Deserving of what? Utility, ‘demographic colonialism’ and circular migration in the EU’s managed migration approach

This presentation sets out from EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström’s assertion that large-scale labour immigration to the EU has become indispensable in order to secure the very ‘economic survival’ of the Union. But while Brussels and other major players are dead certain that the Union’s serious ‘demographic deficit’ necessitates large-scale immigration, they are quite elusive on the matter of whether migrants deserve something in return for their service as replacements in Europe’s aging workforce. Questions about migrants’ social incorporation, prospects for permanent residence and, ultimately, citizenship are thus much less accentuated on the current agenda. Instead, the neoliberal policy concept of ‘circular migration’ has taken central stage. As will be shown, circular migration is conceived as a means to meet an allegedly huge demography-induced labour demand while at the same time relieving member states of the perceived socioeconomic burdens associated with migrants’ rights to residence and social incorporation. The presentation thus seeks to explain the seeming contradiction inherent in the EU’s attempt to sustain extensive immigration without a coherent policy for migrant incorporation. This conundrum will be discussed in the overarching contexts of the current economic crisis and the increasing anti-immigrant and Islamophobic tendencies in the EU. But the wider EU migration problematic will also be related historically by pointing to how demographic projections in Europe’s past may help us expose the professed certainty and policy neutrality of the projections in motion today.