EU migration governance: framing migrant deservingness, sustaining inequalities

The Union’s migration and free movement policies set out to organize populations in and beyond its formal borders using the three discourses of security, utility and integration. This population politics forms part of the broader governance of the Union as a market, and as an international actor, and it creates frames of deservingness for different categories of migrant. At the EU level, this sustains an illusion of policy applied ‘without fear or favour’ to all member states, even if its origins reflect some MS state preferences over others. Yet this apparently organized population politics of the Union always co-exists with three confounding factors: that is, national and local variation in

1) migration patterns and experiences

2) labour markets, esp with respect to informal economy

3) integration and social policies

This paper explores the ways in which these factors and EU law together inform national policies and thus shape frames of migrant deservingness, and experience of migrant rights, in practice. The paper argues that in the EU this is done in ways which disguise profound member state hierarchies in the EU’s political economy. Such hierarchies have significant implication for ideas about deservingness and migrants’ rights, contributing to a Europe which manages its diversity through inequalities.