Chapter 1 Introduction: Manoeuvring Rights: Immigrants’ Experiences of Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

Meng-Hsuan Chou starts the anthology with Chapter 2, ‘EU Mobility Partnerships and Gender: Origin and Implications’. Here she shows how current EU regulations regarding migration came to be formed they way they are and how this development was motivated. She not only explores the circumstances under which European Union (EU) mobility partnerships were established, but also examines the effects in terms of migration flows. She raises the question of how the migration policies of the receiving states gender migratory flows, and also wonder whether instrument formulations are intentional or unintentional. While previous research has mostly examined these issues from the perspective of national migration policies, Chou finds that a supranational viewpoint still is missing, a gap in the literature she here aims to fill in. The EU migration instruments known as the ‘mobility partnerships’ are established by participating EU member states and certain third-world countries with the aim of facilitating circular migration. Chou approaches her questions through empirical analysis of three different data sets: (1) existing studies on the migration-development nexus, European migration policy co-operation and EU mobility partnerships; (2) publicly available reports and official EU documents and (3) position papers circulated amongst national delegates who prepared for, and defended their domestic positions at, the Tampere European Council summit. She suggests that the European governments rarely had ‘gender balance’ as priority when it came to border control. However, by definition and design, EU policies are meant to affect migratory flows. To discern how, it is necessary to look more closely at what happens in practice when member states implement the measures (e.g. from the EU level to the national/bilateral level).