SKILLS DECOUPLING IN EUROPEAN LABOUR MIGRATION POLICYTHE REASONS BEHIND THE RACE FOR TALENT. A COMPARATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS.

Since the beginning of 2000s, labour migration policy in EU countries has entered a new phase, generally referred to as ‘managed migration’. This features more liberal measures to attract sought after migrants, especially highly skilled workers, and more restrictive measures to deter less welcome migrants, notably low skilled workers. This dissertation explores the extent to which EU Member States have pursued this approach and the causes of its different declinations. The first chapter provides an overview of the managed migration approach in labour migration, and its economic and political rationale. The second chapter reviews the existing scholarship efforts to operationalise migration policy, and presents an original index on labour migration policy openness and decoupling by skill level, tested on 14 Member States. Different patterns of labour migration policy openness and decoupling emerge. The third chapter looks for the causal conditions under which Member States have implemented liberal labour migration policy for highly skilled migrants, for general/low skilled migrants, and have decoupled policies by skill level. It reviews the existing causal explanations, in particular an explanation based on the ‘Variety of Capitalism’ research agenda, and an explanation based on coalitions building by labour market actors. Then, by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), it tests a number of conditions, specifically on i. employers’ preferences on migrants’ number and skills, ii. employers’ capacity to affect the policy outcome, and iii. presence of anti-immigration political parties, to find the configurations under which the outcome is present or absent. The fourth chapter explores the causal mechanism associated with the identified conditions with specific case studies, selected on the basis of the QCA results, and notably Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom (typical cases) and Czech Republic (deviant case). The fifth chapter analyses Member States’ behaviour at the EU level, in negotiating and transposing the first EU directive on highly skilled migrants, the Blue Card Directive. It looks for the drivers of Member States behaviour and analyses the interplay between the national and EU dimension of migration policy, and specifically whether the same conditions that explain labour migration openness and decoupling at national level work at EU level.