One Market, 25 States, 20 Million Outsiders?: European Union Immigration Policy Adam Luedtke
[email protected] University of Washington Political Science Department 101 Gowen Hall, Box 353530 Seattle, WA 98195-3530 BMW Center for German and European Studies 9th Annual Graduate Student Conference The European Project: Opportunities and Challenges February 18-19, 2005 Georgetown University, Washington, DC 1. Introduction European integration (the transfer of policymaking authority from national governments to Brussels) presents a dilemma for national immigration authorities. The walls and borders that divided East and West have slowly crumbled and the lines between insiders and outsiders are increasingly blurred. The EU has expanded from 15 member countries to 25, which will eventually allow almost 500 million citizens to move freely across borders. With little or no coordination on security and immigration issues, Europe will experience an unprecedented challenge. Can nation-states construct free trade zones – allowing free movement of persons, services and goods – without common immigration policies? Or is a common immigration policy the inevitable product of the functioning of regional economic cooperation, despite the national pressure to maintain domestic control over this sensitive issue? Looking at the history of European integration, one sees that in other policy areas (such as gender equality or environmental protection), member state governments did not originally anticipate the degree to which the EU’s central institutions (the European Commission, Court of Justice, and Parliament) would eventually gain policymaking authority as the EU evolved (Stone Sweet and Sandholtz 1998, Stone Sweet, Fligstein and Sandholtz 2001, Stone Sweet 2000, Stone Sweet and Caporaso 1998, Cichowski 1998).