We study the labor market impact of opening borders to low-wage countries. The analysis exploits time and regional variation provided by the 2004 EU enlargement in combination with transport links to Sweden from the new member states. The results suggest an adverse impact on earnings of present workers in the order of 1 percent in areas close to pre-existing ferry lines. The effects are present in most segments of the labor market but tend to be greater in groups with weaker positions. The impact is also clearer in industries which have received more workers from the new member states, and for which across-the-border work is likely to be more common. There is no robust evidence on an impact on employment or wages. At least part of the effects is likely due to channels other than the ones typically considered in the literature.

This thesis is about policy instruments for the regulation of international labour mobility. It focuses on the use of government-to-government agreements on the cross-border movement of nurses, negotiated between source and destination countries. This research is a qualitative case study of agreements signed in the early 2000s between the UK and Spain, South Africa, the Philippines and India. It aims to understand the role of these agreements in British policy as perceived by actors in the destination country. It addresses three questions: 1) What types of agreements did the British government negotiate? 2) Why did the British government negotiate these agreements? and 3) What functions did these agreements perform? Employing the notion of ‘policy tools’ as an organising concept, this thesis’s analytical framework draws on political sociology and the conception of policy instruments as being composed and brought into existence by actors and their power relations in multilevel policy contexts. This study is based on documentary analysis and elite interviews with experts in international organisations, officials in the Department of Health (England), recruitment officers in the source countries, and professional nursing organisations and trade unions in the UK. This thesis argues that government-to-government agreements between the UK and supply countries emerged from a discourse on the ethical recruitment of health workers which was framed in the language of human rights. One of the roles of these agreements was to contain contradictory and conflicting interests between and within institutional actors involved in the international recruitment of nurses on both sides of the migration process. More broadly, the research addresses and advances the discussion of the policy instrumentation approach, and contributes to the understanding of the choice of policy tools and their performance in an ambivalent policy context.

The thesis examines how the European Commission incorporated and implemented migration policy as part of the European Union’s external relations, also known as the external dimension of migration. The focus of the thesis is on the period between the coming into force of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999, when migration largely came to fall under the Commission’s remit, and the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. The study compares how the Commission’s Directorates-General (DGs) involved in the external dimension of migration during this period—Justice, Liberty and Security, External Relations and Development—made sense of the changes introduced to their responsibilities. The thesis proposes that the concept of organisational culture, drawn from organisational sociology, can explain how actors interact with and collectively make sense of their organisational environment. The main argument of the thesis is that each of the DGs possesses an organisational culture based on its members’ shared readings of priorities and the function of their unit. The thesis examines these divergent organisational cultures to gauge how policies are internalised and translated into output. The analysis contributes to the external governance literature, which has theorised the external dimension of migration as a continuation of European integration processes without accounting for internal organisational dynamics. It also leads to reflections on organisational sociology theorising, and the implications of the findings on studies of organisational change and implementation. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first provides a background for how the Commission came to be involved in migration policy. The second provides a theoretical framework for the study, building on organisational sociology. The remaining chapters empirically analyse the three elements of organisational culture: DG members’ sources of organisational identity, their perceptions and prioritisations of the external dimension of migration, and their reading of the Commission’s implementation practices, focusing on relations with Morocco as a tool for illustrating the latter.

In Europe, legal parent-child family reunifications are regulated by policies specifying the eligibility criteria that migrant parents must fulfill – two of the general conditions is having a long-term residence permit and fulfilling standardized income requirements. The emergence of transnational families – border crossing family arrangements – is often blamed on the conditions set by immigration countries. On the other hand, qualitative studies in the West African context indicate that transnational family life can be a strategic choice, arguing that West African family practices, such as fostering, are compatible with transnational family life and that parent’s preferences for the child to be brought up in the country of origin is one driver behind separation. Taking the case of Ghanaian migrant parents in the UK and Netherlands, the aim of this study is to explore what factors are associated with if and where parent-child reunification takes place – in the immigration country or the country of origin, with a focus on the interplay between family reunification policies, migrant family practices/norms and gender. The research question is: Do the policies that frame family reunification in the UK and Netherlands determine whether and where parent-child reunification takes place? And, how is the outcome affected by Ghanaian family practices/norms and gender? The analysis is made using binomial logistic regression on a selection of 167 current and return migrant parents from the MAFE-Ghana data, collected in 2009. The results indicate that having a high occupational status has a positive effect on reunification in any location, while a long-term legal status only increases the likelihood of reunification in the immigration country. Indicators for family status show mixed results; while having a partner in the UK or Netherlands has a gendered positive effect on the likelihood of reunification in Europe, it also tends to prolong parent-child separation for migrants who do not reunify in Europe. Against expectations, the availability of alternative caregivers in Ghana does not impact the outcome in any direction and no significant difference is found between the likelihood of reunification in the UK or Netherlands. The findings do not support the notion that transnational family life is a strategy for Ghanaian migrant parents; the conclusion is that policies strongly influence whether and where transnational parent-child separation ends.

The central hypothesis of this dissertation is based on the finding that, like in the countries of Western Europe under the influence of various circumstances, in the Czech Republic, too, there is a shift from the originally proclaimed multicultural concept of integration towards individual civic integration. The objective of the treatise is not only to verify the anticipated trend in the development of the migration policy, but also to seek causes of its modification. The formulation of a hypothesis that would apply equally to the Czech Republic and Slovakia was more complicated. While the formation of migration policies in the area of integration of immigrants into an autochthonous society enjoys a longer tradition in the Czech Republic -- also due to the higher number of immigrants -- in Slovakia it is in its beginnings so far. Even some of the recently adopted outcomes of public policy proclaimed the objective to implement the multicultural dimension vis-a-vis foreigners. The actual policies, however, bore witness to a completely different approach. The core hypothesis of this treatise has thus been complemented by a subhypothesis relating to the conditions of Slovakia: the multicultural dimension of the approach to immigrants in the past only existed at a theoretical level, and only partially. Given the recent adoption of the concept of integration policy, which is not based on the principles of multiculturalism, references to it represent a residual manifestation of the preceding non-systematic treatment of migration and integration in the outcomes of public policy. In real life, several steps hindering the application of this model's principles have been undertaken. Content analysis and diachronic comparative method applied on the documents under review show that there is a change occurring in the Czech Republic in the area of immigration policies. Whereas prior to the financial crisis the government would willingly employ foreigners, the impact of the crisis has led it to a restrictive immigration policy. Demonstrated was also a content shift in the approach to the integration of foreigners. As regards the formation of Slovak migration policies, the process of policy development proved to be more complicated to follow. Public policies in the area of migration and integration of foreigners since 2009 and the stance of the governmental bodies towards them have been largely indifferent. The Czech Republic clearly displays, over the course of the past several years, a shift from the communitarian/multicultural model toward the individual civic integration. The command of the language is considered to be the main vehicle of integration. The Slovak Republic declared multiculturalism only as a remnant of the non-systematic treatment of integration policies, with virtually nothing changing in the real life of immigrants. There had been practically no integration policy in Slovakia up to 2009. Similarly to the outcomes of public policies, the shift in the perspectives on migration away from multiculturalism has occurred in the political programs of Czech political parties as well. The issue of migration in Slovakia has so far not affected election campaigning. Slovak political parties do not have a clear idea of the possibilities of related to the integration of immigrants.

The diploma thesis deals with the theme of regulation of immigration in the European Union and related process of common European migration policy establishment. General concept of Europeanization in connection with immigration is introduced in the first chapter that is also focused on the main barriers of the Europeanization process in the immigration field. The second chapter is concentrated on the significant tendencies in the European migration cooperation development since 1945, especially on the period of the Global approach to migration. Current migration trends in Europe on the basis of demographic and population indicators and the main impacts of present economic crisis on immigration to Europe are characterized in the last chapter. Conclusion of the diploma thesis represents evaluation of the previous European migration activities and outline of possibilities for future development.

This thesis provides an overview of the development of international migration in the Czech Republic to determine the aspects affecting migration. The Czech Republic has become a destination country for many immigrants, not only from the European Union, but also from countries outside the European union. The main goal of this paper is to outline the development of migration movements in the Czech republic before 1989 and in the context of legislative and methodological changes that occurred after 1989. The paper also describes the changes in international migration movements between 2002 -- 2012 in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. These countries belong to the alliance called the Visegrad four. In recent years, they became a new place of migration flows, particularly from countries with less developed economies. The aim is to determine the evolution of selected indicators of migration to identify connections between the selected countries given to their common historical and legal aspects.

For the last two decades Sweden has been one of the most important receiving countries for asylum seekers, hence regarding itself as a “humanitarian superpower”. Historically Sweden has had one of Europe’s most extensive migration policies and made its latest mark by 2015 by allowing the highest number of asylum seekers ever to the country. The media coverage and the public debate on the war refugee migration to Sweden has been comprehensive and thereby put the topic of migration in the centre of parliamentary discussions. The aim of this study was to examine if and how migration has been a subject of securitization in the parliamentary debates. The study was conducted by using a qualitative text analysis of parliament protocols from 2013–2015. The results show that during the period of study a number of parties have made securitising statements regarding migration, but that the subject of migration was securitized first in 2015 when the securitising problem formulation was adopted by a majority in the parliament. I have also concluded that there has been a slight change in the way in which migration is securitized. In 2013–2014 the majority of the parliament parties used the diffuse securitising technique when debating migration, while in 2015 there was a shift towards the exceptionalist securitising technique.

"The Aliens Control Act (ACA) was racially biased towards immigrants who were easy to assimilate into the white population. It thus did not accord with the principles of the new regime based on equality and reflected an exclusionist apartheid ideology. Not only was the act itself repugnant, but the practice of the enforcement bodies in arrest, detention and deportation procedures was maligned as well. There were allegations of violence, arbitrary arrest, harassment, exploitation, unfit detention facilities and lack of procedural fairness. This precipitated the drafting of the Green and White Papers on International Migration, the much contested Immigration Bill and the Immigration Act (IA) itself. The well researched Green Paper's recommendations about the shift in focus from control to management of migration were not taken cognisance of. The government, in consultation with US immigration specialists, focused on control to prevent an influx from the rest of Africa into South Africa's newly 'opened' borders. The only concession granted was the amnesties for long-time residents (usually mineworkers and refugees) from SADC countries, but this was not well responeded to. The South African government seemed to be intent on keeping the exclusionist mindset, with a shift from race to nationality. The IA has to be examined to see whether the contents of the legislation which inform the repatriation process meet constitutional and international law muster. This should be done with the background and criticisms of the ACA in mind. The actual practice of the enforcement agencies that effect the arrest, detention and deportation must be measured against South Africa's accepted human rights norms. A consideration of the past harsh and unconstitutional immigration control mechanisms must take place as well to track South Africa's progress towards a human rights based repatriation program." -- Introduction. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2004. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/dissertations.html / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / The study analyses the changing patterns of international migration within the Southern African region. Topics surrounding migration are rapidly gaining importance, especially in the context of regional integration. Past research has focused primarily on South African migration, neglecting or, rather, paying less attention to the migration within other countries in the Southern African region. This study includes all the migration trends across the countries in Southern Africa while discussing contemporary migration trends within Southern Africa.