Wednesday, June 26, 2013
A1.18C (Oudemanhuispoort)
The European Union has been described as a ‘gated community’ which organizes migrant statuses in a relatively straightforward manner, creating hierarchies of inclusion between EU citizens, long-term residents, and graded categories of other foreigners. The notion of relatively straightforward stratification, however, obstructs our view of the fine-grained – often contradictory – sets of rights accessible to different migrants in the EU. This paper argues that, rather than facing clear hierarchies of inclusion, migrants must negotiate highly ambiguous processes of stratification. These are underpinned by equally ambiguous frames of deservingness with regard to economic, social and civic rights: in EU regulation the principles according to which migrants are defined as ‘deserving’ of admission, welfare provision or labour market access, are differentiated and subject to a range of conditions to an extent where they become relatively unpredictable as potential sources of rights. To expose and evaluate the differential logics behind the governance of migrant statuses by the EU, we compare the regulation of twelve legal categories of migrants, across three dimensions of rights: civic, economic and social. We find that deservingness principles are not clearly associated with hierarchies of rights, even within each of our three dimensions. The result is that the overall allocation of statuses to migrants is necessarily also ambiguous, sometimes even contradictory. We see in this the regulatory manifestation of several co-existing logics and rationalities of ‘deservingness’ in EU migration policy-making.
