ABSTRACT

Introduction Migration policies are national strategies adopted by nation-states to guide the regulation of movement of persons across state borders or internally (e.g. immigration and emigration of migrant workers, return migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, etc.), as well as to regulate the status and rights of persons involved in migration. These policy strategies are not always legal documents and thus are different from laws. Instead, migration policies centralize the migration governance in one policy concept framework, define the objectives of desired migration dynamics, identify challenges to address, and by doing so also specify what national legislation, governmental programmes should be adopted, amended, or implemented to achieve the policy objectives. This paper is a comparative study of construction of migration policies in post-Soviet

states Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine located at the Eastern neighbourhood of the European Union (EU). These six nation-states became independent states when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Since then economic

hardships, unemployment, corruption and ethnic tensions have led to intense emigration flows from these countries and have kept migration concerns high on the public agenda. Migration policy has been one of the areas where international organizations have had a

major contribution in helping post-Soviet states draft and revise policy documents and legislation on migration management, establish implementation practices and institutional structures compatible with international standards, and thus, have facilitated the diffusion of world models of migration regulation into post-Soviet states. Often this policy diffusion has depended on asymmetrical power relations, such as with

the EU. In 2004, to foster closer cooperation with the EU in socio-economic and political issues, the EU launched the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which, besides several states at the South of the EU, presently also includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. To better tailor its activities in its neighbouring post-Soviet states, in 2009 the EU also launched the Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative. Among various objectives, these EU initiatives aim to establish ‘well managed legal migration’ to the EU (European Commission 2011, 11). Given the ageing population of Europe, the EU member-states are interested in young migrants. Thus, controlled migration and labour mobility from EU’s neighbourhood is one way to meet the needed EU labour-force demand and Europe 2020 challenges. On the other hand, by promoting policy reforms, the EU ‘[e]xpand[s] the area where EU rules are applied’ (European Commission 2010, 24). Yet, while the EU needs young labour-force, the post-Soviet states, given the same

concerns of an ageing population, are also interested in controlling emigration of young and skilled labour-force. Despite these competing interests and asymmetrical power relations, a general migration policy framework-conceptualized to benefit local populations-is being formulated. This paper examines the extent to which migration policy-making in the EU

neighbourhood is embedded in the world political frames of progress and development and is framed and promoted by the EU and the third countries within these global frames of progress, albeit over-writing the underlying geopolitical interests of the EU. My analyses show how the world political culture shapes policy-making and penetrates vertically into agendas of nation-states and supranational entities, at times even moulding and legitimating competing interests as ‘mutually beneficial’ for populations that adopt these policies.