Boswell, Christina. "Why do States Liberalise Labour Migration Policies? Germany, Spain and the UK in Comparison". Paper Prepared for OECD, University of Edinburgh, 2013.

Boswell, Christina. "Why do States Liberalise Labour Migration Policies? Germany, Spain and the UK in Comparison". Paper Prepared for OECD, University of Edinburgh, 2013.

• States often have strong demographic and economic reasons to expand their labor pool by allowing and promoting immigration, yet public opinion in many European countries remains strongly against increased immigration. The contrast between economic desire for immigration and an anti-immigration public opinion is called the 'immigration gap', and is usually expressed through the combination of anti-immigration rhetoric and pro-immigration policies (1).
• European countries have particular methods of managing this migration gap, with the most common methods being tolerance of illegal migration -- occasionally regularized through government amnesties -- and the use of seasonal migrant workers on part-time visas to provide for labor needs without becoming a permanent population (1).
• Public support for immigration in Europe has been rare, with the few examples including the UK under New Labour, Sweden in 2008, Spain under the Socialist Rodriguez government, and Germany in 2000 (2).
• Since the public is generally opposed to liberal immigration policies, the political capital to pursue these policies must either come from organized interested groups pressuring governments or from the beliefs of the political elite. The author predicts that immigration liberalization will occur when there are labor shortages, when the government is left-leaning, when the economy is doing well, and when there is an absence of organized opposition to immigration (3-5).
• Interest groups do not have the standard effect on immigration in the European context, instead their interests are represented in terms of governments' desires to improve economic growth. When labor shortages begin to serious affect the economy, governments will respond (3).
• Dr. Gary Freeman argued that since the costs of increased immigration were spread out among society, whereas the costs of liberal migration policy were concentrated in a few sectors, those interested were better able to mobilize and lobby the government. This conception has been critiqued as being non-applicable to Europe since at least the 1980s due to the intense politicization of immigration policies and organization of anti-immigrant lobbies (3).
• Under Conservative government from 1979 to 1997, the official immigration policy in the UK had been zero net immigration, although some de facto liberalization occurred after 1994 as visa standards were lowered. Labour took an explicitly pro-immigration stance from 1998 onward, urged by skill shortages hampering economic growth (6).
• When in power, the Blair government lowered the skill requirements needed for a work visa, adopted a new program aided at specifically importing highly skilled professionals, and expanded other programs. They also allowed migrants from all 8 new EU countries to live and work in the UK (7).
• These policies were undermined around 2006, as far greater numbers of unskilled workers from the EU were coming to the UK than initially anticipated. The system was again changed to restrict unskilled migration from outside the EU, and there was a temporary ban on Romanian and Bulgarian immigration (8).
• The author claims that since the UK did not have a 'guestworker' program after WWII as many continental European countries did, (I'm not sure if that is true, the UK actually took in huge numbers of commonwealth citizens after the war to deal with labor shortages), meaning that there were no organized anti-immigration lobbies. Even the Tories did not have any strong critiques of increased immigration, largely because it helped the economy (7).
• These reforms were undertaken during a period of strong economic growth and low unemployment, a period in which immigration was not a heavily politicized issue (7).
• Germany immigration policy during the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by an effective ban on new economic migrants. By the early 1990s, Germany was expanding the opportunities for immigration, especially for seasonal workers and highly skilled workers, but only through administrative policies and parallel to an anti-immigration political consensus (9).
• Partially because of extremely restrictive immigration, Germany suffered from a deficit of skilled industrial workers, which put pressure on economic growth. Immigration reform was proposed specifically in response to this shortage, as well as the need to transition to a globalized, knowledge-based economy, by Chancellor Schroder in 2000 (9).
• An independent commission on immigration affirmed the government's policy on liberalizing immigration, but met with public opposition due to relatively high levels of domestic unemployment and a strong collective memory in the west of failed integration of guestworkers in the 1950s and 1960s (10).
• The liberalization of immigration policy by the Social Democrats-Greens coalition met with fierce opposition from the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union parties, with them even vetoing the legislation in 2002 when it came up for review by the Bundesrat (10).
• The bill was eventually passed in 2004, but only after being significantly watered down in its provisions, including the removal of a plan for broad-based immigration reform based on the Canadian model (10).
• Prior to 2000, Spain maintained an official policy opposing immigration, instead making up for labor deficits through illegal immigration and subsequent amnesties of illegal immigrants. In 1993, Spain had introduced a quota system which allowed firms to hire outside the country, but this was bureaucratic and many companies preferred to hire illegal migrants already in Spain. Beginning in 2005, the Socialist government rapidly liberalized immigration, which quadrupled in the decade to nearly a million a year, focusing improving control of formal networks over already large migration flows (11).
• The pressure on the Spanish labor market was particularly intense in the 1990s, as the Spanish population aged and left the labor market, leaving the country with high growth potential and low unemployment. Business lobbies, trade unions, and local governments all advocated for liberalized immigration in response to these pressures (12-13).
• Local governments in particular played a key role in shaping the conditions of immigration reform, being made responsible for compiling the lists of occupations experiences major labor shortages (13).
• The Spanish public did not have an historical aversion to immigration, not experiencing significant immigration in its recent history. Additionally, the public perception was that labor would be temporary, not necessarily becoming part of the local population. This meant that there was not a significant anti-immigration lobby (13).
• The primary factor driving the liberalization of immigration policy in Europe has consistently been economic interests in promoting growth during periods of skill or labor shortages. Economically liberal governments in all three countries adopted policies which would benefit the business community through attracting foreign labor (14-15).
• In both Spain and the UK, support for immigration reform was partially driven by public fear of illegal immigration. Governments actively established a dichotomy between legal and illegal immigration, and often proposed increased legal immigration as a solution to rising levels of illegal immigration (15).
• In the current economic situation of low levels of growth and high levels of unemployment, it is extremely unlikely that Western European countries will undertake immigration reform any time soon. Support for liberal immigration policies is also likely to decline, especially as the issue has become re-politicized during the economic crisis (15).