Alex Balch

Managing labour migration in Europe: ideas knowledge and policy change

Preface and acknowledgments List of abbreviations List of tables List of figures 1. Introduction 2. Labour migration policy theory - the state of the art 3. Developing the approach: theory and methods 4. Case study one: labour migration policy change in Spain 5. Case study two: labour migration policy change in the UK 6. The EU and labour migration policymaking in the UK and Spain 7. Managing migration in the UK and Spain: ideas and policy change 8. Conclusions References Index

Labour and Epistemic Communities: The Case of ‘Managed Migration’ in the UK

How do new ideas flow through networks to reframe policy questions, and what role is played by the growing world of think tanks and policy experts? This article takes the remarkable shift in UK labour migration policy since 2000 and demonstrates how policy was redesigned by networks of actors working between and within the worlds of think tanks and government, including the Prime Ministers Policy and Innovation Unit (PIU), the Treasury, the Home Office and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). The article shows how different kinds of ideas and knowledge flowed through different actors and networks to influence the reframing of policy, using the epistemic communities hypothesis (ECH) as a theoretical framework for the analysis.

Sending and Receiving: The Ethical Framing of Intra-EU Migration in the European Press

Labour migration in the European Union (EU) has become a hot topic in public debates, particularly around the issue of European enlargement. The media are frequently criticized for stirring up debates around immigration but analysis has overlooked the underlying ethical justifications for migration controls. This article addresses this by developing an innovative approach that applies an ethical lens to media coverage of intra-EU migration. It shows how a generally narrow range of communitarian and cosmopolitan arguments are employed by the press in two European countries that occupy very different positions in the migratory system: Bulgaria and the UK. It finds a convergence of communitarian arguments across the case studies, and a significant importation of frames, reversing the roles of sending and receiving country.

Ethics, Politics and Migration: Public Debates on the Free Movement of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK, 2006–2013

Public debates on immigration have become the subject of much concern, particularly in the UK. This article applies an ethical lens to assess changes in public debates over intra-EU migration in six UK national newspapers during 2006 and 2013. It finds an almost complete dominance of communitarian justifications, mainly based on welfare chauvinism, but a notable increase in security-related arguments and a decrease in economic nationalist ideas. Alternative cosmopolitan arguments about immigration go from rare to virtually absent. The discussion links these shifts to a failure of the UK centre-left to overcome historic difficulties in presenting a coherent narrative on immigration policy.

A system in chaos? Knowledge and sense-making on immigration policy in public debates:

This article shows how press selection and presentation of knowledge and expertise relate to processes of sense-making over contemporary political dilemmas. It develops an approach that combines framing analysis with theoretical insights from the literature on narrative and complexity. It demonstrates the value of this approach through quantitative and qualitative analysis of media coverage of the UK government’s decision-making over access to the labour market for new European Union (EU) citizens in 2006. The findings illuminate the relationship between expertise and complexity, the partisan way in which the media utilize expertise, and how official and non-official sources relate to certainty and uncertainty over policy. The article also contributes to our understanding of how intense media scrutiny can shape public debates on immigration, where ‘moral panics’ are often accompanied by calls for government intervention, and the supposedly rational world of facts and figures is distorted into a ‘numbers game’.

Opportunity from Crisis? Organisational Responses to Human Trafficking in the UK

This article analyses the effects on key organisations responsible for immigration control and law enforcement of the UKs signing in March 2007 and ratification in December 2008 of the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings. It shows how opportunities for organisational change and innovation arose from the 2006 crisis in the UK immigration system and also looks at how narrative constructions of the issue of human trafficking, of migration control and of public management more generally provided important frameworks for interpretation of ostensibly new and challenging issues. We show how the 2006 crisis in the immigration system caused by the ‘foreign prisoners’ scandal’ created opportunities for adaptation of existing organisational roles and narratives and for the development of new ways of working which, in turn, prompted some innovation and change in UK responses to human trafficking.

A Europe of Rights and Values? Public Debates on Sarkozy's Roma Affair in France, Bulgaria and Romania

This article analyses press coverage between July and October 2010 in three different European Union (EU) member states (France, Romania and Bulgaria) of the French governments expulsion of Roma in 2010. It asks what the international reaction to Frances actions tells us about the way in which Europe is deployed in debates over discrimination, minority rights and freedom of movement in national media. The article finds evidence in national public debates of a Europeanisation of normative discussions, thanks to a willingness by a range of actors to use the EU in an instrumental way for political gain. However, the representation of issues and actors by the press also demonstrates the ways in which the prominence of supposedly European norms, and the framing of the EUs role, can be associated with national political dynamics, both in relation to the political environment and contemporary narratives regarding national identity.

A deadly cocktail? The fusion of Europe and immigration in the UK press

ABSTRACT This article asks how the EU is imagined and deployed in different justifications for national restrictions on the free movement of European citizens. It does this by analysing press coverage in the UK, where concerns about the issues of immigration and European integration contributed to a victory for ‘Brexit’ in the 2016 referendum. It develops a novel technique for analysing the political dimension of media debates offering a conceptual map to navigate the confusing fusion of Euroscepticism and anti-immigrationism. Through reference to political theories on immigration controls, and ideas about European integration from EU studies a series of hypothetical roles and functions for the EU are developed. These are then used as a framework to analyse coverage in the UK national media in two crucial time-periods: 2006 and 2013. The article’s findings challenge conventional wisdom that Euroscepticism and anti-immigrationism are (a) closely correlated and (b) map neatly onto existing left-right political preferences. The results show that the left-right dimension was less salient in 2013 than in 2006, the space within which discussions of the EU take place narrowed, and the economic and political aspects of regional integration were increasingly overshadowed by the image of the EU as supranational entity.

The Development of the EU Migration and Asylum Regime

This chapter examines the development of policy in Europe in order to provide a context for other chapters that discuss the European ‘migration machine’. The chapter provides a politico-legal perspective, and conceptualizes the development of the EU approach to migration and asylum since the late 1990s, demonstrating how it can be seen as constituent of an evolving and complex system. Our purpose here is to consider analytically the meaning and significance of the emerging EU framework on migration and asylum. We ask what kind of system the EU is able to develop and in what ways this is limited and constrained given the questions over EU competency and legitimacy in these areas. In order to do this we critically evaluate developments in the EU on the migration and asylum system, charting its course from Tampere, Finland (in 1999) through to Stockholm (in 2009). In each of the various phases of its development, we ask about the main ideas and arguments that have underpinned this process. How, for example, has the EU balanced security concerns over the openness of borders with demographic and economic arguments for more migrants? We then consider how these compare with the actual outputs and outcomes of the legislative process. The final section draws together our main findings, discusses the rationale for integration in this area and identifies the key characteristics of the developing EU framework on migration and asylum.

Understanding and Evaluating UK Efforts to Tackle Forced Labour

Forced labour1 is recognised as a worldwide problem, directly affecting millions of people, generating some US