Trade Agreements as a Venue for Migration Governance? Potential and Challenges for the European Union

Some overall conclusions and recommendations

• The initial manifestations (starting in the 1960s) of a trade-migration policy nexus derived not from a (at the time, non-existent) common migration policy, but from the externalities of single market integration.
• EU migration policy has addressed trade agreements pre-eminently from the perspective of issue-linkage as a means to incentivize countries of origin and transit of asylum seekers and migrants to cooperate in reducing immigration pressure to Europe.
• While the EU has attempted to use trade as a positive incentive in the cooperation on refugee displacement, the trade policies have not payed enough attention to country specific geopolitical, economic and social factors which in turn has affected the outcome. This has led to an aborted implementation of the compact in the case of Lebanon and to mixed results in the case of Jordan.

About the authors

The report is written by Sandra Lavenex, Professor of European and International Politics, University of Geneva and Tamirace Fakhoury, Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Refugee and Migration Studies, University of Aalborg in Copenhagen and Scientific Advisor to the Kuwait Chair (2020-2022) at Sciences Po, Paris.

The Delmi Report 2021:11 is launched on November 9, 2021.

Picture by Markus Spiske from Unsplash.