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

The conditions for non-EU migrant workers to gain legal entry to Britain, France, and Germany are at the same time similar and quite different. To explain this variation this book compares the fine-grained legal categories for migrant workers in each country, and examines the interaction of economic, social, and cultural rationales in determining migrant legality. Rather than investigating the failure of borders to keep unauthorized migrants out, the author highlights the different policies of each country as “border-drawing” actions. Policymakers draw lines between different migrant groups, and between migrants and citizens, through considerations of both their economic utility and skills, but also their places of origin and prospects for social integration. Overall, migrant worker legality is arranged against the backdrop of the specific vision each country has of itself in an economically competitive, globalized world with rapidly changing welfare and citizenship models.

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.