Eu Migration Law

This book is a reflection of the social reality of mass migration in the EU from a legal perspective. It consists of a collection of essays reflecting on important current issues including the scope of the powers allocated to the EU, the cooperation of the EU with third countries and the emergence of international migration legal norms.

Migration is one of the greatest societal challenges of our time. It has many facets, from mass movements to escape war, climate, or human rights abuses to the search for economic opportunity and prosperity. Illicit industries facilitate border crossings at the expense of safety, and governments face problems of processing and integrating new arrivals. These challenges have had a profound impact in Europe, calling into question central values of solidarity and human rights. This book analyses the law and policy of migration in the European Union (EU) and its relationship to understandings of the EU as an international human rights actor. It examines the role crisis plays in determining the priorities of migration policy and the impact political exigencies have on the rights of migrants. This book problematises the EU Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice as a ‘home.’ Taking a governmentality approach to critique discourse, the idea of a holistic approach is deconstructed to explore notions of wellness, resilience, responsibilisation and externalisaton. The EU’s pursuit of a holistic approach to managing migration in crisis indicates problems with EU solidarity, and the tactics employed to bring the crisis under control reveal security concerns that provoke questions about the EU as an international human rights actor. Both this framework for analysis and the empirical findings make a significant contribution to how the migration crisis can be theorised using adaptable conceptual tools. Under this form of governance, migration becomes a phenomenon to be treated so that its symptoms are ameliorated. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the EU, migration, and human rights as well as policymakers, commentators, and activists in these areas.

Since 1999, the EU has adopted legislation harmonizing many areas of immigration law, in particular rules on borders, visas, legal migration, and irregular migration. The much-enlarged and fully updated second edition of this book includes commentary on the EU visa code, the Schengen Borders Code, the Frontex Regulation, the Returns Directive, the Directives on family reunion, long-term residents and single permits for migrant workers, and many more besides. This volume completes this new edition of EU Immigration and Asylum Law, which consists of a 3-volume set. It is the essential guide for any lawyers, academics, civil servants, NGOs and students interested in this area of law.

More than a decade has passed since the appearance of the first issue of the European Journal of Migration and Law, which was established to examine the intertwining of issues of law and migration in the EU. This volume has been compiled to celebrate that anniversary.

Large-scale migration constitutes an unavoidable social reality within the European Union. A European polity is made possible and tangible by the individual acts of migrants crossing the internal borders, developing a transnational life and integrating into European societies. Consequently, migration has become a special feature of the self-understanding of the European Union: its existence depends upon a continuing flow of persons crossing the borders of the Member States, and also upon the management of the flows of third-country nationals knocking at its doors. To respond to this challenge, the Union has developed common European migration policies. This book is a collection of essays which aim to explore a selected number of issues related to the development of these policies. It presents the current state, and the future of European immigration law discussing the political rationales and legal competences driving the action of the Union in this area. It reflects on the cooperation of the Union with third countries and on the emergence of international migration legal norms. It illustrates the role of the European Courts and the emergence of new actors through the adoption of EU instruments.

Since 1999, the EU has adopted legislation harmonizing many areas of immigration law, in particular rules on borders, visas, legal migration, and irregular migration. The much-enlarged and fully updated second edition of this book contains the text of and detailed commentary upon every significant measure in this field proposed or adopted up until 1 September 2011. It includes commentary on the EU visa code, the Schengen Borders Code, the Frontex Regulation, the Returns Directive, the Directives on family reunion, long-term residents and single permits for migrant workers, and many more besides. This is the essential guide for any lawyers, academics, civil servants, NGOs and students interested in this area of law.

Principally, this book comprises a conceptual analysis of the illegality of a third-country national's stay by examining the boundaries of the overarching concept of illegality at the EU level. Having found that the holistic conceptualisation of illegality, constructed through a combination of sources (both EU and national law) falls short of adequacy, the book moves on to consider situations that fall outside the traditional binary of legal and illegal under EU law. The cases of unlawfully staying EU citizens and of non-removable illegally staying third-country nationals are examples of groups of migrants who are categorised as atypical. By looking at these two examples the book reveals not only the fragmentation of legal statuses in EU migration law but also the more general ill-fitting and unsatisfactory categorisation of migrants. The potential conflation of illegality with criminality as a result of the way EU databases regulate the legal regime of illegality of a migrant's stay is the first trend identified by the book. Subsequently, the book considers the functions of accessing legality (both instrumental and corrective). In doing so it draws out another trend evident in the EU illegality regime: a two-tier regime which discriminates on the basis of wealth and the instrumentalisation of access to legality by Member States for mostly their own purposes. Finally, the book proposes a corrective rationale for the regulation of illegality through access to legality and provides a number of normative suggestions as a way of remedying current deficiencies that arise out of the present supranational framing of illegality.

Looks at immigration and asylum legislation and polices in Europe to investigate how immigrants are 'othered' by them.