Patterns in EU Labour Immigration Policy: National Initiatives and European Responses

The article proposes an analytical framework for the analysis of EU labour immigration policy. Internal immigration policy is produced by top-down liberalisation and bottom-up national re-regulation, coloured by national interest associations and political engineering of the migration topic. External immigration policy may be created through bottom-up osmosis of national or bilateral initiatives. The EU liberalisation of service provision and its national re-regulation and the recent Austrian and German temporary labour migration programmes are analysed as empirical cases. The implications for the impending EU eastward enlargement are considered.