The Political Economy of Border Drawing: Arranging Legality in European Labor Migration Policies

Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola of the University of Oulu reviews The Political Economy of Border Drawing: Arranging Legality in European Labor Migration Policies by Regine Paul. The conditions for non-EU migrant workers to gain legal entry to Britain, France, and Germany are at the same time similar and quite different. To explain this variation, this book compares the fine-grained legal categories for migrant workers in each country, and examines the interaction of economic, social, and cultural rationales in determining migrant legality. Rather than investigating the failure of borders to keep unauthorized migrants out, the author highlights the different policies of each country as “border-drawing” actions. Overall, migrant worker legality is arranged against the backdrop of the specific vision each country has of itself in an economically competitive, globalized world with rapidly changing welfare and citizenship model.

Read the book review at https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12299