Abstract
The article focuses on the negotiation of a new labour migration policy in Germany in the years 2011 and 2012, and on the role that actors on both the regional and the European Union levels played in encouraging the introduction of a more open labour migration framework. Up until now, research has highlighted the German use of the European level for introducing more restrictive changes in migration policy. In line with these precedents, during the negotiation of a European policy for admitting highly-skilled migrants, Germany advocated a restrictive framework. However, at the transposition of the EU directive on highly-skilled migrants in national law, the German government used the directive as an opportunity to introduce a paradigm change in labour migration policies, establishing a significantly more open labour migration policy hitherto exclusively associated with Anglo-Saxon countries. The article will analyse the preconditions for this change, assessing the value of the goodness-of-fit approach for understanding processes of Europeanization.
Highlights
The article focuses on the negotiation of a new labour migration policy in Germany in the years 2011 and 2012, and on the role that actors on both the regional and the European Union levels played in encouraging the introduction of a more open labour migration framework
In European comparison, in 2012 Germany was the country that had issued the highest amount of Blue Cards in the EU (2584), having delivered 86 percent of all Blue Cards (Kosc, 2013: 15). This transposition of the Blue Card directive must be seen as the final point of a national development towards a more open labour migration regime
In 2010, at the time when Blue Card directive was supposed to be implemented, a controversial debate on labour migration took place. Those actors who were in favour of a further opening of the German labour market to third-state migrants were successful. Both key actors on the federal level and at the subnational level demanded a liberalization of the German migration law
Summary
Europeanization has been defined as ‘the impact of (...) EU policy measures on the existing policies, political and administrative processes and structures of member states’ (Héritier, 2005: 200). Windhoff-Héritier, et al (2001) has stated that the capacity for change is influenced by formal veto positions (institutions) and factual veto positions and supportive coalitions (contending actors) She has conceived of the implementation of EU directives as a policy process of goal-oriented actors in a given political context that may restrict or facilitate implementation (Windhoff-Héritier, et al 2001: 12). Duina (2007), too, in a reply to criticism on his original concept by Mastenbreoek and Kaeding (2006) emphasizes the role of actors and holds that key actors can push a directive despite misfit, or vice versa (Duina, 2007) He conceptualizes actors (state officials and interest groups) as the link between goodness of fit and ease of adaptation. In contrast to this view, I argue that goodness of fit is a valuable approach in order to capture the dynamics of the Europeanization of German labour migration policies between 2010 and 2012
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