Mayer, Matthias M.
(2011)
Governmental preferences on liberalising economic migration policies at the EU level: Germany’s domestic politics, foreign policy, and labour market.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
The academic debate about European cooperation on immigration has focused on big
treaty negotiations, presented an undifferentiated picture of the subfields of immigration,
and has only recently begun to make use of the abundant literature on national
immigration policies. As a macrostructure, this study uses a bureaucratic politics
framework to understand the preference formation of national governments on liberalising
economic migration policies. This allows unpacking the process of preference formation
and linking it to a number of causal factors, which, by influencing the cost and benefits
distribution of the relevant actors – intra-ministerial actors, employer associations, trade
unions, and other sub-state actors – shape the position of the government. The influence
of the causal factors is underpinned by different theories derived from the literatures on
Europeanisation, immigration policy-making, and foreign policy. Germany is used as a
longitudinal case study with four cases within it, as it has undergone a U-turn in a way no
other relevant Member State has, from a keen supporter of EU involvement to being highly
sceptical with regard to economic migration policies at the EU level. The empirical data is
based on 43 open-ended interviews, archival research and newspaper analysis.
The bureaucratic politics framework supplanted with the theoretical strands of domestic
politics and foreign policy concerns provides a number of themes that can explain why and
under what conditions a Member State supports liberalising economic migration policies at
the EU level from 1957 until the Treaty of Lisbon. The thesis argues that if the European
policy measure applies to a particular group of sending countries and the domestic
salience of immigration is low, sending countries can lobby Member State governments to
support EU-level liberalisation of immigration policies. The misfit between the existing
national regulations for economic migration and European-level policies cannot be significant as otherwise the economic and political adaptation costs for actors involved are
too high. A heated national debate on immigration is negatively related to governmental
support for such measures as the political costs of support skyrocket. Conversely, if the
decision-making process happens bureaucratically, this helps to attain governmental
support as the political costs of doing so are kept minimal.
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