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Opening the floodgates?: European migration under restrictive and liberal border regimes 1950-2010

Opening the floodgates?: European migration under restrictive and liberal border regimes 1950-2010
Opening the floodgates?: European migration under restrictive and liberal border regimes 1950-2010
he effect of ‘open borders’ on migration has been the subject of substantial controversy. Political rhetoric and media images help stoke fear of uncontrolled mass migration that in turn fuels arguments in favour of tighter immigration regulations and border controls to ‘bring migration back under control’. In public debates, removing migration barriers is frequently portrayed as tantamount to ‘opening the floodgates’. However, immigration liberalisation may increase also circulation and return, rendering the effect on net migration theoretically ambiguous. Drawing on bilateral flow data over the 1959-2010 period contained in the DEMIG C2C database, this paper uses European Union (EU) enlargement as a case study to assess how liberalising border regimes affected migration flows. The analysis suggests that, with some exceptions, liberalisation boosted circulation rather than led to a structural increase in intra-EU migration. While removing migration barriers can lead to migration surges—particularly when economic gaps between origin and destination countries are large—these tend to be temporary, after which migration becomes more circular and tends to consolidate at lower levels. And while intra-regional circulation in the EU has grown, closing external EU borders has increasingly pushed non-EU migrants into permanent settlement along with significant family migration. These factors help to explain the structural rise in non-EU immigration, defying policy expectations that opening internal borders would decrease non-EU immigration.
international migration , European Union, free mobility, migration policies, border regimes
1
International Migration Institute Network
de Haas, Hein
0848aa4f-e767-4154-a2a9-4a37a3e481a3
Vezzoli, Simona
4488cb3e-60f7-448b-9b98-a591f087a3c5
Villares-Varela, Maria
5e63e77d-525f-4196-8be8-e8c7db56eae1
de Haas, Hein
0848aa4f-e767-4154-a2a9-4a37a3e481a3
Vezzoli, Simona
4488cb3e-60f7-448b-9b98-a591f087a3c5
Villares-Varela, Maria
5e63e77d-525f-4196-8be8-e8c7db56eae1

de Haas, Hein, Vezzoli, Simona and Villares-Varela, Maria (2019) Opening the floodgates?: European migration under restrictive and liberal border regimes 1950-2010 International Migration Institute Network 44pp.

Record type: Monograph (Working Paper)

Abstract

he effect of ‘open borders’ on migration has been the subject of substantial controversy. Political rhetoric and media images help stoke fear of uncontrolled mass migration that in turn fuels arguments in favour of tighter immigration regulations and border controls to ‘bring migration back under control’. In public debates, removing migration barriers is frequently portrayed as tantamount to ‘opening the floodgates’. However, immigration liberalisation may increase also circulation and return, rendering the effect on net migration theoretically ambiguous. Drawing on bilateral flow data over the 1959-2010 period contained in the DEMIG C2C database, this paper uses European Union (EU) enlargement as a case study to assess how liberalising border regimes affected migration flows. The analysis suggests that, with some exceptions, liberalisation boosted circulation rather than led to a structural increase in intra-EU migration. While removing migration barriers can lead to migration surges—particularly when economic gaps between origin and destination countries are large—these tend to be temporary, after which migration becomes more circular and tends to consolidate at lower levels. And while intra-regional circulation in the EU has grown, closing external EU borders has increasingly pushed non-EU migrants into permanent settlement along with significant family migration. These factors help to explain the structural rise in non-EU immigration, defying policy expectations that opening internal borders would decrease non-EU immigration.

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More information

Published date: 20 February 2019
Keywords: international migration , European Union, free mobility, migration policies, border regimes

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 428543
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/428543
PURE UUID: c32c3576-509f-4874-b0a0-efc6a023e46f
ORCID for Maria Villares-Varela: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-0137-7104

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 01 Mar 2019 17:30
Last modified: 23 Jul 2022 02:15

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Contributors

Author: Hein de Haas
Author: Simona Vezzoli

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