ABSTRACT
As I write this in the winter of 20161 the European Union is beset with crises: financial, monetary, growth, deflation, unemployment, Grexit, Brexit, Ukraine, to name some of the major ones. For the moment, though, the one topping the headlines is the so-called refugee crisis, including all that has followed in its wake of intergovernmental vitriol, border controls between EU members and collapsing Dublin and Schengen systems. But the current refugee crisis is just one amongst many in the big family of migration-related EU crises. Another impending crisis of course concerns the future of free movement for EU citizens, or ‘EU migration’, which is intimately, but far from exclusively, linked to the current Brexit crunch. To this we should add the fast-ageing EU’s ballooning ‘demographic deficit’, a crisis calling for millions upon millions of new labour migrants that seem out of reach; or as an Irish Times (2013) headline captured it: ‘Is Europe on the verge of demographic collapse?’ We could mention too the emigration crises that are plaguing many EU member states and which in some places have generated demographic collapses that are past the on-the-verge stage (e.g. Juska and Woolfson, 2015). In this chapter I want to deal with this, what we may call, big picture of EU migration crises. Too often EU migration crises and EU migration policy areas are treated separately, even as unrelated or distinct, both in the public debate and in scholarship. In the public debate we tend to deal with what politicians whine the loudest about at the moment, be it benefit tourism, Roma beggars, illegal immigration or portentous floods of asylum-seekers. In scholarship we have the general tendency of compartmentalized research, where some study asylum policy, others examine third-country labour migration, yet others delve into the legal details of EU citizens’ free movement; and rarely do they meet. The former tendency testifies to the sorry state of large parts of the news media. Whereas sports journalists readily help us spot a footballer pretending to be fouled, news reporting has a much harder time calling the bluff when a prime minister wants to moan us into believing that 2,000 refugees on the opposite side of Dover pose an existential threat to Britain. As for the latter tendency within research, although specialization and demarcation are often necessary and unavoidable, we could make use of more attempts at comprehensive and synthetic accounts that ask if there are dots to connect
between the various migration policy areas and the recurrent crises. In what follows I obviously cannot account for all of the abovementioned crisis and policy areas. Instead, I will limit myself to the big enough conundrum of how we may understand the EU’s dual and seemingly contradictory objectives of less migration, the mantra of the refugee crisis, and more migration, the mantra of the demographic crisis. Would it not seem natural to expect that the refugees be greeted as a first, albeit modest, step towards reducing the EU’s gigantic demographic deficit? As one report in the Financial Times (2016a) had it, commenting on the draconian efforts by some EU members to keep refuges out: ‘Poor demographics suggest they should welcome an influx of fresh workers. Finland is, for example, the most rapidly ageing country in the world behind Japan.’ Or may a joint analysis of these ‘less-and-more’ objectives, at least from the Brussels perspective, actually give at hand that the EU rather perceives of them as somehow logically harmonious? In my effort to suggest answers to these and other questions I will touch on the importance of historical perspectives on EU migration policy, if only to acknowledge that the current situation is contingent on migration policy choices made by the EU in the recent past, something that tends to go missing in the often highly presentist accounts on EU migration policy. In line with this volume’s thematic I will also engage with the concept of austerity. As a starting point, I take that in the world of politics, migration and migrants constitute austere categories, denoting a paucity of the social embeddedness that citizenship offers, or what a path to citizenship through permanent residence offers. I will begin by briefly commenting on the refugee crisis and the rather unambiguous EU response of scrambling to stem the tide, which will then spill over into the equally unambiguous, yet less well-known, EU response to the Union’s alleged demographic emergency of scrambling to hugely increase the intake of third-country labour migrants. From there I go on to attend to the question as to why Brussels and member states do not see refugees as the answer to the EU’s dire demography. I suggest that the answer to this question rests with an austere calculus, which, for both fiscal and racial reasons, effectively thwarts the type of expansive public investment and citizenship regime that would be required to, so to speak, allow the EU’s demographic deficit to be perceived as congruent with the global refugee surplus. Here I will focus on Germany and Sweden, two countries that initially did take some steps in the direction of such congruity, but which since have recoiled. In the chapter’s final part I shall thus suggest some explanations for this sudden change.
