In 1999, with the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, European Union (EU) migration went from being an area of intergovernmental cooperation to one governed by ever closer version of the Community Method. This shift resulted in a significant production of secondary legislation being agreed at the EU level, regarding all areas upon which the EU had some degrees of competence, namely asylum and refugee, irregular migration, legal migration, administrative cooperation, and border and visa policy. The academic literature is divided in how to interpret policy developments in this area. Some academic contributions have emphasised the divergence from traditional EU policy methods, others have analysed migration policy in the perspective of traditional questions about EU integration, and the majority had some normative assessments of the policies being formulated. This thesis tackles EU migration policy from the point of view of delegation. It proposes to assess the extent of EU integration in this area by measuring the amount of powers the Council of the European Union has granted to the European Commission. The dissertation finds that delegation has occurred in this policy area, and to an extent that is comparable to other, older policy areas, but is uneven across migration categories. Past delegation studies highlighted a number of possible determinants of delegation, such as reducing uncertainty, strengthening the credibility of commitments, achieving efficiency, as well as institutional contexts. This dissertation finds evidence for the credibility and efficiency rationales, as well as conflict between the Council and the Commission. This study is relevant to current debates about how much power EU institutions are and should be granted, whether these institutions are biased towards the nature of the policies, and current trends in EU integration.

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.

After the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, large numbers of Central and Eastern Europeans moved to work in Western Europe. The aim of this thesis is to use the case of migration after the enlargement to further our understanding of the relationship between immigrant group size and natives’ attitudes. Recent scholarly debates raise questions about how immigration affects European societies and the political durability of European welfare states. This research puts forward two questions: Does an increase in Eastern European immigration after the enlargement explain differences in civic attitudes in Western Europe? And second, does this relationship (if any) depend on national contextual factors? The relationship between immigration and three categories of public attitudes are examined: attitudes towards immigration, attitudes towards welfare and attitudes of trust. This thesis draws on ethnic competition theory, which postulates that group competition over resources provokes the natives to perceive immigration as a threat to their own or their group’s interests. To test this theory, this study uses data from the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2010 to build multi-level pooled time series models. The results find only partial support for ethnic competition theory. When a greater proportion of E-8 migrants live in the country, individuals tend to have more positive views about immigration. The results also show that this positive relationship is weakened when national economic conditions are more precarious. Additionally, the results do not find that E8 migration is negatively related to Western European attitudes regarding trust or welfare. This implies that as more immigrants arrive, Europeans can potentially acknowledge immigration’s economic and cultural benefits. Moreover, these results challenge pessimistic scholarly predictions that immigration erodes trust and support for welfare in Europe. This thesis offers two academic contributions. First, it considers the case of E8 migration, which has been ignored by existing comparative attitudinal studies about immigration. Second, focusing on post-enlargement migration helps this thesis to overcome common empirical obstacles such as cross-country differences in immigrant composition and admission criteria.