Introduction

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European migration regime had emerged as the distinctive feature of European Integration. The European migration regime refers to the set of rules, formal or informal, at the European level governing international migration movements. ¹ Until this book was written, this regime was unique in the world through the free movement of people within the European Union, European citizenship, and the Schengen agreements in their internal and external dimensions. In comparison to migration regimes in other regions of the world, those instruments created a higher degree of openness for migrants within Europe, with the absence of border controls, a general right of residence, the access to employment, the right of establishment, the recognition of qualifications, the export of social security benefits, and certain electoral rights. Elsewhere, for instance in North America, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East, migration movements were more constrained. The rules of the migration regime in Europe were also unique insofar as they had created a deeper closure for migrants from outside Europe than was the case for any other region in the world. Europe’s external borders became the bloodiest globally, with 9,000 migrant deaths in 2015 and 2016 in the Mediterranean alone, accounting for over 60 percent of all deaths worldwide. ²