Migrations - [06/09/2009]

The challenges for migration policies in Europe

On 29 May, the Centre for Human and Social Sciences held a seminar titled The challenges for migration policies in Europe, within the framework of the Migration Policies, Justice and Citizenry Project. The main topics discussed at the event, which was chaired by Juan Carlos Velasco of CSIC, were Europe's migration policy and the EU's immigration management instruments.

Gemma Pinyol, the Coordinator of the Migrations Programme at the CIDOB Foundation, was given the task of presenting the first subject, with a talk titled The common European immigration policy: an “unfinished” process. After analysing the immigration characteristics in Europe and the evolution of the work agendas of Tampere (1999) and the Hague (2004), Pinyol explored the main issues in Europe's immigration policy: the organised management of migration flows, the external dimension of immigration policy, the integration of immigrants and the creation of a common European asylum system. Likewise, she referred to the importance of the recent European Pact on Immigration and Asylum, passed by the European Council in 2008, and which outlined the challenges for the future Stockholm Programme in terms of defining an EU migration policy.

In the second part of the seminar, Ruth Ferrero, Lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid, analysed the instruments for managing immigration in Europe, placing particular emphasis on the processes of regularisation, the bilateral agreements on migration issues and the expedition of visas in the Western Balkans following the EU enlargement process.