Research Papers

The self-declaration of 'not being a country of immigration' has dominated Germany's international reputation for the last three decades and remained largely untouched even by the adoption of its first immigration law in 2004. Below this level of political discourse, however, Germany established in a series of reforms an elaborated system for permanent, temporary and academic high-skilled labour migration during the last ten years. Furthermore, actual migration figures today show a serious increase of high-skilled immigration compared to the late 1990s. The lack of a points system in its migration legislation - widely regarded as the ultimate solution for any modern migration policy - and regular calls by economists for higher levels of immigration to address potential skills shortages, covers this fundamental renunciation from earlier German beliefs. Against established political economy frameworks dominating the study of labour migration, the paper argues that the far-reaching developments in Germany have to be explained in the context of the increasing Europeanization of migration policies. Responding to the new diversity of Europe's migration policies and the normalization of the European politics of migration the paper is based on a broader theoretical framework linking a bottom-up research design with a mechanism-centred approach and demonstrates how causal processes of policy learning are necessary to explain the particular design and timing of the national reforms. In particular contexts, the European Commission is able to silently but comprehensively transform deep-seated national models by providing new policy ideas and particular policy templates.