Challenges in European Migration Governance

Abstract

Migration management has become one of the key challenges for the EU, latest since the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. This panel addresses recent developments both in the internal and external dimension of European migration governance. With regards to the external dimension, we focus on new policy concepts of the EU such as resilience as well as the moral implications of 'refugee markets' which are underlying also the EU's recent deal with Turkey. In addition to that, we try to get a better sense of the nature of the cooperation with third countries by explaining the variance in the impact of European policies in these countries and elucidating the agency of these countries, which are usually only considered the targets of EU policies. On the internal dimension we focus on the production and proliferation of new ideas by the European Commission and try to explain under which conditions the Commission's ideas have the strongest impact on EU policy. Additionally, we aim to contribute about recent debates on the impact of populism on migration policy in Europe by addressing the question whether bodies most isolated from populist pressures such as courts indeed come to more liberal decisions on asylum claims than, for instance, administrations and whether judicial independence can account for the different recognition rates at second instance across Europe.