Immigration Policy and European Union Politics

EU immigration policies have incrementally evolved from a purely intergovernmental to a
deeply integrated EU policy area. In practice, EU immigration policies and EU secondary
legislation still leave significant discretion to the Member States, as witnessed by key developments
in the various subfields of immigration policies—including policies on border
protection, return and irregular migration, as well as labor migration and family migration
policies. The key academic debates on EU immigration policies have mainly focused
on explaining the decision-making processes behind the adoption of EU policies as well as
their impact on national policies. While scholars find that these EU policies have led to
liberalizations in the areas of family migration or labor migration, the irregular migration
and border policies of the EU have gradually produced more restrictive outcomes. Policy
liberalizations are usually based on the impact of EU institutions, which tend to have
more liberal positions than Member States. Lowest common denominator output at the
EU level, such as on the Blue Card Directive, is usually due to a resistance of individual
Member States. With deeper integration of the policy area over time and qualified majority
voting, however, resistant minorities have been increasingly outvoted. The stronger
politicization of some areas of immigration, such as family migration, has also led the European
Commission to curb its legislative proposals, as it would be much harder to adopt
a piece of legislation today (2019) that provides adequate protection standards.