What do trade agreements have to do with migration policy?

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) aim to facilitate trade between two or more countries by doing things such as cutting tariffs or facilitating investment, but new research from the University of Geneva shows that that more than 70% of all PTAs signed in the last decade also contain provisions on international migration.  The majority of these provisions are legally binding commitments that liberalize economic migration. However, states and economic blocs like the European Union also use PTAs for commitments to protect migrant rights and, especially for the EU, commitments in which the signing parties agree to fight irregular migration and cooperate on readmission.

A new dataset documenting the trade-migration nexus

These insights stem from the recently published MITA dataset that codes the complete migration policy content of PTAs signed worldwide between 1960 and 2020, which includes 236 different variables for a total of 797 agreements. The data documents the use of trade agreements for migration governance and yields a number of unexpected findings. Contrary to the widely held assumption that states’ resist tying their hands to legally binding international commitments on migration, more than 300 PTAs contain provisions facilitating the mobility of economic migrants. Provisions abolishing immigration barriers such as economic needs tests or numerical quotas or clauses that facilitate visa procedures and the recognition of qualifications have proliferated in particular since the 1990s after the adoption of similar measures in the 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services of the WTO (so-called GATS mode 4 liberalization) (see Figure 1).

A tool of selective liberalization

These provisions do not apply to economic migrants in general, but usually only apply to narrowly defined categories of people, mostly linked to trade in services. The most common categories are Intra-Corporate Transferees (ICTs), business visitors, contractual service suppliers (that is, the international equivalent to posted workers in the EU), and independent professionals. And most of these have to be highly skilled, although some PTAs also facilitate the migration of trainees or nurses. The most interesting caveat of this rapidly expanding venue for economic migration is that the vast majority of PTAs exclude access to the labour market.

How does this work? In fact, trade and migration practitioners avoid speaking of “migration” in the context of PTAs and prefer to use the term “mode 4 mobility”. The trick is that these persons formally retain their work contract in the country they come from. However, their mobility qualifies well as migration, as their allocated duration of stay can reach from a few months to five years or more in the case of ICT.

Read the full blog post here.