The Two Faces of Europe: Expanding Restrictions, Expanding Openness

Across Europe, national governments take contradictory approaches to migration policy. Across the EU, there has since 2000 been a new openness to skilled migrants, typified, for all its problems and limitations, in the EU blue card. At the same time, in the areas of family unification and asylum policy, national governments have introduced new sets of restrictions, in some cases (Denmark, the Netherlands) very severe ones. Most recently, even Germany, traditionally among the most pro-European member states, has called for limitations on intra-EU movement. In accounting for these restrictions, the paper will argue that state reaction is a function of (a) political learning and (b) the type of migrants. As most European governments have negatively selected migrants for most of the postwar period, and as they have frequently lost control of asylum applications and paid a heavy domestic price for it, governments are hostile to unskilled and welcoming of skilled migrants.