Europe
Recent Activity
The two sides of the debate on immigration and integration in Europe share an underlying assumption that the problem is cultural, while disagreeing on whether it is the result of too much or too little respect for cultural differences. This report contends that both get the issue wrong, calling attention to the inability of policies to ensure immigrants acquire and retain work.
The Arab Spring exposed critical weaknesses and exacerbated long-held disagreements within the European Union related to asylum, immigration, and external border control policy matters that spilled over into the operation of the Schengen area.
With unemployment rates remaining persistently high in the wake of the global economic crisis, ongoing turbulence in financial markets, and new austerity in public spending, anxious publics and governments trained their attention on immigration and immigrants during 2011.
Immigration flows this year continued to respond sharply to the economic climate in major immigrant-receiving nations, as many struggled to gain a labor market foothold in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown.
Public backlash against the detention systems of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States mounted in 2011 with allegations of unacceptable living conditions, abuse, prolonged detention, and government waste.
This Council Statement for the fifth plenary meeting of the Transatlantic Council on Migration captures key elements of deliberations on the best ways to bring greater order and legality to migration, border management, and labor market systems through transatlantic cooperation.
While policymakers are under increasing pressure to reduce illegal immigration, the estimated population of unauthorized immigrants in EU-15 countries has declined since 2002. European governments are collaborating on the management of their external borders, as this report details, discussing the detected and estimated scope of irregular migration in the European Union.
Though contentious, regularization (referred to in the U.S. context as legalization) remains a frequently utilized policy tool to address the European Union’s unauthorized immigrant population. Since 1996, more than 5 million people have been regularized through a variety of methods, as this Insight details.