The European Union’s immigration policy: a stalled form of the strategy of conflict?

Abstract

More than 10 years after the Amsterdam Treaty, which transferred competences on immigration and asylum matters to common jurisdiction, the EU Commission is asking for a “genuine” European immigration policy. In our view, such a genuine policy must consider the common control of immigration flows, unequivocally rejected by both the Amsterdam and Lisbon Treaty for reasons that are rooted in the political terrain and—in terms of the economic logic—in the difficulty of finding a common immigration model. We consider that the focal point is constituted by whether or not to create side-payments, without which States have no choice but to adopt a national immigration policy. Side-payments, at this stage in the history of the European Union, would be very difficult to determine in the context of immigration policy. The fact that immigration policy is assigned to national governments, rendering compensatory payments impossible, is rooted in the complexity of this politically sensitive issue as well as in the practical difficulty of calculating the positive and negative externalities referred to above.