The Political Economy of Border Drawing ─ Arranging Legality in European Labor Migration Policies

The author compares labor migration policies in Britain, France, and Germany, examining how they are founded on normative claims, structurally embedded in specific socioeconomic settings, and affect social relationships. She considers the policies' legal principles and normative foundations, their emergence and governance in socioeconomic settings, variations across national contexts, and policy implications for migrants' rights, focusing on who the perceived “good” workers are and why they are included. She draws on legislation and interviews to discuss how migration policy studies fail to explain the differences between legal and illegal migrant workers because they focus on the effectiveness of territorial border enforcement. She discusses various topics: variations in national economies, labor markets, welfare states, citizenship, and integration regimes; policy legacies and migration experiences and how legal migrant workers are selected in legislation and which policy meanings are embedded in classification mechanisms and variations in them; the role of economic, social, and civic classification norms and variations; and the sorting effects of border-drawing regimes for migrant workers. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Regine Paul is a postdoc scholar with the HowSAFE project on comparative risk regulation at the University of Bielefeld. She has published a number of scholarly articles and contributed to edited volumes on migration and mobility policies in Europe. She is also board member of the research network “European Integration and the Global Political Economy” at the Council for European Studies.