177,000/57,000 in 1995; and
210,000/47,000 in 1996 (Rotte 2000: 374). By 2000, numbers were up again, reaching
264,000 (Martin 2002). In addition, an unknown number – but probably one in the
hundreds of thousands – of illegal migrants were employed in Germany,
especially in the construction sector. It is no exaggeration to say that
Germany’s new capital – supposed symbol of a newly confident ‘Berlin Republic’
– would not have been rebuilt without unskilled migrant labour, both legal and
illegal. Estimates of the latter run from anywhere between 150,000 to 1.5
million (Martin 2002).
In addition to contract workers,
there has been an upswing in trans-border mobility for purposes other than residence
or work: that is, mobility such as tourism and shopping which can easily cover
for black market enterprises, and which in any case represent significant
economic and geographical transactions (Wallace, this volume). Taking the
Slovakian example, almost half of all Slovakians surveyed (46.7%) visit
Austria, despite border delays, once a month, including 59.0% of Bratislava
City residents and 38% of other Slovakian residents; the prime motivation in
these cases is a desire to shop (Williams and Baláž: this volume). There is no
reason to think that movement is not equally frequent between Poland and
Germany, Hungary and Austria, and the Czech Republic and both these
countries. Moreover, one of the less
frequently noted effects of the accession process has been the net return of
migrants to Poland and elsewhere, as a result of improving economic conditions
there; this was something that could have been predicted from the experience of
previous accessions in Spain and Portugal (Kupiszewski 1996).
What lies behind these new forms of economic mobility? With the
events of the 1990s, and evidence presented in the rest of this volume, it is
clear that East-West European migration and some forms of intra-EU labour
migration – has increased sharply in the 1990s. The German example is again
instructive. Unification and the mistaken impression that East Germany would enjoy an Wirkschaftswunder led to a building boom, and
a sharp increase in demand for labour. Germany’s CDU/CSU government thus
responded by negotiating the new bilateral accords with CEE countries and
Turkey. This had quick, paradoxical effects. Germany’s powerful unions, in
order to ensure just treatment or – depending on the perspective – to limit
competition from already settled guestworkers from the 1950s and 60s,
successfully demanded parity of wages. Germany’s companies responded by pushing
East European workers into unemployment or illegal employment, and sought
lower-wage workers elsewhere in the EU. This was made possible by a mechanism
allowing countries to employ workers at offices located in low-wage countries,
such as Ireland, Portugal or Spain, and then post them ‘abroad,’ in Germany,
with minimal E1-11 insurance coverage ensured by EU accords. The result was a
contradictory set of inclusive and exclusive effects. Foreign workers were –
against what Marxists might have predicted – extended the full range of
(German) economic and social entitlements, yet they were thus excluded, through
their involuntary high pricing, from the labour market. Non-German European
workers, however, were excluded from wage and welfare entitlements enjoyed by
German workers, yet they were incorporated into the labour market through
active employment anchored officially in employment and benefits ‘back home’.
The important point in both cases is that European companies secured the
migrant labour to fulfil demand despite
the wishes of an anti-migrant German electorate, and, in the Portuguese/Spanish
cases, against the expressed intention of European legislators (Menz, this
volume).
The story of labour migration post-Wende thus far is a story of unskilled labour. But it does not end
here. From the mid-1990s, German, British and other European governments have
looked with a sympathetic eye towards new kinds of skilled migration. The shift
has multiple causes, but the most important concerns the position of the
European economy within the global market. From 1995, American economic growth
accelerated. It appeared for a time that the US had managed to double its
non-inflationary growth rate: from an average of 2-2.5% common to most OECD
countries post-OPEC to (albeit briefly) one of 4-5%. The source of the new
growth potential was said to be a productivity increase occasioned by new
applications of information technology.
The competition from the US had two effects on Europe. First, the
major European economies faced labour shortages in the IT sector; during the
2000 IT boom, Germany reported 75,000 unfilled vacancies. Second, policymakers
saw in the labour shortage, one clear source of European sluggishness vis à vis
the US: the liberal US immigration policy on H1 visas for highly skilled
workers, through which Indians, Koreans, Chinese and (even) many brain-drained
Europeans have, in recent years, poured into America. The American shadow stood
behind Germany’s first attempt to attract skilled immigration: its policy of
issuing 20,000 visas for high skilled, high-wage jobs, earning more than
Euro 51,129 (DM 100,000) per year, that was dubbed
misleadingly (because of its 5 year contractual limit) the ‘Green card’
programme. Importantly, Germany announced this policy during a time of high
unemployment and continued opposition to new immigration. The SPD/Green
coalition’s current (January 2002) immigration proposal, put forward during a
time of high and rising unemployment, is explicitly linked with Germany’s need
to attract skilled workers in sectors facing continuing skills and labour
shortages.
It is also designed to address a demographic time-bomb. In all
European countries, birth-rates are below replacement levels: Italy and
Germany’s rates are especially low, at approximately 1.2 and 1.3 births per
woman respectively (UNESCO 2002). To be sure, migration alone will not address
Europe’s reproductive shortfall. If the number of births remains constant, then
Germany would actually require a net total of 600,000-700,000 migrants per year
to make up the difference (Münz, Seifert and Ulrich 1997). By any measure, this
figure is beyond Germany’s integration capacity. But immigration can have the
effect of rendering the depopulation process less difficult, and can affect the
age structure in a manner that might cushion – particularly in the context of
later retirement ages – social programmes under pressure through an aging
population.
In short, immigration to Europe has been driven primarily by market
concerns, in the face of political hostility and a decline in state control
policy: the needs of industry for low-skilled workers, shortages in
high-skilled sectors and, in the case of day-trips and short-term visits, the
inferior ranges of consumer goods in certain CEE countries. The story of
primary economic migration to Europe has been a story shaped first and foremost by the market not by
politics or any state intervention.
National European migration policies
Meanwhile, national policies as
such have been trying to catch up with these powerful economic and demographic
dynamics. Europe’s shift towards a moderately
pro-immigration stance began quietly in the 1990s, much of it centering on Germany. As the decade progressed, Germany’s
nationality law – long the bête noir of immigration scholars – was also
revived. Journalists, intellectuals and activists appealed for a reformed
citizenship law based on ius soli and eased naturalisation requirements
(Leicht 1999: 1), and Schröder’s Social Democratic/Green coalition (1998-)
presented a liberalised nationality law, which passed after compromise over
dual citizenship (Green 2000). In May 2000, the coalition then announced the
Green Card visa programme. Four months later, Federal Ministry of the Interior, Otto Schily,
appointed a commission led by Christian Democrat Rita Süssmuth. The Süssmuth
commission reported in July 2001, and made four key recommendations:
·
Approximately 50,000 economic migrants should be brought to Germany, on
the basis of a quota system, per year.
·
An immigration bureau should be instituted at the federal level.
·
The right to asylum should not be touched.
·
Possibilities (Angebote) for
integration should be increased.
In early August 2001, Schily
announced the government’s plan, hoping to secure multiparty agreement before
presenting legislation. It proposed allowing a set number of skilled applicants
to migrate to Germany each year, according to a quota and Canadian-style points
system, but avoided specifying any number. The skilled migrants would be
offered permanent residence. The measure would institute integration
requirements, most importantly the learning of German. While allowing family
immigration, it would reduce the age limit from 16 to 12. The law passed the
Bundestag and the Bundesrat in March 2002, but the complex nature of its
adoption means that the law awaits both the President’s signature and a
possible constitutional court challenge. The CDU/CSU candidate for
the 2002 national election in the autumn, Edmund Stoiber, has promised to make
opposition to immigration an issue. Whatever happens, the pressures and people
in Germany supporting a more open immigration policy will not go away.
Although receiving less attention,
a similar shift is underway in Britain. Once described as having
Europe’s only successful ‘country of zero immigration’ (Layton-Henry 1994), the
British government has been encouraged to reconsider more open policies in the
light of Germany’s new openness to immigration. Perceiving sectoral labour
shortages, notably in the IT sector, the DEEA announced in May 2000 that
British businesses would be given the power to bypass normal immigration rules
and to quickly employ non-European workers in areas of severe labour shortage,
notably information technology and health (especially nursing). On 25th July 2000, the British Government also announced a
pilot scheme, to run for two years, which would create a special ‘innovator
category’ for entrepreneurs who intend to establish enterprises in science and
technology based sectors, including e-commerce. Using a mechanism first
developed in Canada – a classic country of immigration – and applied earlier to
Hong Kong migrants, applicants will be judged according to a points system.
They must score a minimum number of points in three areas: personal
characteristics (education, work & business experience), business plan
(viability), and economic benefits (number and type of jobs created, amount of
R & D spending). Finally, on 11th September 2000, Home Office
Minister Barbara Roche announced to the Institute of Public Policy Research
that the Labour Government wanted a debate on expanded immigration categories.
On 29th September 2000, the government announced new immigration
rules easing the requirements for workers entering the country and allowing
them to stay longer. The DEEA has drawn up a list of professions requiring
labour, notably IT personnel, but also service staff such as Indian restaurant
chefs. In January 2002, the Home Office introduced a programme allowing skilled
foreign nationals to enter Britain. Modelled on the Canadian points
system, it rewards education, work experience and earning (Parker 2002).
Nor is it the case that this shift
is restricted to Northern Europe; indeed, developments in Southern Europe have
been in some instances more striking. Altering a decades- old pattern in which
large-scale illegal migration was followed by periodic legalisation programmes,
Italy adopted its first avowedly pro-migration
policy on 6th March 1998. It provides for the
establishment of an annual quota administered by the Ministry of Labour for new
immigrants, as well as an annual quota for temporary workers entering the
country for twenty days to six months (Calavita 2002). Recent hostility to
immigration expressed by some members of the ruling coalition under Berlusconi,
have still been tempered by the recognition of the crucial role that cheap
immigrant labour plays in the continuing economic ‘miracle’ of northern Italian
SMEs, as well as the wholesale adoption of immigrant domestic workers by
households where both parents now go out to work. Likewise, Spain as early as
1993 adopted a quota system for channelling labour migrants into specific
regions and economic sectors; since 1994, an average of 30,000 work permits
have been issued (Cornelius 2002). This has been particularly generous to
migrants from Latin America, most recently large numbers from Ecuador.
To be sure, developments in immigration policy across Europe have in no way received
the endorsement of public opinion, which is increasingly hostile to these
market-led demands. 2002 election results in Denmark, Italy, France, and the
Netherlands, reflect in some measure hostility to new immigration, though this
is still sharpest towards asylum seekers rather than skilled migrants. It is
too early to make sweeping, definitive statements on the political results or
policy consequences that might flow from new salience of far-right
anti-immigrant rhetoric. The 11th September 2001 terrorist attack on
New York City clearly also threw a wild card into the steadily liberalizing
attitudes that have follwed global economic demands, though predictions of a
sharp shift in American and/or European immigration policy after 9/11 have not
yet been realised. In the US, the only quantifiable effect on immigration
policy has been a shelving of George Bush’s proposal for an amnesty of Mexican
migrants and a resolution of the free movement consequences of NAFTA for the
US-Mexican border; in Europe, some countries have expanded powers to enforce
security, including more frequent use of detention. Ultimately, the free
movement of terrorists and skilled workers alike was made easy by the
unqualified acceptance of the good of global international mobility that was
led by the US economic boom of the 1990s. For sure, the events have intensified
opposition to immigration in some quarters – notably in Germany, where the
Bavarian Premier has sought to politicize immigration in the wake of the
terrorist attack – and immigration policy is likely to become more
‘securitised’ (Bigo 1998) in its public face in Europe, as it has in the US
since the attack. Nonetheless, the fact that scholars of immigration throughout
the 1990s remained oblivious to the pressures in favour of new primary
immigration suggests that the fortress Europe metaphor was and still is both
factually inaccurate and a block to more fruitful scholarly inquiry. What is more,
the idea of fortress Europe tells us nothing about the migration implications
of enlargement, except perhaps to suggest that the fortress will become larger
but no more penetrable.
In
summary, Europe in the last decade – in diametric opposition to the normative
arguments of those whose views were shaped by the Fortress analogy – has
basically accepted large numbers of semi-permanent and temporary migrants; it
has, through the abolition of visas on first-wave candidate countries,
encouraged a sharp increase in trans-border movement; and its largest member
states have even openly adopted more positive immigration policies.
The EU’s role
Thus far, the analysis has only presented
the national level impetus across Europe to more open immigration. What role
has European integration as such played in all this? As we have suggested, work
on this topic has also been dominated by an exaggerated portrayal of European
integration as the mechanism through which member states have collectively
constructed a more securitised European fortress. The work of Bigo and others
has delineated ways in which concerns for security have led to tightened
immigration restrictions, expanded police cooperation and so forth (Bigo 1998;
Guiraudon 2000; Mitsilegas, this volume). These self-declared ‘compensatory
measures’ of the EU’s third pillar, though, are themselves better understood as
the secondary consequence of the more
fundamental liberalizing effects of the EU’s involvement in this field, that
has simply extended the market-building logic of free movement persons to an
ever wider territorial range that now extends to accession countries and
beyond. That is, as the Schengen agreement made the European Union a zone of
open borders, and as pre-accession agreements expanded opportunities for
migration within this greater Europe, EU member states sought – notably through the Schengen agreement
itself – to compensate for this loss of control with a reinforced capacity for
internal security measures. Such a linkage follows a large established pattern
in immigration policy: states with relatively porous external borders (those in
Central Europe) compensate with reinforced internal control; only states with
impenetrable external borders (Canada, pre-1997 Britain) have the luxury of dispensing
with internal control. It is no surprise that in Britain –
once the model of external control – pressure for ID cards intensified as
asylum applications rose ever higher.
In fact, the EU’s potential liberalizing effect has been one of the
chief reasons that some members states have long sought to keep the EU out of
the immigration policy area. British and Danish non-participation in Schengen
has only been the most conspicuous examples. Before the Amsterdam Treaty,
immigration policy governing movement from outside the EU, as well as the
movement of third country nationals within the EU, was kept firmly beyond the
EU’s competence (Guild 1998). The exclusion of EU competence was even greater
in citizenship and national immigrant integration policies. The substantial
qualifications added to the Amsterdam Treaty’s (partial) communitarisation of
migration policy were a further reflection of member state fear that the
Commission’s proposals will have a liberalising bent in these areas (see Hailbronner
1997). Yet, even the Councils’ restrictionist impulses should not be
overstated. The attribution of excessive restrictionist success to the EU
overstates the EU’s restrictive capacities, and it ignores the reluctance of
Eurosceptic states (Britain, Denmark) to transfer further power to
supranational institutions, as well as the support of pro-migrant NGOs for more
Europeanisation in this area, because they see the ECJ, the Commission and the
European Parliament as correctives to member state’s exclusionary intent
(Geddes 2000).
EU Enlargement
If both the market and European integration itself are creating
liberalising migration pressures, they are being refracted by an institutional
factor: enlargement and the rules governing it. Enlargement has had at least
three knock-on effects on migration and
immigration policy. First, effective policing of external EU borders
requires that EU member states are able to return illegal migrants/rejected asylum
seekers to their country of origins. In the case of Eastern Europe, this has
required readmission agreements, which Germany signed with Poland in 1993 and
the Czech Republic in 1994 (Lavenex, this volume). Second, EU policymakers have
explicitly linked enlargement with immigration control. This has both liberal
and restrictive effects.
On the liberal side, countries wishing to join the EU have had to
adopt the Geneva Convention on refugees and the 1967 protocol (limiting the
Convention’s temporal and geographical limitations). Thus, Bulgaria
somewhat reluctantly ratified both in 1992 and adopted in 1994 a refugee law
purporting to bring Bulgarian asylum provisions up to EU standards (Lavenex,
this volume). This will open Bulgaria to more asylum seeking. To be sure, as a
reflection of the low priority accorded asylum, the new law did not take effect
until 1999, but it took effect nonetheless. On the resrictive side, the EU has
indeed made it a condition of accession that candidate countries bring their
asylum provisions in line with the Schengen and Dublin agreements. This
alignment has involved the adoption of ‘safe third country’ and ‘safe country
of origin’ rules, as well as other rules on manifestly unfounded asylum claims.
It has also involved sealing off borders to countries with which there had
previously been relatively free movement: Poland and Hungary have tightened
borders with Belarus and the Ukraine, that have led to a severe disruption of
routine cross-border transactions in this region (Jileva, this volume).
Although, as Lavenex argues (this volume), the dominant mechanism was one of
uncoordinated, bilateral negotiation (Germany-Poland, for instance), the result
was the extension of European asylum rules, standards and restrictions to
Central Europe. In the case of visa policy, accession countries have had to
extend visa requirements to countries with which they previous had simplified
border procedures. Thus, in 2000, the candidate countries of Estonia, Latvia,
Slovakia and Romania introduced, at the EU’s behest, visa requirements for
contiguous but non-candidate countries: Russia, Moldova and the Ukraine
(Jileva, this volume). It should be pointed out, however, that lines did not
always run in the direction of restriction: the candidate countries themselves
have been freed of visa requirements for EU member states and, thus, as noted
above, they have enjoyed privileged access to the EU labour market through new
bilateral agreements and new cross-border opportunities.
Several implications follow from these observations. First, it
hardly needs pointing out – except that it is so often forgotten – that the
enlargement of the EU is intimately and inevitably tied up with a process of
exclusion and inclusion. Since
‘Europa’s’ first emergence from Roman
myth, Europe’s core has shifted north and west – from Athens to the
Franco/German/Benelux core. Now, after the fall of Berlin Wall, Europe (when
‘Central Europe,’ was, literally, rediscovered overnight) Europe is again
shifting eastwards. As Europe expands, the newly included countries – Poland, Hungary,
the Czech Republic – are granted first visa-free access and then the promise of free
movement and the right of establishment. The price of this exclusion for those
caught outside the European geographical space will, in the short run, be
severe: the cost of visas, restrictions on individual movement, and limitations
on trade. Cross-border traffic between Poland
and the Ukraine dropped by 50% between 1997-1999, and in southeast Poland
unemployment increased by 10% to 14%. Yet this movement has to be set against a
sharp increase in movement, semi-permanent, short-term and trans-border,
between CEE countries and the EU, and the ever expanding range of cross-border
market transactions that will inevitably follow between new members of the EU
and the new neighbours of the EU. Moreover, some unlikely EU members – such as Turkey
and Morocco – are already well integrated into certain economic structures,
with special labour agreements and privileged trading status. Whatever one
thinks of the process, these dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are inevitable
in the enlargement process; they inhere in the construction of Europe. The emerging governance
of economic and geographical factors over state-territorial ones suggests that
the borders of the new Europe will continue to be fuzzy and porous rather than fortress-like.
Conclusions
Our
central argument in this paper is that we are currently witnessing a
transformation in migration processes in Europe: from a historical situation in
which these were dominantly shaped and restrained by state-centred and
territorially-bound forms of governance, to one in which they are increasingly
defined and governed by market forces, and the inability of states to enforce
their jurisdiction over labour mobility. Further, we argue that public and
scholarly discussion about migration has not kept pace with these changes on
the ground, instead falsely interpreting changes in European attitudes and
policies on migration in terms of the construction of a European fortress. In
other words, despite the nation-state’s continued attempt to define migration
as a political phenomenon – controlled by categories of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’
migration, the granting (or not) of nationality and citizenship rights, and so
forth – migration in Europe is in fact beginning to resemble more the scenario
of labour market theorists, who point to self-regulating supply and demand
factors as the ultimate determinants of why people move and where they end up.
International
economic integration – expressed in this regional context by the dynamics
towards European Union and EU enlargement – lies behind the marketisation of
migration in Europe. As market demand takes over the state’s discretion to award or deny
access to mobile individuals, selectivity enters into a process that was
previously governed by a mix of impartial human rights norms, nationally
specific conceptions of citizenship, and a heavy dose of xenophobia. This has
had mixed results. It has undermined asylum law and the generosity of western
states in welcoming needy and desperate long distance migrants. But it has also
broken down all kinds of barriers that existed to block the mobility of
qualified, internationally available labour from fulfilling needs in the western
market place. The state has withdrawn from designating various categories of
mobility – such as cross-border business transactions, temporary labour
migration, tourism and shopping – as unwanted migration, and it has scrambled
to ‘regularise’ large numbers of clandestine or undocumented labour that have
poured into various low end niches in the western economy. These are all
migrants who have been ‘selected’ by labour market demand. Moreover, such migration
has occurred well beyond the levels of tolerance that would politically reflect
the temper of an increasingly hostile indigenous European public. Most of the
academic work of the last decade has sought to explain migration and
immigration policy in Europe through state-centred discussions about citizenship and sovereignty, or
the centrality of the political and legal process. However, it seems clear that
migration scholars need to think again about the more fundamental labour market
dynamics that underpin these changes, whether from a neo-liberal (Borjas 1989, 1999),
or a neo-Marxist perspective (Piore 1979; Castles and Kosack 1973; Samers 2000).
From
the point of view of aspiring and hopeful new members of the European club,
European economic integration offers access and engagement with western markets
without presupposing that all migration westwards is going to be an irrevocable
commitment to leaving one’s homeland ties and becoming a new ‘integrated’
citizen of a western state. This logic offers preference for the geographically
proximate and the economically interdependent, extending indefinitely
southwards and eastwards, through concentric circles that are not yet
watertight in their exclusion. This will include the Mediterranean, some of the former Soviet sphere
and perhaps even Turkey; it will exclude others further
from Europe’s radius. No enlargement can
solve the dramatic imbalances of North-South inequality, but an enlargement
driven by economic dynamics constructs less of a fortress than a politically constructed
one. Economic free movement works to reduce differentials and bring migration
imbalances under a more self-equilibrating supply and demand relation. But
enlargement is only about changing the nature of the boundary for some, putting it more in the hands of
bottom-up individual economic actors rather than the top-down nationalism of
state actors concerned with preserving the nation. For sure, for many other,
more distant and desperate migrants seeking access to Europe, enlargement will bring nothing. Europe will still be their ‘Amerika’, an
impossible new beginning, achieved only after scaling exclusionary ‘fortress’
walls.
Another
serious consequence of market-led migration is the further downgrading of
citizenship and welfare rights for residents, in favour of market flexibility
and a precarious workforce unprotected by benefits. The emptiness of ‘EU
citizenship’ – which is little more than the a fancy PR packaging of minimal
cross-national economic rights for workers in the EU – signals this concern. Transnational
migrants may seek their own protection in networks and transnational ties, no
longer counting on the welfare benefits and migrant rights of citizenship and integration
as in the past. Market-led openness will also undoubtedly have impacts on the
privileged status of nationals and older migrants, who enjoyed the full
benefits of closed European welfare states in the decades before more wide
scale economic integration.
It is
perhaps this that lies behind states’ and commentators’ reluctance to recognise
how extensively the market already governs migration processes in Europe. The market offers the promise of
a far more rational immigration policy, in which supply and demand, not
security and barbed wire fences, deal with the inevitable push-pull dynamics
engendered by global economic integration. Yet European states for the main
part retain a huge discretion over national immigration policies, that have yet
to fully embrace the inevitability in the future of more economistic and
demographically sanguine thinking on migration. Yet the internal market in
Europe is one of the most remarkable instances of modern nation-states ‘letting
go’ of their need to control governance over the flow of capital, goods,
services and persons, instead exposing all member states to the costs and
benefits of an integrated market. Enlargement poses the challenge of ‘letting
go’ over a much wider geographical territory, with further knock on-effects on
the porousness of European borders to their peripheries. A market-based
migration theory thus poses in stark terms the issue of whether EU states will
have the courage and wisdom to defy popular nationalist hostility and residual
fortress-building impulses; and hence whether they will allow- East-West
migration to become genuinely demand driven across and beyond the new accession
countries.
Table 1: Asylum seekers in Select Western Countries,
1985-1998 (in
thousands)
Country
|
85
|
86
|
87
|
88
|
89
|
90
|
|
92
|
93
|
94
|
95
|
96
|
97
|
98
|
99
|
00
|
|
Austria
|
6,7
|
8,7
|
11,4
|
15,8
|
21,9
|
22,8
|
27,3
|
16,2
|
4,7
|
5,1
|
5,9
|
7,0
|
6,7
|
13,8
|
20,1
|
18,3
|
|
Belgium
|
5,3
|
7,7
|
6,0
|
5,1
|
8,1
|
13,0
|
15,2
|
17,8
|
26,9
|
14,3
|
11,4
|
12,4
|
11,8
|
22
|
35,8
|
42,7
|
|
Canada
|
8,4
|
23,0
|
35,0
|
45,0
|
19.9
|
36,7
|
32,4
|
37,8
|
20,3
|
22
|
26
|
26
|
22,6
|
23,8
|
29,3
|
37,9
|
|
Denmark
|
8,7
|
9,3
|
2,8
|
4,7
|
4,6
|
5,3
|
4,6
|
13,9
|
14,4
|
6,7
|
5,1
|
5,9
|
5,1
|
5,7
|
7
|
12,2
|
|
Finland
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
0,2
|
2,5
|
2,1
|
3,6
|
2,0
|
0,8
|
0,8
|
0,7
|
1
|
0,4
|
3,1
|
3,2
|
|
France
|
25,8
|
23,4
|
24,8
|
|
60,0
|
56,0
|
46,5
|
28,9
|
27,6
|
26,0
|
20,2
|
17,2
|
21
|
22,4
|
31
|
38,6
|
|
Germany
|
73,9
|
99,7
|
57,4
|
|
121,0
|
193,0
|
256
|
438,2
|
322,6
|
127,2
|
127,9
|
116,4
|
151,7
|
98,6
|
95,1
|
78,8
|
|
Greece
|
1,4
|
4,3
|
6,3
|
9,3
|
6,5
|
4,1
|
2,7
|
2,0
|
0,8
|
1,3
|
1,4
|
1,6
|
4,4
|
3
|
1,5
|
3
|
|
Ireland
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
0,1
|
0,0
|
0,0
|
0,1
|
0,4
|
0,4
|
1,2
|
3,9
|
4,6
|
7,7
|
10,1
|
|
Italy
|
5,4
|
6,5
|
11,0
|
1,3
|
2,2
|
4,7
|
31,7
|
2,6
|
1,6
|
1,8
|
1,7
|
0,6
|
1,9
|
11,1
|
33,4
|
15,6
|
|
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
0,1
|
0,2
|
0,1
|
0,2
|
0,1
|
0,2
|
0,3
|
0,4
|
1,7
|
2,9
|
0,6
|
|
|
5,7
|
5,9
|
13,5
|
7,5
|
14,0
|
21,2
|
21,6
|
20,3
|
35,4
|
52,5
|
29,3
|
22,9
|
34,4
|
45,2
|
39,3
|
44
|
|
Norway
|
0,9
|
2,7
|
8,6
|
6,6
|
4,4
|
4,0
|
4,6
|
5,2
|
12,9
|
3,4
|
1,5
|
1,8
|
2,3
|
8,4
|
10,2
|
10,1
|
|
Portugal
|
0,1
|
0,3
|
0,5
|
0,4
|
0,2
|
0,1
|
0,3
|
0,7
|
2,1
|
0,6
|
0,5
|
0,3
|
0,3
|
0,4
|
0,3
|
0,2
|
|
Spain
|
2,3
|
2,3
|
2,5
|
3,3
|
4,0
|
8,6
|
8,1
|
11,7
|
12,6
|
12,0
|
5,7
|
4,7
|
5
|
6,6
|
8,4
|
7
|
|
Sweden
|
14,5
|
14,6
|
18,1
|
19,6
|
32,0
|
29,0
|
27,3
|
84,0
|
37,6
|
18,6
|
9,0
|
5,8
|
9,7
|
12,8
|
11,2
|
16,3
|
|
Switzer-land
|
9,7
|
8,6
|
10,9
|
16,7
|
24,4
|
36,0
|
41,6
|
18,0
|
24,7
|
16,1
|
17,0
|
18,0
|
24
|
41,3
|
46
|
17,6
|
|
Britain
|
6,2
|
5,7
|
5,9
|
5,7
|
16,8
|
|
73,4
|
32,3
|
28,0
|
42,2
|
55,0
|
27,9
|
32,5
|
46
|
71,2
|
99
|
Totals
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
320,3
|
438,7
|
563,2
|
695,5
|
554,2
|
329,1
|
293,1
|
244,5
|
338.7
|
367.8
|
453.5
|
455.2
|
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