The metaphor of ‘Fortress Europe’ is the most common conclusion drawn by scholars regarding the Europeanization of refugee and migration policies. From an intergovernmental perspective, this phenomenon has been explained as the result of venue shopping. The argumentation is that European co-operation provides institutional and discursive opportunity structures that allow member state governments to avoid national constraints and to increase the states’ autonomy in order to control refugee and migration movements. Contrary to this line of reasoning, the German case provides evidence that outcomes of the European influence are increasingly diverse. The disaggregation of refugee and migration policies into theoretically meaningful compartments – asylum policies, irregular migration, labor migration and policies addressing the migration-development nexus – shows that the resulting pattern of Europeanization hardly fits linear assumptions of a restrictive and illiberal influence. Aiming at a more persuasive explanation, the paper effectively provincializes the venue shopping approach by developing a typology of different explanatory mechanisms based on the two fundamental dimensions of Europeanization – uploading and downloading. Stating that the European Union constitutes the new ‘limit of control’ for its member states would certainly overestimate the influence of the supranational level, at least regarding the German case. Nevertheless, the multi-level analyses successfully show that today, venue shopping does not represent a general framework anymore but simply constitutes one among at least three other theoretical mechanisms.
