Domestic and international labour migration policies: Complementarity or disparity?

Western democracies face competing pressures in the regulation of international migration that forces governments to balance needs for economic openness with demands for political closure. The public policy literature suggests that facing opposing demands, governments may resort to strategies of venue-shopping whereby they shift political decision-making to institutional fora in which such opposition is reduced. This paper examines to which extent preferential trade agreements and bilateral labour agreements constitute a venue to meet economic demand for certain types of economic mobility while circumventing political constraints, thereby perpetuating the ‘liberal paradox’ that predominates in liberal democratic immigration systems. Based on an original database of migration provisions in trade agreements (MITA), the paper examines OECD countries’ and the EU’s strategic venue-shopping for the liberalization of labour mobility on the basis of all preferential trade agreements concluded by these countries since the 1980s, and compares this with the conclusion of Bilateral Labour Agreements regulating temporary labour mobility and domestic regulations on labour migration. While disclosing a hitherto under-investigated facet of contemporary labour migration, the findings have important implications for our understanding of the logics driving the inclusion of non-trade issues in preferential trade agreements and of the venues through which liberal democracies govern desired forms of economic migration in times of growing anti-immigration sentiment.