In a context of acute labour shortages and concerns with long-term population aging, the EU and many of its Member States see foreign workers as a rescue. Mobile citizens from within the EU constitute a big part of the foreign labour force of many richer EU countries.
However, they come disproportionately from Central Eastern and Southern Eastern countries, leading to a rarely debated redistribution between EU Member States, of human capital, investment in education and training, social security contributions and tax revenues, but also simply of people.
At national level, emigration has been a salient topic, as shown for instance in the growing use of ‘emigrant return policy’ especially in Eastern and Southern Europe. Nonetheless, there has been a curious silence around the topic at EU level, especially compared to years of loud controversies around mobile EU citizens’ access to welfare in countries of destination (think: Brexit).
In recent research Cecilia Bruzelius from University of Tübingen argues that one important reason is the institutional framework of the EU itself. Drawing on public policy theory according to which existing institutions limit what is seen as a problem and how problems are addressed, she posits that emigration and its consequences have failed to become a clear agenda point because there are no readily available EU policy solutions with which emigration and associated challenges can be addressed heads-on.
The research reveals that EU free movement law includes mechanisms to protect countries of destination’s social systems – namely conditional residence and limited social rights –, but lacks similar measures at the emigration end of free movement. Rather, the most readily available EU policy option to regulate emigration is EU cohesion policy. This has shaped problem definitions, issue traction and political interests in ways that depoliticises the topic.
First, seen through the lens of cohesion policy, large and continued emigration has been interpreted as the result of lacking convergence and consequently subsumed under a broad political agenda, gaining little focused attention. For instance, under the first von der Leyen Commission, emigration was subsumed in debates about regional depopulation, effectively depoliticising national conflict lines. This would not be conceivable if framed in relation to free movement law, which is structured around host and home states.
Second, the most obvious policy response that countries with high emigration could demand within the cohesion policy framework is more EU funding. A dedicated fund for this purpose is ambitious but plausible. Yet, because the states concerned with emigration already are net-recipients of EU funds, agendas are limited in scope, and the political and economic gain of pushing other political topics seems higher, they have seen little gain in lobbying the issue.
Combined with unequal member state power, and the clear benefits of the status quo for migration destination states, these factors have silenced debates on distributive consequences of emigration. For now, redistribution of resources through human capital from Europe’s less well-off to its most well-off regions remains largely unaddressed.