Circular Migration, or Labor Migration Without the Migrants? Managing the

“Demographic Deficit” in a Neoliberal Europe

Peo Hansen

The increase and persistence of irregular migration in the EU result in large part

from a labour market demand. In several EU countries various businesses, sectors

and services such as tourism, agriculture, elderly care, cleaning and construction

could not operate as currently without the access to irregular migrants’ labour (see

e.g. Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2011). An important enabling factor for this

development is to be found in the liberalization of the EU economy that got under

way in the 1980s. Since then we have seen more deregulated and flexibilized

labour markets, weakened labour unions and increased wage competition

connected to a growing low-wage service sector and informal labour market (see

e.g. Schierup, Hansen & Castles, 2006).

At first sight, there is thus a glaring contradiction between the EU’s stated

objective of fighting ‘illegal migration’, on the one side, and its neoliberal economic

objectives, on the other. That is to say, the latter objective’s translation into more

flexible labour markets, which often are made to rely on a steady increase of cheap

and casual migrant labour, has acted to offset the former objective. In the early

1990s research started to attend to this condition and was able to demonstrate that

many EU governments that claimed to be fighting illegal immigration were in

actuality quite content with the fact that their economies were profiting from the

cheap labour performed by irregular migrants (Overbeek, 1995). In this sense,

what we are dealing with may not be so much of a contradiction after all. As

Stephen Castles (2004, pp. 223, 214) explains:

Policies that claim to exclude undocumented workers may often really

be about allowing them in through side doors and back doors, so that

they can be more readily exploited. […] This can mean that politicians

are content to provide anti-immigration rhetoric while actually

pursuing policies that lead to more immigration, because this meets

important economic or labour market objectives.

As was uncovered by The Guardian, in 2002 Spanish authorities rounded up African

migrants on the Canary Islands and flew them to the mainland where they were

simply dumped off in areas where the agribusiness needed labour (Lawrence,

2011). In most cases, of course, this procedure works in indirect ways, foremost

through a more or less deliberate eschewal of systematic controls of employers and

workplaces. In dodging the demand side this obviously checks the efficiency of ever

so extensive migration barriers erected for the purpose of tackling the supply side

of irregular migration.

Parallel to the EU debate on how to ramp up the fight against ‘illegal migration’,

the past decade has seen an almost equally energetic debate on how to bring about

a vast increase in ‘legal’ labour immigration to the ageing Union. Much discussion

has thus also focused on the sustainability of the EU’s securitized migration policy.

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Several liberal scholars and pundits, business lobbies and various other neoliberal

outlets have argued that the ever-increasing investment in migration prevention in

many ways runs counter to the EU’s enormous economic and demographic demand

for labour migrants. Instead of border guards and barbwire, they claim, more focus

should be put on making demand and supply mechanisms the chief instruments in

the EU’s migration management towards Africa and other poor parts of the world

(see e.g. Becker, 2011; Legrain, 2007). Such a conversion would also be conducive

to a realization of ‘circular migration’ on a large scale—that is, the policy concept of

having migrants circulate smoothly between jobs in countries and regions with the

greatest demand for the time being, a policy concept that the EU itself has been

instrumental in promoting in recent years (Venturini, 2008; see e.g. CEC, 2007c).

Just as there is a global market for capital, goods and services, the argument goes, it

is now high time to also install a global migration market, liberated from

protectionist borders and red tape. Some point to the EU itself and its longstanding

regime of free movement for labour as a model for such a new global order

(Legrain, 2009). Very rarely though, does this perspective attend to the fact that

this free movement regime—instituted during the heyday of the western European

welfare state—formally includes numerous social rights provisions for those who

migrate between the EU’s member states; this in order to prevent social dumping.

The issue concerning migrants’ social rights thus constitutes the blind spot of the

current debate. There is a strong emphasis on the new labour migrants’ decisive

importance for the EU’s future growth, competitiveness and demographic balance.

Conversely, however, there is practically no mention of what these indispensable

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rescuers can expect in return from the receiving societies, in the form of social

rights, family reunion and possibilities to obtain permanent residence. Rather than

accounting for labour migrants as the social creatures they are, the tendency today

is one of reducing them (even in the explicit) to human capital and production

factors pure and simple, set to optimize the labour markets on which they should

circulate. As the globally influential pundit Philippe Legrain (2009, p. 3) has it,

migration is just ‘a form of trade’, from which of course follows that labour

migrants make up a tradable commodity among others. But as Karl Polanyi

demonstrated in his modern classic The Great Transformation, the notion of such a

socially naked human being is a dangerous fiction, since every attempt at its

realization, every attempt to actually treat a human being as was she socially naked

and only dressed for the market, always risks having catastrophic consequences.

‘The commodity description of labor’, Polanyi (1944/2001, p. 76) explains, ’is

entirely fictitious’, since ‘[t]o allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the

fate of human beings […] would result in the demolition of society.’ This is so

because ‘the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used

indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual

who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity.’ When, under such a

regime, a person’s labour commodity is discarded or treated as a disposable, one-

use commodity, this would be tantamount to the elimination of this person’s entire

being (Polanyi, 1944/2001, p. 76, my italics).

In accordance with the particular liberal perspective just recapitulated, migrants’

social conditions also constitute the blind spot in EU policy. There is thus

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widespread agreement on the merits of circular migration and that a widened

scope for market mechanisms makes up the most effective means to improve the

EU’s demography and global competiveness. But in contrast to the liberal camp that

advocates more open borders, the EU remains firmly convinced that there is no

alternative but to continue the militarized reinforcement of its external borders.

Even so, the basic purpose is the same. Because in the logic advanced by the EU,

labour migration can only increase if it goes in tandem with an increase in border

security. This explains why it only comes natural for the EU to increase the budget

of Frontex—for the stated purpose of staving off migrants and refugees from North

Africa—while the Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström during the very

same week (in June 2011) tells Financial Times that ‘we need hundreds of

thousands, millions in the long term’, of labour migrants (quoted in Barber, 2011).

The overarching question that this article seeks to answer is how we should

understand and explain this seeming contradiction. In other words, I shall try to

work out how the EU imagines itself capable of creating a productive or win-win

dynamic between the security oriented ‘fight against illegal immigration’, on the

one side, and the growth and competitiveness oriented aspiration for a large-scale

increase in labour migration, on the other. In demonstrating how this enterprise

impacts on current EU migration policy in broad terms I also go on to show its

more particular designs vis-à-vis African countries.

Labour Migration as a Matter of the EU’s ‘Economic Survival’

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The EU’s declared demographic and economic need for new labour migrants is not

just any type of need. According to most estimates put forward by the EU, the UN

and other institutions and organizations the figures range in the tens of millions for

the coming three to four decades. Economic growth and migration growth have

thus become two sides of the same coin in the EU’s economic and political

ambitions. This was made clear already in the Lisbon Strategy (2000-2010) and

now constitutes one of the cornerstones of Europe 2020, the EU’s new ten year

plan for growth (CEC, 2011, p. 4). From the perspective of the Commission, a large-

scale increase in labour migration has become so urgent that the Home Affairs

Commissioner Malmström now repeatedly states that it has become necessary ‘in

order to secure our economic survival’ (Malmström, 2010).

Whether the current crisis and mass unemployment will lead to a reappraisal of

the Commission’s position remains to be seen when I write this (in December

2011). Certain changes in migration patterns have already taken place: Ireland has

become a country of emigration again; Greece and Spain are expected to follow

suit; Portugal has in the last few years, as a result of the crisis, seen tens of

thousands of its citizens emigrate to oil-booming Angola alone; and several EU

countries have taken steps to curtail regular labour migration and some have also

sought to make unemployed migrants on temporary permits leave their countries

(see Koser, 2010). In the summer of 2011 the Spanish government decided to

reintroduce the ban on migration from Romania on account of Spain’s severe

unemployment problem. Soon after the Netherlands indicated that it entertained a

similar move. At the same moment the Commission rushed to the defence of its

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policy; according to Malmström the crisis had altered nothing and the

Commission’s position on labour migration was thus to stay the course. Malmström

also noted that Spain, despite its mass unemployment, in no way made up an

exception in this regard, adding: ’Many businesses still say we can’t find people to

do jobs such as picking strawberries’ (quoted in Pop, 2011).

Since the onset of the crisis and the collapse of the housing market and

construction sector in Spain there has been a steady deterioration in the situation

for the country’s labour migrants. Many migrants previously employed in

construction have been forced to scramble for work in the most poorly paid

horticulture and agriculture industry. Since this industry has lowered its costs even

further it has also been even more prone to utilize irregular migrant workers. With

this it has become still more rare for agribusinesses to hire regular labour.

According to the UK charity Anti-Slavery International, the conditions for the

irregular migrants working in Spain’s agriculture have deteriorated to the point

that they in many places now can be likened to outright slavery. There is even a

shortage of food, which has forced the Red Cross to provide food for thousands of

Spain’s irregular migrant workers (Lawrence, 2011).

It is certainly not this situation and these workers that the Commission has in

mind when it emphasizes Spain’s continued need for labour immigration. Brussels

only has regularly employed migrants in view. That Spain wants to halt Romanian

labour migrants must thus partly be understood in this light, since they could

migrate regularly to Spain within the EU’s free movement framework and so lay

claim to a set of formal rights, even though many Romanians of course too have had

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little option but to toil in the informal economy. But given that the EU’s free

movement regime places certain requirements on the state, this should give us a

clue as to why the financially hard-pressed Spanish government has an interest in

curbing this type of migration. This is borne out too by the fact that Madrid has

tried to encourage the return of temporary migrant workers from non-EU

countries with which Spain has bilateral agreements that include social security

provisions for the migrants while working in Spain (Koser, 2010).

This, though, should not be taken to infer that Spain wants to stop all migration,

far from it. With the crisis inducing companies to cut costs the demand for cheap

labour in certain sectors might actually have increased as a result of the crisis. So

far, Spain has not curbed employers’ associations recruitment of temporary

migrant labour to the agricultural sector. This migration is ‘regular’, at least in the

first stage. But once the migrants are in Spain, it is quite common for the employers

to subject them to the most appalling treatment, and despite the fact that

authorities are quite aware of this they rarely intervene (Baqué, 2011).

But for the time being the crisis has not altered the EU’s stance and the policy to

significantly increase labour migration thus holds firm. An early confirmation of

this position toward the crisis could be seen when the European Parliament, at the

height of the financial turbulence in the fall of 2008, overwhelmingly approved the

European Commission’s so-called blue card proposal, which aims to facilitate high-

skilled labour migration to the EU. According to the then EU Home Affairs

Commissioner Jacques Barrot, the Parliament’s approval demonstrated ‘that

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Europeans are open to immigration flows and that we are welcoming to nationals

from outside Europe’ (quoted in Goldirova, 2008).

Barrot sought to convey an image of a cosmopolitan EU opening up to the world.

This attempted re-branding of the EU has gained attention within both media

commentary and research, as seen in statements such as the following: ‘The

Commission’s Blue Card initiative demonstrates that the EU is no longer a

“fortress”; it is opening itself up to talent, and creating the right conditions for

migrants to obtain a legal job in Europe.’ (Kyrieri, 2007: 24) Such hopes aside,

however, the EU’s real objectives are firmly rooted in economic imperatives,

something that the Commission rarely tries to conceal. Moreover, when the

Commission launched its blue card bid in 2007 it was adamant in putting all

illusions about greater openness, as in laxer migration controls, firmly to rest. The

blue card, the Commission stated, was by no means intended to be ‘a blank cheque’

to all highly qualified third country workers (quoted in Goldirova, 2007a). As such,

the then Home Affairs Commissioner Frattini underlined, ‘the blue card is not a

permanent card like the American green card’ (quoted in Goldirova, 2007b); it

‘does not create a right of admission’ (CEC, 2007a, p. 2). Instead, it is intended to be

‘demand driven’ invariably requiring that migrants show proof of a ‘job contract’

before a blue card is issued (CEC, 2007b, p. 9). By this means, member states

‘maintain control on which type—and how many—highly qualified workers will

enter their labour markets’ (CEC, 2007a, p. 2; see also CEC, 2007b, p. 7).

Predictably, the Commission’s proposal also steered clear of any mention of

permanent residence for the would-be blue card holders.

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From ‘Zero Migration’ to Multi-Million Migration?

This notwithstanding, the Commission’s self-satisfied proclamations about a

Europe ‘open to immigration’ should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Rather,

they should be situated and examined in the historical context of the EU’s previous

stance on labour migration.

From the early 1970s to the late 1990s the EU held firm to an official line of

policy that unequivocally advised against any labour migration to the EU from non-

OECD countries. Deemed the only ‘realistic’ option at the time, the policy acquired a

status almost like that of a sacred promise to EU citizens. As such, it made up one of

the primary rhetorical tools in Brussels’ endeavour to win popular support and

legitimacy for the neoliberal transformation that the EU went through during the

1980s and 90s. The Commission thus rarely missed an opportunity to ensure that

liberalization within the framework of the Single Market by no means would be

allowed to lead to an increase in immigration. The EU thus took pains to flaunt

liberalization and the move to eliminate internal borders as walking hand in hand

with powerful measures to strengthen external border controls and step up the

fight against illegal immigration, fraudulent asylum-seeking and international

crime and terrorism (see e.g. Geddes, 2003; Hansen & Hager, 2010). Brussels and

EU governments’ guarantees to reinforce the external borders to immigrants and

other alleged security threats, as migration now increasingly was being framed,

were promoted as synonymous with EU citizens’ legitimate entitlement to security

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in times of great change. As stated in a Commission booklet specifically addressing

the EU citizens, ‘The problems of immigration and asylum, drug trafficking and

other aspects of international crime [sic] are matters of increasing concern to the

citizens of Europe.’ (CEC, 1995, p. 62)

This provided, it is first and foremost in relation to what Brussels today refers to

as the era of ‘zero immigration’, meaning the early 1970s to late 1990s, that we

should assess the confident statements about a Europe that welcomes migrant

workers from around the world. Indeed, since the turn of the millennium the

Commission’s calls for a clean break with zero immigration policies have increased

exponentially. All of a sudden, Brussels would start issuing statements such as ‘The

Commission considers that the zero immigration mentioned in past Community

discussion of immigration was never realistic and never really justified.’ (CEC,

1999, p. 2) Furthermore, ‘it is clear from an analysis of the economic and

demographic context of the Union and of the countries of origin, that there is a

growing recognition that the “zero” immigration policies of the past 30 years are no

longer appropriate.’ (CEC, 2000a, p. 3) However, Brussels’ turnaround on labour

immigration has not given rise to any public self-examination. Instead, the

Commission has been trying to make it appear as if it had never itself really

sanctioned the past policy of zero immigration, when in fact it was one of the

policy’s staunchest advocates.

Even more important is that the Commission also dodges the issue concerning

the real meaning of the so-called zero immigration policy. Because as concerns the

EU area, the 1980s and 1990s were certainly not characterized by zero labour

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immigration. On the contrary, several million new labour migrants from around the

world arrived during these decades. Most of these, however, were not legal or

regular labour migrants. They were irregular, undocumented, or ‘illegal’, the latter

being the EU’s established designation.

As already mentioned, much research has demonstrated that the increased

demand for this type of cheap labour must be understood as contingent on the

deregulation and increasing flexibility of the EU economies and labour markets that

followed in the wake of the neoliberal transformation during the 1980s and 1990s.

Weakened labour unions and labour laws, pressure for low-skilled production and

low-wage and temporary employment, in conjunction with a fast growing service

sector and informal labour market of outsourced, subcontracted and sweated

labour have all encouraged the EU’s growing demand for irregular labour migrants.

That is, the type of labour often most suited for such economic and labour market

conditions (Schierup, Hansen & Castles 2006; see also contributions in Berggren et

al. (eds.), 2007).

In the official rhetoric, however, Brussels and EU governments refrain from

acknowledging that they, in fact, have promoted an economy and labour market

dynamic that feed on the work conducted by irregular migrants. So far, it is only the

EU’s great demand for ‘legal’ labour migrants that is being openly acknowledged.

Instead of going public with what they know, the EU’s political establishment

persists in broadcasting its hostile attitude towards the ‘illegal immigrants’ while

simultaneously advancing policies that are conducive to ‘illegal immigration’. The

term illegal immigrants, consequently, constitutes one of the most flagrant

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misnomers of our time. It is precisely those millions of ‘illegals’ that constitute key

cogs in the EU’s so hotly coveted flexible labour market. It is their contribution to

the labour pool that lowers production costs, which keeps consumer prices down

on construction, tourism, agriculture, child and elderly care, etc.

From a Broken Promise on Zero Labour Migration to a Renewed Promise on

‘Illegal’ Migration

Nonetheless, the new policy also contains a certain measure of candour. Thus,

when the Commission launched its new official approach to labour immigration it

was fairly obvious that the Commission recognized how it was breaking a promise

to the EU citizens. It was clear that the Commission felt it had been saddled with a

tough public relations challenge. Brussels thus appeared to be apprehensive that

EU citizens would respond negatively to the official abrogation of ‘zero

immigration’, possibly interpreting it as portending less restriction and an

uncontrolled inflow of immigrants. After all, the EU had gone from an official policy

firmly resolved to uphold ‘zero’ labour immigration from non-OECD countries to a

policy forecasting the entry of millions of new migrants almost over night. In order

to obviate a possible public disapproval of this abrupt shift, the Commission soon

came up with a series of public relations measures to be adopted by elite actors. ‘A

shift to a proactive immigration policy’, the Commission asserted, will ‘require

strong political leadership to help shape public opinion.’ (CEC, 2000a, p. 22) In its

detailed opinion on the Commission’s new approach to migration, the EU’s

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consultative body, the European Economic and Social Committee (2001, p. 111),

voiced similar concerns: ‘It will not be easy to persuade public opinion to take a

favourable view of the more open immigration policy now being proposed, but far-

reaching work to this end is now urgently required.’

So, in the face of the broken promise on zero immigration, what has been the EU’s

main tactic for saving face? The answer is simple: by making a new pledge to EU

citizens to implement even harsher measures against ‘illegal’ migration. As part of

this new pledge, the Commission (2002, p. 8) has also pointed to the merits of ‘the

forced return of illegal residents’, arguing that this can ‘help to ensure public

acceptance for more openness towards new legal immigrants against the

background of more open admission policies particularly for labour migrants.’

Instead of being a catalyst for a gradual reversal of the EU’s securitized migration

control policy, as many had predicted, the new policy of working to increase labour

migration has created a development in the exact opposite direction. As the

Commission (2011, p. 7) puts it, the EU must ‘ensure that the need for enhanced

mobility does not undermine the security of the Union’s external borders;’ and

therefore ‘[t]he control of the EU’s external border must be continuously improved

to respond to new migration and security challenges.’ ‘Citizens’, moreover, ‘need to

feel reassured that external border controls are working properly’, and authorities

thus need to demonstrate that ‘[p]reventing irregular migration and maintaining

public security are compatible with the objective of increased mobility’ (CEC 2011,

pp. 7, 11).

Between 1993 and 2003, according to the International Centre for Migration

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Policy Development (2004) in Vienna, more than 10,000 migrants and refugees

died in and around the Mediterranean while trying to reach the EU, many of them

in search of work. Since then the death toll has risen; only during the first seven

months of 2011 almost 2000 deaths were reported in the Mediterranean (Migrants

at sea, 2011). There is widespread agreement that this catastrophe has everything

to do with the steady expansion of the EU’s militarized migration control in the

Mediterranean, which forces migrants and refugees to opt for ever-more perilous

waterways.

What we are witnessing, to put it incisively, is a development where the EU’s

endeavour to increase labour immigration coincides with migrants dying in their

endeavour to meet this demand. As I noted initially, this has struck many as

appallingly irrational, bound to yield to a more expedient regime that would

regulate labour migration more in accordance with, for instance, balanced

mechanisms of demand and supply. For why roll out more barbwire carpet for

those who are said to be so desperately needed?

Surely, this seems appallingly irrational and contradictory. I should add too that

both Brussels and individual EU governments acknowledge that the reduction of

North-South inequalities constitutes a key instrument in responding to so-called

forced migration from Africa and elsewhere. As numerous scholars and NGOs have

shown, however, the EU lacks both the political will and the viable economic

instruments to assume such a far-reaching project, a project that, needless to say,

hardly could be initiated short of a sweeping transformation of the current

political-economic world order. With this option effectively precluded, the EU

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proceeds by embracing a non-obliging rhetoric about global inequality reduction

while simultaneously committing to establishing a regime for migration

management intent on making militarized migration control one of the primary

guarantors for the supply of the EU’s demand for migrant labour. In other words, it

is more barbwire, not less, that is seen as the rational means to increase labour

migration to the EU.

A Case in Point: EU Migration Management vis-à-vis Africa

The EU’s current relation to Africa illustrates this rationality to the full. From 2005

and onwards numerous EU-African declarations, partnerships and other

cooperative frameworks (e.g. the European Neighbourhood Policy) have been

created in order to establish a mutually beneficial ‘management’ of African

migration. The terms ‘migration management’ and ‘partnership’ are key here. They

have been adopted for the explicit purpose of clarifying that the EU’s intention no

longer is focused only on one-sided ‘control’ and ‘prevention’. On the contrary,

circular migration from Africa has in recent years emerged as an important means

to cover the EU’s future labour demand. In this equation, the management of

migration is also intended to be designed so as to enhance African development

through such measures as (non-obligatory) codes of conduct to prevent ‘brain

drain’; measures to facilitate remittances and return migration of highly skilled

migrants; to encourage the role of diasporas and migrant communities in the

development of Africa; and to promote democratic governance and human rights

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(see e.g. The Africa-EU Strategic Partnership, 2007; CEC, 2009, pp. 27–8; Joint

Africa-EU Task Force, 2010, pp. 41–3).

Such and other objectives took shape in the wake of the Ministerial Euro-African

Conference on Migration and Development that was held in Rabat in the summer of

2006. The conference, which produced the Rabat Declaration, was brought about

mainly in response to the increased entry of African migrants to the EU in 2005 and

2006. Here both the Spanish government and the Commission contended that the

long-term solution could not rest with security measures alone, but that it also

required measures reducing the disparities between the North and the South. But

as was indicated above, it was the security approach to migration that got the best

of it also in Rabat (Noll, 2006, p. 1). As Malta’s foreign minister noted with

satisfaction, referring to the agreement reached in Rabat: ‘Fighting international

criminal organisations, repatriation of illegal immigrants and stopping the flow of

illegal migration are indeed very important factors in addressing illegal

immigration holistically’ (quoted in Balzan, 2006).

Notwithstanding the optimism created by the Rabat conference and the swiftly

launched security measures to stave off the ‘illegals’, the arrival of African migrants

in the Canaries would soon break new records, causing a heated atmosphere within

the EU leadership. One point of contention was Spain’s decision in 2005 to

regularize and thus grant permanent residence to most but not all of its roughly

one million undocumented migrants. Many EU governments claimed that this had

simply sent the wrong signals. ‘It’s no solution’, the Austrian Home Secretary

declared, ‘to legalize people, as was done by Spain, because it gives some kind of

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pull factor to the people in Africa, as we unfortunately saw in the last months.’

(quoted in Mahony, 2006) The Commission also spoke unfavourably about the

Spanish regularization; and in the summer of 2008 it went on to announce its

formal disapproval of ‘mass regularizations’ as such, arguing that it is

counterproductive to the ‘fight against illegal immigration’ (CEC, 2008).

Since the Rabat conference there has been a series of high-level EU-African

meetings and agreements focusing on migration. But despite all the rhetoric of

‘partnership of equals’, ‘win-win’ dynamics and African development, the

asymmetric power relations between the EU and Africa shine through with utter

clarity when it comes to the more concrete objectives and forms for partnership

cooperation (see e.g. Betts 2008, pp. 13–14). Going through the scores of policy

documents produced by recent EU-African agreements, one is struck by the very

weak agency that is assigned to Africa, excluding, of course, its agency as a source

of demographic pressure. To be sure, from the exclusive perspective of African

leaderships, EU cooperation could often be characterized in win-win terms. And

although many of the EU’s satellite dictatorships on the other side of the

Mediterranean now have fallen, the interests on the part of the EU remain the

same, at least for the time being (see CEC, 2011), something that is underscored by

the EU’s and Catherine Ashton’s recent praise for Morocco’s king Mohammed VI

and his ‘clear commitment to democracy and respect for human rights’ (quoted in

Rettman, 2011).

But as noted, in the area of demographics the EU does ascribe some potential

agency to its African partner. According to the EU, Africa, not the least its northern

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parts, does have a demographic surplus that has to be checked; otherwise the

migration situation would get out of hand and so African leaders have to be

persuaded to control ‘illegal’ migration to the EU. Gaddafi, for instance, knew all too

well how to exploit this European angst, and with oil and gas at his disposal he was

certainly not without success. During one of his official visits to Italy, in August

2010, Gaddafi demanded five billion euros annually in order to prevent Europe

from ‘turning black’:

Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn

into Africa. We need support from the European Union to stop this army

trying to get across from Libya, which is their entry point. At the moment

there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe and we

don’t know what will happen. What will be the reaction of the white Christian

Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans? We don’t know if

Europe will remain an advanced and cohesive continent or if it will be

destroyed by this barbarian invasion. We have to imagine that this could

happen but before it does we need to work together. (quoted in Pisa, 2010)

Two months later the EU and Libya signed a new agreement on deepened

migration cooperation.

Fear of the African masses’ coming invasion—the African demographic time

bomb’s imminent explosion—is, as everybody knows, a recurrent theme in both

today’s and yesterday’s European debate. On the one hand, then, the EU needs to

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control a perceived massive immigration pressure from Africa; or as Nicolas

Sarkozy (2007, pp. 195–6) has stressed:

At our doorstep, 900 million African represent the youth of the world. Four

hundred fifty million of them are under seventeen years old. Their poverty

and lack of a future are their problem today. Tomorrow these problems will

be ours. […] No European country will be able to stand up to this challenge if

Africans continue to believe that their economic salvation lies in Europe. […]

We need to speak frankly with Africans about immigration.

On the other hand, the demographic logic is also used to argue in favour of

migration, since the EU allegedly suffers from a demographic deficit so perilous

that its entire ‘economic survival’, as its Home Affairs Commissioner has it, now

depends on a massive inflow of labour migrants. According to the European

Commission (2006b, p. 2), the EU therefore needs to ‘manage’ migration and make

sure to admit African migrants:

Migration from Africa has substantially increased in recent months. This

development is unlikely to stop in the foreseeable future and migratory

pressures may grow. At the same time, the EU will need migrants to ensure

the sustainability of its labour markets given its demographic development.

The EU needs to compete with other world regions and it needs migrants

with the appropriate skills to accomplish that.

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The EU wants to create a balance between the African migration pressure and the

European migration need—or to put it in the appropriate market terms: the EU

wants to achieve equilibrium between demand and supply of labour migrants. But

even if Brussels clearly advocates a greater scope for market mechanisms to

determine the allocation of labour migrants, it does by no means believe in a self-

regulating migration market. Instead, what the EU seems out to accomplish is to rig

the migration market to its own advantage. And for this to be feasible, external

borders have to be reinforced and migration policy cooperation with sending

countries has to be strengthened.

This comes to the fore in the Tripoli Declaration (2006), or the Joint Africa-EU

Declaration on Migration and Development, and the EU’s Global Approach to

Migration (CEC, 2006b). To be sure, both of these policy schemes do include clauses

emphasizing all sorts of development benefits to be reaped by African countries.

Yet, the overarching and most persistent policy prescriptions revolve around the

following: that Africa has a ‘duty to fully cooperate’ with the EU in preventing illegal

immigration, in developing return instruments and reinforcing border controls;

and that circular, temporary and seasonal migration should be facilitated (Tripoli

Declaration, 2006; see also CEC, 2006b). Furthermore, ‘policies to increase the

economic benefits for the EU from migration’ should be enacted to ‘facilitate the

admission of certain categories of immigrants on a needs-based approach (e.g.

highly skilled and seasonal workers)’ (CEC, 2006b, pp. 7, 8; see also CEC, 2011).

21

By these means, the EU is to guard itself against the import of unemployment and

poverty, as well as against various perceived security threats and the socio-

economic burden of processing asylum seekers. Given that labour demand in many

sectors may fluctuate quite rapidly, the EU also wants to guard itself against a

situation where newly arrived labour migrants all of a sudden are out of work, with

all that this involves in terms of social and economic costs. As a result of the current

economic crisis and the rising unemployment in the EU, this logic is already kicking

in, as noted above. It is by recommending circular migration, the issuing of

temporary work permits, as well as preparing for an active return policy if jobs

should dry up, that Brussels wants to obtain instruments to avert such a situation

from occurring. As the Commission (2011, p. 12) puts it: ’Enabling the people with

the right skills to be in the right place at the right time, is key to the success of

business, research and innovation in Europe.’

In their thorough assessment and analysis of the EU’s African partnership policy

on labour migration, Carrera and Hernández i Sagrera (2009, p. 36) demonstrate

that the type of labour migration ‘envisaged by the partnerships is guided by a logic

that views mobility as circular, temporary and subject to selection’. While basing

their analysis on a systematic survey of EU documents, Carrera & Hernández i

Sagrera also spice their account with a leaked secret document that France and

Germany jointly presented to the G6 migration ministers meeting held in the UK in

2006. The document, entitled ‘New European Migration Policy’, included, among

other things, the following position:

22

We do not want uncontrolled immigration into our labour markets and our

social security systems. In order to promote circular migration, quotas should

be set for the migration of labour into certain occupations…in order for the

concept of circular migration to succeed, it is important that migrants return

to their countries of origin after their stay in an EU member state. …Finally,

we also have to make sure that the countries of origin unconditionally comply

with their obligation to readmit those migrants who do not want to return

voluntarily. (quoted in Carrera & Hernández i Sagrera, 2009, p. 11)

In the Commission’s (2007c, p. 8) Communication on circular migration a year later

part of this message was repeated:

Circular migration is increasingly being recognized as a key form of migration

that, if well managed, can help match the international supply of and demand

for labour, thereby contributing to a more efficient allocation of available

resources and to economic growth. However, circular migration also poses

certain challenges: if not properly designed and managed, migration intended

to be circular can easily become permanent and, thus, defeat its objective.

The Commission’s proposal for a directive on seasonal labour, which was

presented in 2010, further underscores the basic tenets of the policy concept of

circular migration. The proposal builds on the alleged fact that the EU faces a

permanent and expanding ‘structural need for low-skilled and low-qualified

23

workers’ that cannot be satisfied by ‘EU national workers, primarily owing to the

fact that these workers consider seasonal work unattractive.’ (CEC, 2010, pp. 2–3)

As such, the directive intends to put the idea of circular migration into practice,

particularly vis-à-vis African countries. Here the Commission emphasizes, firstly,

that the directive proposal ‘provides for incentives and safeguards to prevent a

temporary stay from becoming permanent’; and, secondly, that ‘Member States

shall require that the seasonal worker will have sufficient resources during his/her

stay to maintain him/herself without having recourse to the social assistance

system of the Member State concerned.’ (CEC, 2010, pp. 2, 19).

Taken together, the EU’s migration policy towards Africa is emblematic of how

Brussels believes itself capable of generating a win-win dynamic between a growth

and competitiveness oriented labour migration policy with minimum social costs,

on the one side, and, on the other, a security oriented migration control policy,

keeping out unwanted migrants and preventing circular and temporary labour

migrants from ‘becoming permanent’. Since this has become the dominant line of

policy it provides more than one clue as to why the migration crisis in the

Mediterranean region has been allowed to continue unabated.

Conclusion

As I stressed initially, the development and tendencies that have been addressed

here must be analysed in direct relation to the diminishing scope of both social

rights and human rights in the EU. Substantial rights are considered costly and fit

24

badly with the neoliberal doctrine that has been the EU’s guiding norm for more

than twenty years. Governments in the EU have thus become much more hesitant

to commit themselves to social rights provisions for new labour migrants. This

partly explains why governments do their utmost to avoid the granting of

permanent residence to new labour migrants. As the Swedish Minister for

Migration clarified at the Euro-African Ministerial Conference on Migration and

Development in Paris in 2008: ‘In this context, we must recognize that the old

paradigm of migration for permanent settlement is increasingly giving way to

temporary and circular migration.’ (Billström, 2008) Despite the continued

hollowing out of national citizenship rights in the EU, permanent residence—

whether obtained through employment, refugee protection, for family reasons, etc.

—still provides migrants and refugees with a set of basic social, civil and political

rights. As Castles and Davidson (2000, pp. 94–5) underscore, ‘[t]he pivotal right

[for migrants] is clearly that of permanent residence, for once a person is entitled

to remain in a country, he or she cannot be completely ignored.’

When the European Commission now undertakes to establish a common EU

framework for labour migration it is easy to spot the compatibility between the

member state reluctance towards migrants’ permanent residence and social

incorporation, on the one side, and the concepts and arrangements around which

the Commission suggests an EU framework be developed, on the other. These

concepts and arrangements revolve around circular migration, temporary

migration, seasonal migration and return migration. What characterizes such

arrangements, which all member states have individually adopted to a greater or

25

lesser extent, is that they entail few social commitments on the part of the host

state and thus leave little room for substantial rights for the migrants.

To migrate to the EU with one’s much sought-after labour has thus ceased to be

synonymous with the simultaneous opportunity to also embark on a migration into

a regime of social rights. Here we are approaching something crucial. Because what

we can begin to discern is that the precarious and rightless position that has made

‘illegal’ labour migrants so popular on the EU labour market in some important

respects now forms the model for the EU’s circular labour migration regime and its

projected management of the Union’s great demand for new ‘legal’ labour migrants

—at least as pertains to low-skilled migrants. As a consequence, the very same

people on whom the EU’s future economic growth and prosperity, indeed its very

‘economic survival,’ are said to depend are offered nothing in return. It seems as if

the EU wants the poor world’s labour, but not its people, at least not in the form of

social beings and prospective rights-bearing residents and citizens. This is also why

I think we might be better off conceptualizing ‘circular migration’ less in terms of

migration, as in people moving and settling in an EU country, and more in terms of

Karl Polanyi’s notion of fictitious commodities; that is, in terms of the ‘shoving

about of labour’.

This needs to be understood against the background of a general European, but

also global, tendency in which migration policy more and more gets detached from

the fundamental issue concerning migrants’ social conditions: migration policy, in

other words, ceases to be embedded in policies of social incorporation. This, in

turn, is structurally interlinked with a simultaneous effort to capitalize even further

26

on the international division of labour by way of establishing this division more

firmly and tangibly in the heart of Europe itself. This course of action will not only

risk exacerbating ethno-racial discrimination in the EU, particularly on its already

ethnically segmented labour market; with a militarized migration control serving

as the new regime’s ultimate regulator, it will also risk worsening the migration

crisis at the EU’s external borders. If this demonstrates the importance of

addressing how current migration policy expresses and feeds on the political

economy and geopolitics of unequal global, regional and international relations, it

should also highlight the importance of restoring the matter of social rights on the

migration policy and research agenda.

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