Circular Migration, Or Labor Migration Without the Migrants? Managing the Demographic
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Circular Migration, or Labor Migration Without the Migrants? Managing the “Demographic Deficit” in a Neoliberal Europe
Peo Hansen
The increase and persistence of irregular migration in the EU result in large part from a labour market demand. In several EU countries various businesses, sectors and services such as tourism, agriculture, elderly care, cleaning and construction could not operate as currently without the access to irregular migrants’ labour (see e.g. Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2011). An important enabling factor for this development is to be found in the liberalization of the EU economy that got under way in the 1980s. Since then we have seen more deregulated and flexibilized labour markets, weakened labour unions and increased wage competition connected to a growing low-wage service sector and informal labour market (see e.g. Schierup, Hansen Castles, 2006).
At first sight, there is thus a glaring contradiction between the EU’s stated objective of fighting ‘illegal migration’, on the one side, and its neoliberal economic objectives, on the other. That is to say, the latter objective’s translation into more flexible labour markets, which often are made to rely on a steady increase of cheap and casual migrant labour, has acted to offset the former objective. In the early 1990s research started to attend to this condition and was able to demonstrate that many EU governments that claimed to be fighting illegal immigration were in actuality quite content with the fact that their economies were profiting from the cheap labour performed by irregular migrants (Overbeek, 1995). In this sense, what we are dealing with may not be so much of a contradiction after all. As Stephen Castles (2004, pp. 223, 214) explains:
Policies that claim to exclude undocumented workers may often really be about allowing them in through side doors and back doors, so that they can be more readily exploited. […] This can mean that politicians are content to provide anti-immigration rhetoric while actually pursuing policies that lead to more immigration, because this meets important economic or labour market objectives.
As was uncovered by The Guardian, in 2002 Spanish authorities rounded up African migrants on the Canary Islands and flew them to the mainland where they were simply dumped off in areas where the agribusiness needed labour (Lawrence, 2011). In most cases, of course, this procedure works in indirect ways, foremost through a more or less deliberate eschewal of systematic controls of employers and workplaces. In dodging the demand side this obviously checks the efficiency of ever so extensive migration barriers erected for the purpose of tackling the supply side of irregular migration.
Parallel to the EU debate on how to ramp up the fight against ‘illegal migration’, the past decade has seen an almost equally energetic debate on how to bring about a vast increase in ‘legal’ labour immigration to the ageing Union. Much discussion has thus also focused on the sustainability of the EU’s securitized migration policy. Several liberal scholars and pundits, business lobbies and various other neoliberal outlets have argued that the ever-increasing investment in migration prevention in many ways runs counter to the EU’s enormous economic and demographic demand for labour migrants. Instead of border guards and barbwire, they claim, more focus should be put on making demand and supply mechanisms the chief instruments in the EU’s migration management towards Africa and other poor parts of the world (see e.g. Becker, 2011; Legrain, 2007). Such a conversion would also be conducive to a realization of ‘circular migration’ on a large scale—that is, the policy concept of having migrants circulate smoothly between jobs in countries and regions with the greatest demand for the time being, a policy concept that the EU itself has been instrumental in promoting in recent years (Venturini, 2008; see e.g. CEC, 2007c). Just as there is a global market for capital, goods and services, the argument goes, it is now high time to also install a global migration market, liberated from protectionist borders and red tape. Some point to the EU itself and its longstanding regime of free movement for labour as a model for such a new global order (Legrain, 2009). Very rarely though, does this perspective attend to the fact that this free movement regime—instituted during the heyday of the western European welfare state—formally includes numerous social rights provisions for those who migrate between the EU’s member states; this in order to prevent social dumping.
The issue concerning migrants’ social rights thus constitutes the blind spot of the current debate. There is a strong emphasis on the new labour migrants’ decisive importance for the EU’s future growth, competitiveness and demographic balance. Conversely, however, there is practically no mention of what these indispensable rescuers can expect in return from the receiving societies, in the form of social rights, family reunion and possibilities to obtain permanent residence. Rather than accounting for labour migrants as the social creatures they are, the tendency today is one of reducing them (even in the explicit) to human capital and production factors pure and simple, set to optimize the labour markets on which they should circulate. As the globally influential pundit Philippe Legrain (2009, p. 3) has it, migration is just ‘a form of trade’, from which of course follows that labour migrants make up a tradable commodity among others. But as Karl Polanyi demonstrated in his modern classic The Great Transformation, the notion of such a socially naked human being is a dangerous fiction, since every attempt at its realization, every attempt to actually treat a human being as was she socially naked and only dressed for the market, always risks having catastrophic consequences. ‘The commodity description of labor’, Polanyi (1944/2001, p. 76) explains, ’is entirely fictitious’, since ‘[t]o allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings […] would result in the demolition of society.’ This is so because ‘the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity.’ When, under such a regime, a person’s labour commodity is discarded or treated as a disposable, one-use commodity, this would be tantamount to the elimination of this person’s entire being (Polanyi, 1944/2001, p. 76, my italics).
In accordance with the particular liberal perspective just recapitulated, migrants’ social conditions also constitute the blind spot in EU policy. There is thus widespread agreement on the merits of circular migration and that a widened scope for market mechanisms makes up the most effective means to improve the EU’s demography and global competiveness. But in contrast to the liberal camp that advocates more open borders, the EU remains firmly convinced that there is no alternative but to continue the militarized reinforcement of its external borders. Even so, the basic purpose is the same. Because in the logic advanced by the EU, labour migration can only increase if it goes in tandem with an increase in border security. This explains why it only comes natural for the EU to increase the budget of Frontex—for the stated purpose of staving off migrants and refugees from North Africa—while the Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström during the very same week (in June 2011) tells Financial Times that ‘we need hundreds of thousands, millions in the long term’, of labour migrants (quoted in Barber, 2011).
The overarching question that this article seeks to answer is how we should understand and explain this seeming contradiction. In other words, I shall try to work out how the EU imagines itself capable of creating a productive or win-win dynamic between the security oriented ‘fight against illegal immigration’, on the one side, and the growth and competitiveness oriented aspiration for a large-scale increase in labour migration, on the other. In demonstrating how this enterprise impacts on current EU migration policy in broad terms I also go on to show its more particular designs vis-à-vis African countries.
Labour Migration as a Matter of the EU’s ‘Economic Survival’
The EU’s declared demographic and economic need for new labour migrants is not just any type of need. According to most estimates put forward by the EU, the UN and other institutions and organizations the figures range in the tens of millions for the coming three to four decades. Economic growth and migration growth have thus become two sides of the same coin in the EU’s economic and political ambitions. This was made clear already in the Lisbon Strategy (2000-2010) and now constitutes one of the cornerstones of Europe 2020, the EU’s new ten year plan for growth (CEC, 2011, p. 4). From the perspective of the Commission, a large-scale increase in labour migration has become so urgent that the Home Affairs Commissioner Malmström now repeatedly states that it has become necessary ‘in order to secure our economic survival’ (Malmström, 2010).
Whether the current crisis and mass unemployment will lead to a reappraisal of the Commission’s position remains to be seen when I write this (in December 2011). Certain changes in migration patterns have already taken place: Ireland has become a country of emigration again; Greece and Spain are expected to follow suit; Portugal has in the last few years, as a result of the crisis, seen tens of thousands of its citizens emigrate to oil-booming Angola alone; and several EU countries have taken steps to curtail regular labour migration and some have also sought to make unemployed migrants on temporary permits leave their countries (see Koser, 2010). In the summer of 2011 the Spanish government decided to reintroduce the ban on migration from Romania on account of Spain’s severe unemployment problem. Soon after the Netherlands indicated that it entertained a similar move. At the same moment the Commission rushed to the defence of its policy; according to Malmström the crisis had altered nothing and the Commission’s position on labour migration was thus to stay the course. Malmström also noted that Spain, despite its mass unemployment, in no way made up an exception in this regard, adding: ’Many businesses still say we can’t find people to do jobs such as picking strawberries’ (quoted in Pop, 2011).
Since the onset of the crisis and the collapse of the housing market and construction sector in Spain there has been a steady deterioration in the situation for the country’s labour migrants. Many migrants previously employed in construction have been forced to scramble for work in the most poorly paid horticulture and agriculture industry. Since this industry has lowered its costs even further it has also been even more prone to utilize irregular migrant workers. With this it has become still more rare for agribusinesses to hire regular labour. According to the UK charity Anti-Slavery International, the conditions for the irregular migrants working in Spain’s agriculture have deteriorated to the point that they in many places now can be likened to outright slavery. There is even a shortage of food, which has forced the Red Cross to provide food for thousands of Spain’s irregular migrant workers (Lawrence, 2011).
It is certainly not this situation and these workers that the Commission has in mind when it emphasizes Spain’s continued need for labour immigration. Brussels only has regularly employed migrants in view. That Spain wants to halt Romanian labour migrants must thus partly be understood in this light, since they could migrate regularly to Spain within the EU’s free movement framework and so lay claim to a set of formal rights, even though many Romanians of course too have had little option but to toil in the informal economy. But given that the EU’s free movement regime places certain requirements on the state, this should give us a clue as to why the financially hard-pressed Spanish government has an interest in curbing this type of migration. This is borne out too by the fact that Madrid has tried to encourage the return of temporary migrant workers from non-EU countries with which Spain has bilateral agreements that include social security provisions for the migrants while working in Spain (Koser, 2010).
This, though, should not be taken to infer that Spain wants to stop all migration, far from it. With the crisis inducing companies to cut costs the demand for cheap labour in certain sectors might actually have increased as a result of the crisis. So far, Spain has not curbed employers’ associations recruitment of temporary migrant labour to the agricultural sector. This migration is ‘regular’, at least in the first stage. But once the migrants are in Spain, it is quite common for the employers to subject them to the most appalling treatment, and despite the fact that authorities are quite aware of this they rarely intervene (Baqué, 2011).
But for the time being the crisis has not altered the EU’s stance and the policy to significantly increase labour migration thus holds firm. An early confirmation of this position toward the crisis could be seen when the European Parliament, at the height of the financial turbulence in the fall of 2008, overwhelmingly approved the European Commission’s so-called blue card proposal, which aims to facilitate high-skilled labour migration to the EU. According to the then EU Home Affairs Commissioner Jacques Barrot, the Parliament’s approval demonstrated ‘that Europeans are open to immigration flows and that we are welcoming to nationals from outside Europe’ (quoted in Goldirova, 2008).
Barrot sought to convey an image of a cosmopolitan EU opening up to the world. This attempted re-branding of the EU has gained attention within both media commentary and research, as seen in statements such as the following: ‘The Commission’s Blue Card initiative demonstrates that the EU is no longer a “fortress”; it is opening itself up to talent, and creating the right conditions for migrants to obtain a legal job in Europe.’ (Kyrieri, 2007: 24) Such hopes aside, however, the EU’s real objectives are firmly rooted in economic imperatives, something that the Commission rarely tries to conceal. Moreover, when the Commission launched its blue card bid in 2007 it was adamant in putting all illusions about greater openness, as in laxer migration controls, firmly to rest. The blue card, the Commission stated, was by no means intended to be ‘a blank cheque’ to all highly qualified third country workers (quoted in Goldirova, 2007a). As such, the then Home Affairs Commissioner Frattini underlined, ‘the blue card is not a permanent card like the American green card’ (quoted in Goldirova, 2007b); it ‘does not create a right of admission’ (CEC, 2007a, p. 2). Instead, it is intended to be ‘demand driven’ invariably requiring that migrants show proof of a ‘job contract’ before a blue card is issued (CEC, 2007b, p. 9). By this means, member states ‘maintain control on which type—and how many—highly qualified workers will enter their labour markets’ (CEC, 2007a, p. 2; see also CEC, 2007b, p. 7). Predictably, the Commission’s proposal also steered clear of any mention of permanent residence for the would-be blue card holders.