The floating boundaries of eu directives as a tool for achieving national goals. the case of deported eu nationals from the uk

In 2004, a Citizen Rights Directive was enacted, granting EU nationals a possibility to freely move and live in member states. In this paper, a research was conducted to find possible explanations of growing number of EU nationals deported from the UK in the period of 2004-2015, while the Directive was supposed to minimise the number of such cases. Based on overview of the academic literature on powers of states in the EU, the following hypothesis, explaining growth of deportation orders, was held: in process of implementation of the Directive, the UK national authorities interpreted the content of Citizen Rights Directive in its own manner to fulfil national policy goals. Process tracing analysis was used to test this hypothesis. During statistical data analysis, increasing immigration flows and rising crime rate were concluded to not explain the growing deportation level. Qualitative content analysis of UK immigration acts identified the ever stricter rules, especially for deportation order appeals, which could have substantially impacted the outcome. Expert interviews of UK and Lithuanian experts confirmed that changes in appeal system and legal aid cuts accelerated deportation procedures. Respondents from the UK also put down such deportation policy to Conservative party‘s victory in 2010 elections and their main electoral promise – to stabilize and control immigration flows from EU countries. The aim to create hostile climate for immigrants was put into force by changes in immigration law. Main targets of such policy were foreign offenders and, significantly more often, Eastern Europeans. Such trends are explained by Eastern Europeans‘ inability to properly integrate to British society due to language barriers, which leads to lack of support of this group. Also, as they mostly work low-skilled jobs and are at worse socio-economic situation, they are more likely to commit crimes. The research proved hypothesis to be right. The UK Government managed to reinterpret Citizen Rights Directive‘s concept „threat to national security“ in a way that more immigrants become eligible for deportation. Also, UK officials created a mechanism (based on appeal rights and target populations) to avoid drawing attention from public ant supranational institutions. After legal aid cuts took place, only a minority of people-to-be-deported managed to appeal the decision. Surprisingly, most of them win their cases, therefore, they do not reach European Court of Justice, whose competence is to assess the properness of implementation of the directives. States of return, such as Lithuania, in most cases are not being informed about their deported nationals, therefore, also do not question UK‘s deportation policy. This case study proves that member states have powers to fulfil national policy goals in policy areas, regulated by supranational institutions. This finding is especially relevant in the current situation the EU faces – the growing popularity of radical political right parties. The results of research proves proponents‘ of Brexit argument of state‘s inability to control immigration while in EU to be false. It proves the contrary – the state has tools to fulfil national policies in EU controlled policy areas and has put it into practice for several years now