Facing 2020: Developing a New European Agenda for Immigration and Asylum Policy

As the European Commission looks ahead to the next strategic program for immigration in 2014, this policy brief sketches the challenges in developing a strategic, long-term agenda on migration at a time when Europe remains beset by fiscal uncertainty and a jobs crisis that is particularly acute for the young. Against such a backdrop, few governments are willing to have a serious conversation about anything but skilled immigration.

The brief finds that the successive five-year operational agendas for the Justice and Home Affairs no longer provide sufficient means for long-term, strategic policymaking in the area of immigration and asylum. Rather, the brief promotes the development of a policy platform that reaches beyond Justice and Home Affairs to other relevant policy domains and underscores the importance of public outreach on immigration issues. Moreover, the brief finds a growing demand for regional, as opposed to national, approaches to immigration issues and for policymakers to recalibrate Europe’s place in the world to better understand the future flows that immigration policy must be prepared to address.