A Superabundance of Contradictions: The European Union's Post- Amsterdam Policies on Migrant 'Integration', Labour Immigration, Asylum, and Illegal Immigration

Abstract

The agreements reached within the frameworks of the Amsterdam Treaty and the Tampere European Council in 1999 would set off a flurry of activity in the areas of EU immigration, asylum and migrant/minority ‘integration’ policy. In conjunction with these policy areas moving up the EU agenda, moreover, this rapidly growing activity would expand well beyond the confines of the Amsterdam and Tampere programmes. The European Commission’s bold move to declare an end to the era of‘zero’ extra-Community labour immigration, as well as the expanding ‘externalization’ of the EU’s immigration and asylum policies to third countries, are just two of several examples highlighting this dynamic development. This paper focuses on the unfolding EU policies in the fields of ‘integration’, anti discrimination, immigration, and asylum. In terms of demarcations, it covers the development up until the conclusion of the Tampere Programme (1999–2004), leaving off at the beginning of its multi-annual successor agenda, the Hague Programme (2005–10). The examination proceeds through a double movement, surveying and analysing both internally and externally directed policies, as well as their intimate and often contradictory interplay. The paper sets out by scrutinizing supranational initiatives in the field of migrant/minority integration and anti-discrimination,focusing specifically on the strong interaction of this enterprise with labour-market policy and the issues of citizenship, social exclusion, and ‘Europeanvalues’. It then goes on to explore the European Commission’s objectives and assumptions concerning its calls for a sizeable increase in labour migration from third countries. Besides relating this to the internal requirements of the EU’s transforming labour market, it also discusses the external ramifications of the EU’s developing labour migration policy. The remaining sections scrutinize the EU’s emerging asylum policy. It attends, inter alia, to the EU’s ever-widening smorgasbord of restrictive asylum instruments and security-oriented immigration policies, which, as the paper goes on to argue, together serve to transform the right of asylum into a problem of ‘illegal immigration’. Above all, this predicament is discussed in relation to the growing importance of immigration and asylum matters in the EU’s external relations.

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