European Immigration and Asylum Policy: Scope and Limits of Intergovernmental Europeanization

Introduction The European Union’s migration policy has evolved rapidly over the past two decades. This should actually have come as a surprise to many observers. Migration policy – understood here to encompass asylum, refugee and immigration policy – is generally seen as an essential matter of national sovereignty. This is reflected by the intergovernmental policy-making procedures of European migration policy. But whereas intergovernmentalism is usually associated with stagnating European integration, migration policy – as a common European policy – has evolved nonetheless.