Global Migration Governance Through Free Trade Agreements

Abstract

This panel brings together papers on the issue of migration governance through Free Trade Agreements (FTAs): an international migration governance regime with a variety of impacts across the globe. FTAs facilitate the mobility of global elites, but also of cooks and care workers. In the EU context, they deal mostly with temporary labour mobility of the highly skilled; Member States are employing different policy tools to implement the obligations. Previous research has revealed how Preferential Trade Agreements concluded by some Asian nations have become a pathway for advancing labour mobility goals that extend beyond the commitments present in the WTO’s GATS or comparable deals concluded by the EU and the USA. The panel will build on those insights to showcase the most recent developments here, interrogating them from both a legal and political perspective. In some contexts, these treaties appear to ensure a liberalisation of opportunities in shortage occupations. In others, FTA benefits may just as much be curtailed, particularly via restrictive visa policies, as e.g. have become visible in the wake of the Brexit. Moreover, the intersection of trade and migration policies bring to the fore a number of constitutional tensions, alongside gaps in legal protection for natural and legal persons, which have so far remained underexplored. The panel seeks to address these lacunae, tracing patterns and developing solutions for this often intransparent, and multi-layered, regulatory sphere. Together, they offer a global contemporary perspective on trade-related migration governance issues, with a geographical reach spanning (at least) three different continents. Participants in the panel will also discuss another paper presented in the panel.

Title	Details
Independent professionals and intra-corporate transferees in Spain: trade mobility vs national migratory regulation	View Paper Details
The Constitutional Conundrum of Trade Related Skilled Migration into the EU	View Paper Details
A quiet globalisation of immigration? The interplay between international trade rules and national immigration policies in Switzerland and Germany	View Paper Details
Domestic and international labour migration policies: Complementarity or disparity?	View Paper Details