The European Union's migration policy, as it plays out, is far from a coherent, deliberated program designed in Brussels or Strasbourg. But nor is it an amalgam of the separate policies on admission and residence, varying in effectiveness, of autonomous member states. Between these two figments, however, there is a widely held depiction of the EU reality: that of a North-South migration policy divide in which the disciplined northern member states coexist with a “soft underbelly” of lax southern states, haplessly policing the Mediterranean front-lines—and shepherding migrants northward. This collection of case studies is an extended rejection of such a view. Its contributors illustrate the evolving aims and practices of migration governance among selected countries across the EU. There are 15 chapters, organized in thematic sections covering visa policy, externalization (offshoring) of migrant selection, regularization (usually amnesty) for irregular entrants, labor migration, “welfare chauvinism” (restrictions on migrant eligibility for welfare benefits), and asylum procedures. The editors draw the contents together in introductory and concluding chapters, identifying fields where harmonization is in train and others that are insistently idiosyncratic—finding, in sum, that the European migration system is “a complex, ambiguous reality, where convergence dynamics must come to terms with persisting variance.”

One source of complexity and ambiguity is the elusiveness of the target. In the last two decades the migration regime has experienced surging numbers of workers from Eastern Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis, burgeoning numbers attempting the hazardous Mediterranean crossings, and the massed Ukraine war exodus, as well as the effects of the Great Recession and, lately, Covid. Country impacts and responses have necessarily depended on specific economic and geopolitical circumstances, only later reflected in European Commission dictates such as the 2020 New Pact on Migration and Asylum. The use of development aid conditioned on migrant deterrence as a policy instrument is one case in point, begun initially in bilateral agreements between Spain (and then Italy and France) and individual African countries and later taken up by the Commission. (Reciprocally, migrant transit and origin countries have found that their control of numbers gave them a means of exacting a “geographical rent” from the EU.) On asylum, the basic problem is the conflict between the legal principle—increasingly seen as ill-suited to the scale of the problem—and the political imperative to limit inflows. The procedures to determine refugee status are lengthy and administrative decisions denying asylum are frequently overturned by the courts. Orders to leave are widely disregarded. (Germany, the most effective country at carrying out such orders, expels just 24 percent; France, 11 percent.) Irregular migration aside from asylum-seeking is periodically rewarded with some form of regularization.

A large proportion of EU migrants are intra-EU, mostly easterners after the 2000s enlargement. Another portion are northern retirees in the south. Delaying or limiting migrants' entitlement to welfare-state benefits is a common means of deterrence or cost-offsetting. (Brexit was deterrence taken to an extreme.) Migrant workers, of course, are also sought from further afield, raising the issue of “source-country particularism.” Germany for a time practiced blindness to migrants' ethnic origins, recruiting by qualifications only, but has retreated to its earlier practice, now favoring workers from the Western Balkans. Other countries with particularistic connections to the EU labor market (that of Spain especially) are the Maghreb states: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

The volume offers a sophisticated treatment of the migration topics the editors have selected, but does not claim to cover all aspects of the EU's migration regime where there are North-South differences to be contested. An issue of growing significance that would deserve such consideration is the range of attitudes toward migrant diversity by race and religion and toward the absolute numbers of newcomers—the looming scale of Europe's demographic predicament, the source of the threatened “great replacement.”

Claudia Finotelli, a political scientist, is in the Department of Applied Sociology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a research associate of the International and European Forum of Migration Research (FIERI), Turin, Italy. Irene Ponzo, a political sociologist, is Deputy Director of FIERI. The contributors are from European universities and research institutes.—G.McN.

欧盟的移民政策，就其实施情况而言，远非布鲁塞尔或斯特拉斯堡设计的连贯、深思熟虑的计划。但它也不是自治成员国各自的入境和居留政策的混合体，这些政策的有效性各不相同。然而，在这两个虚构的故事之间，存在着对欧盟现实的广泛描述：南北移民政策分歧，纪律严明的北方成员国与松懈的南方国家的“软肋”共存，不幸地监管着地中海地区。前线——并引导移民向北。这本案例研究集是对这种观点的长期拒绝。其贡献者阐述了欧盟选定国家之间不断变化的移民治理目标和实践。共有 15 章，按专题部分组织，涵盖签证政策、移民选择的外部化（离岸）、非正规入境者的正规化（通常是特赦）、劳务移民、“福利沙文主义”（对移民享受福利资格的限制）以及庇护程序。编辑们将介绍性章节和结论性章节中的内容汇集在一起​​，确定了正在协调一致的领域和其他一贯独特的领域——总而言之，他们发现欧洲移民体系是“一个复杂、模糊的现实，必须采取趋同动力来解决这一问题”。具有持续方差的术语。”

复杂性和模糊性的根源之一是目标的难以捉摸。在过去的二十年里，移民制度经历了来自东欧的工人数量激增、叙利亚难民危机、试图穿越危险的地中海的人数激增、大规模的乌克兰战争逃亡以及大衰退和最近的影响。 ， 冠状病毒。国家的影响和应对措施必然取决于具体的经济和地缘政治环境，后来才反映在欧盟委员会的指令中，例如 2020 年《移民和庇护新协议》。使用以移民威慑为条件的发展援助作为政策工具就是一个典型的例子，最初是在西班牙（然后是意大利和法国）与个别非洲国家之间的双边协议中开始的，后来由委员会采纳。（相反，移民过境国和原籍国发现，他们对人数的控制为他们提供了向欧盟索取“地理租金”的手段。）在庇护方面，基本问题是法律原则之间的冲突——越来越多地被认为是不正当的——适合问题的规模以及限制资本流入的政治必要性。确定难民身份的程序很漫长，拒绝庇护的行政决定经常被法院推翻。离开的命令被广泛忽视。（德国是执行此类命令最有效的国家，但仅驱逐了 24% 的人；法国为 11%。）寻求庇护之外的非正常移民会定期获得某种形式的正规化奖励。

很大一部分欧盟移民来自欧盟内部，其中大部分是 2000 年代东扩后的东欧移民。另一部分是南方的北方退休人员。延迟或限制移民享受福利国家福利的权利是威慑或抵消成本的常见手段。（英国脱欧是一种极端的威慑。）当然，人们也会从更远的地方寻找移民工人，这就提出了“来源国特殊主义”的问题。德国曾一度对移民的种族血统视而不见，只根据资格进行招聘，但现在已经退回到以前的做法，现在更青睐来自西巴尔干地区的工人。其他与欧盟劳动力市场有特殊联系的国家（尤其是西班牙）是马格里布国家：阿尔及利亚、摩洛哥和突尼斯。

该书对编辑选择的移民主题进行了复杂的处理，但并未声称涵盖了欧盟移民制度的所有方面，其中存在着南北差异值得争议。一个日益重要、值得考虑的问题是对种族和宗教移民多样性以及对新移民绝对数量的不同态度——欧洲人口困境迫在眉睫，这是威胁“大替代”的根源。

克劳迪娅·菲诺泰利 (Claudia Finotelli) 是一位政治学家，马德里康普顿斯大学应用社会学系的教授，也是意大利都灵国际和欧洲移民研究论坛 (FIERI) 的研究员。艾琳·庞佐 (Irene Ponzo) 是一位政治社会学家，现任 FIERI 副主任。贡献者来自欧洲大学和研究机构。—G.McN。