EU Labour Migration Policy & Aversion to Breaking Rules in Migrant Populations
to: 13:00
Join us for the kick off session of the Migration Working Group at the EUI.
‘Supranational entrepreneurship in a contested policy field: The Case of the Intra-Corporate Transferee Directive’ by Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, PhD Researcher (University of Geneva/EUI)
Immigration policy is commonly assumed to be among the most controversial topics of EU policy-making, where Member States are eager to preserve national control and sovereignty. Yet we know surprisingly little about the conditions under which labour immigration policies are negotiated in the Post-Lisbon era. This paper uses process tracing to analyse the negotiations of the EU Intra-Corporate Transferee Directive adopted in 2014 to understand how the European Commission was able to achieve a high degree of supranationalisation and regulatory innovation in the contested policy field of labour immigration. The analysis daws from rivalling explanations of policy outcomes from intergovernmentalist and more neofunctionalist accounts and develops a causal pathway between the Commission’s ambitions and the outcome. I argue that the Commission successfully framed the policy as a matter of international obligations and business needs rather than immigration or social policy and was thereby able to maintain low salience and thus facilitate agreement. As a pathway case, the Intra-Corporate Transferee Directive allows us to sketch the conditions for successful policy entrepreneurship and for further harmonisation of immigration policies in the post-Lisbon era.
Discussants
Martin Ruhs | Professor and Deputy Director,MPC
Henriet Baas | PhD Researcher, EUI
‘Aversion to breaking rules and migration’ by Andrea Ichino, Professor of Economics (EUI)
Migration movements may increase the geographic dispersion of the Aversion to Breaking Rules (ABR) in a population, with possible long-term economic consequences. We show this result with Italian Census data, using indicators of false birth date registrations for families of South-North migrants and remainers in the two macro-regions. Within locality×biennium cells, deterrence and cheating benefits are similar in the two groups and thus cheating differences are informative about the underlying ABR, as our theory suggests. We also exploit the Fascist reforms of 1926 as shocks to deterrence, offering additional information on the underlying ABR of migrant and remainer families.
Discussants
Mauro Lanati | Research Fellow, MPC
Alberto Venturin | PhD Researcher, EUI
