Towards Dialogue: The Complex Political Economy of Skill Formation and Migration

In recent decades labour markets, worker mobility, and skills provision strategies in individual European countries have become increasingly interrelated. While migration policy research and skill formation studies have blossomed individually and greatly increased our collective knowledge on driving forces and cross-national differences, the analytical linkage of the two strands remains sparse. This Section aims to bridge the continuous scholarly divide between those exploring the variable dynamics of skill formation in national political economies and those interested in migration policies and transnational European mobility to promote scientific, interdisciplinary exchange. Whilst some initial studies analyze variations of labour migration policies from the perspective of Varieties of Capitalism, the interaction between specific skill formation regimes and labour migration policy choices and effects remains both under-theorized and under-explored empirically. Also, this work sidelines the political economy of categorization of migrants according to skill level. Here, political economy scholars could learn from the migration governance literature, which shows that changing legal definitions of skill categories are not straightforwardly related to economic considerations but follow political ideas about desirable types and numbers of migrant workers. A case in point is the Brexit campaign and related debates about the desirability of Eastern European workers, which starkly defied firms’ liberal migrant recruitment preferences. Recent discussions about a so-called refugee dividend in European host societies go in a similar direction. Simultaneously, but so far rather unrelated, politico-economic studies take a nation state-centric view on the genesis and development of skill formation. These contributions have shed light on employers’, youths’, unions’ and political parties’ preferences for the investment in different types of skills (high, low, specific, general) and their interactions. Cross-national variations and institutional changes over time are also comparatively well explored. Considerable lacunae within debate, however, are studies analyzing how skill formation regimes are shaped by – and are themselves structuring – the transnationalization of labour markets, especially EU free movement. Arguably, this process creates a more complex political economy of skill formation as different actors’ economic recruitment preferences and socio-cultural norms of belonging are highly fragmented and national-style compromises harder to strike. To bring both fields into dialogue, this Section approaches the skill formation-migration nexus by way of a “sandwich” strategy and the integration of different theoretical and empirical angles. Panels are devoted to state-of-the-art developments in each field of study as a baseline for joint discussions and examine the mutually interdependent constitution of skill formation and migration policy regimes from different perspectives.