One Market, 25 States, 20 Million Outsiders?: European Union Immigration Policy

[From the Introduction]. Section Two of this paper will detail the evolution of the EU’s immigration regime, from Maastricht’s modest beginnings, to the ambitious European constitution. Since “immigration policy” is a very broad topic, covering diverse areas such as labor migration, family reunification, political asylum, social integration, and the fight against illegal immigration, the third and fourth sections will focus on one key policy area: the rights and freedoms of Europe’s nearly 20 million “third-country nationals” (TCNs), who are legally resident in an EU member state, but do not hold citizenship in any member state. Despite calls by the European Commission, the Parliament, and several of the member states, TCNs do not possess the same rights as EU citizens to move freely and take up employment in any member state. Therefore these immigrants, though legally resident in the EU, cannot participate in the common market. The third and fourth sections will detail the political struggle over whether or not to give free movement rights to TCNs, looking at the key roles played by the European Court of Justice (analyzed in Section Three) and the European Commission (analyzed in Section Four) in the face of strong opposition by powerful member states. This political struggle will be analyzed in the context of the debate between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism (Stone Sweet and Sandholtz 1998, Moravcsik 1998), and will be analyzed on the basis of secondary sources, and interviews I conducted with political actors in Brussels during 2003 and 2004. The fifth section concludes the chapter, analyzing the extent of TCN free movement rights as they currently stand, as well as their prospects of future expansion, in the broader perspective of the increasing degree of EU control over immigration policy in the 21st Century