Recruit the Skilled, Rotate the Unskilled? Comparing Labour Migration Policies by Occupation and Skill Level in Four European Countries

It is sometimes assumed in both scholarly and public debates that migration policies have become more restrictive tout court in the face of public pressures to control immigration. Yet migration policies are highly differentiated. Philip Martin once claimed that major destination states seek to ‘recruit’ high skilled migrants with tempting packages, while ‘rotating’ low skilled migrant workers through temporary programmes. In this paper we examine this claim using a new policy index – ImPol – which is based on a methodology that allows us to compare policy restrictiveness between countries, over time, and across different occupational categories and skill levels. We explore whether policy restrictiveness varies between skill levels and occupations across four European countries: France, Italy, Spain, and the UK. We test the claim that EU countries have become more open to high-skilled immigration, whilst becoming more restrictive to low-skilled migrant workers. We also consider whether high capital routes, such as investors and entrepreneurs, enjoy preferential treatment compared to labour migrants. Our paper thus assesses whether the general trend of the ‘hollowing out’ of labour markets across Western countries is reflected in the migration policies of these European countries.