Considering the vertical legal competition between the EU legal order and the national ones, it must be underlined that the third-country nationals can operate legal strategies in order to enter or stay in the EU territory: they try escape from some categories that are defined at the national level by attempting to benefit from the frame that are drawn at the EU level. Although the European Court of Justice has elaborated a jurisprudence anti-bypassing, some member States, because they are insufficiently convinced or reassured, have started to prevent such by passing modifying their national legislations.
Thus a legal competition has appeared in a horizontal perspective. As far as immigration and asylum matters are concerned, such a legal competition does not ensure the development of more attractive and more protective national legal norms for third-country nationals. On the contrary, even though it is partially neutralized by a harmonization generated at the EU level, the horizontal legal competition appears to push the Member States national norms that are more and more restrictive, less and less protective, so much so that the ambition of a real common immigration and asylum system gets affected.
