The EU's Role in Managing Economic Migration

The purpose of this contribution is to: map out the development of the EU's approaches to management of economic migration, to explain causes of slow europeanisation in this policy area and to outline future perspectives. The text describes: (1) the establishment of an asymmetric constitutional framework for EU migration policies, with unfinished communitarisation in the field of legal migration, (2) the development of policies for managing economic migration in 1993-2006, and (3) current debates launched by the Commission in 2005. Finally (4), the author outlines the causes of the current situation. Despite the limitations, she predicts the further europeanisation of economic migration policies. The main reasons for this prediction are the continued trend towards a piecemeal adoption of specific measures to regulate economic migration, the links of economic migration policies to more dynamic segments of migration policies and the need for a global approach to migration in the EU's external policies. The likely scenario is subsidiary and selective EU intervention