Paper Titles & Abstracts

The immigration of international students from third countries has become one of the major migration streams to the European Union next to labour immigration, family reunification and asylum. According to Eurostat, almost 21 per cent of all first-time residence permits granted by the Member States in 2011 were issued for education reasons. This, and other sources of information, suggest that it has become more common for young people to choose to study abroad. The European Union has, in a global context, emerged as one of the main destinations of international students. With regard to the admission and stay of third-country students in the EU, however, the harmonisation of national regulations is, until now, less advanced than in other areas of the EU's common immigration and asylum policy, such as short-term visas or asylum. In 2004, the Council of the European Union adopted a Directive on the conditions of admission of third-country nationals for the purposes of studies, pupil exchange, unremunerated training or voluntary service. While triggering some modest approximation of national admission criteria and conditions surrounding the stay of foreign students, such as their right to work, considerable national differences have remained. Based on an evaluation of the Directive that was undertaken by the EU Commission in 2011, an online survey and a comparative study by the European Migration Network (EMN) in 2012, the Commission has initiated a process to recast the Directive with a view to further increase the international attractiveness of the EU as a destination for studies. With the recent EMN study as a main source of information, this paper aims at identifying the key issues, as well as possible success-factors and obstacles, for the on-going harmonisation process.