Disentangling the European Migration Policy-Mix since 1990

The Covid-19 pandemic shows once again: policies addressing and affecting human migration and mobility both explicitly and implicitly are inherently and mutually intertwined. Simultaneously, the effects and effectiveness of migration policies are influenced by a multitude of other public policies including healthcare, welfare, labour, economic or foreign policies. While acknowledging the interconnected nature of migration policy and governance systems, scholars have rarely tried to analyze whether and how multiple migration-relevant policies co-evolve in a systematic and coordinated way. This paper aims to fill this gap by asking whether internal and external migration-relevant policies develop in similar directions in terms of their restrictiveness, and, to what extent various migration-relevant policy instruments describe patterns of policy convergence or divergence? The analysis of migration policy configurations in and across 31 European states between 1990 and 2020 shows that the European migration policy mix is a configuration of policies that seem to develop rather independently from each other in rather incoherent directions – both within as well as between European destination countries. Yet a closer analysis identifies some striking patterns of convergence and co-evolution of some ‘functionally proximate’ policy areas while more ‘functionally distant‘ policies seem less integrated or coordinated. That is, despite efforts for greater harmonisation in some policy areas or some policy instruments, the broader European ‘migration policy regime’ is still rather fragmented, and a multitude of migration-relevant policies follow only weakly a policy coherent trend within and across Europe states.