In a context of growing labour shortage and concerns with long-term population ageing, 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 limited attention to the topic at the 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 observes that the limited visibility of emigration and its national consequences on the EU policy agenda may, in part, reflect the nature of the EU’s institutional framework. Drawing on public policy theory, she suggests that emigration and its impact on sending countries have not gained more attention on the EU level because current tools, such as free movement law and cohesion policy, were either not designed to specifically address emigration or turn the matter into a regional problem.
Concretely, the research reveals that while EU free movement law includes mechanisms to protect the social systems of destination countries – namely conditional residence and limited access to social benefits – there are fewer corresponding measures addressing the challenges faced by countries of emigration.
In practice, the EU cohesion policy has become the primary tool for responding to emigration-related issues. This institutional setup has influenced how the topic is framed and discussed, contributing to it being subsumed under a broad political agenda of cohesion and gaining little focused attention. For instance, under the first von der Leyen Commission, emigration was mainly discussed in the context of regional depopulation, an approach that helped ease national sensitivities, depoliticising the issue. Had the debate been framed in terms of free movement law, which distinguishes between host and home states, national interests would perhaps not have been sidelined.
Second, the most obvious policy response that high-emigration countries could demand within the cohesion policy framework is more EU funding. A dedicated fund for this purpose is ambitious but plausible. However, as these states are already net-recipients of EU funds, the scope for advancing new demands has been limited, and attention has often shifted toward other political priorities for which the political and economic gain seems higher.
Together with the unequal power of member states and the benefits that the current migration system gives destination countries, these institutional factors have contributed to a more limited debate on the distributive implications of emigration. For now, the transfer of human capital from less affluent to more prosperous regions of Europe remains an important issue that has yet to receive sustained policy attention.