Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume Ithat temporary unemployment should occur for a period exceeding three consecutivemonths or if it occurs more than once, the EU Blue Card is withdrawn. 53- The fact that it gives more privileges in terms of family reunification to the highly-skilledmigrants who have not lived in the EU, as opposed to third-country nationals who areestablished residents of the EU, is controversial.- More importantly, it is not clear whether and how the Blue Card is an instrument thatexcludes or paves the way for an EU citizenship and, if the Blue Card is to be understoodas a gateway to citizenship, how do divergent citizenship laws in EU member states andthe Blue Card complement each other?- Although it explicitly targets the necessity of avoiding brain drain and of establishingethical recruitment procedures so as to “minimize negative and maximize positive impactsof highly skilled immigration on developing countries in order to turn ‘brain drain’ into‘brain gain’”, 54 concerns have been raised about whether the Blue Card could negativelyimpact on origin countries as not enough empirical work has been done on the effects ofbrain drain and how the latter occurs.- From a broader angle, the Blue Card raises the question of whether future migrationtrends in EU labour immigration would be more focused on highly-skilled and selectivemigration. In this regard, analysing the Blue Card as an instrument for the implementationof the Global Approach to Migration casts doubt on the globality of the approach itself.This is why it has been argued that Europe needs instead “a common policy for all typesof labour migration, be it unskilled, semi-skilled or highly-skilled” (Baldwin-Edwards2009, p. 135) and not partial instruments addressing specific migration aspects.- Despite the fact that the EU Blue Card Proposal has been adopted as Council directive, theUK, Denmark and Ireland did not adhere to the proposed approach. Moreover, the UK hasalready a quite efficient point system for skilled labour recruitment. This not only drawsattention to the lack of coordination and the difficulties relating to shaping a commonEuropean labour migration policy, but also casts some doubt upon the credibility of theEU Blue Card as a policy instrument capable of pooling all EU actors together. This,combined with the application and acceptance procedure for the transfer of the Blue Cardto another European country, limit the potential attractiveness of this instrument as an EUwideentitlement).6.4. The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and the European Neighborhood Policy: AdequateTools for an External Migration Policy?Besides the articulation between EU migration policy and the needs of its labour markets on the onehand and the development needs of partners (and in particular AMCs) on the other hand, anotherrelevant field of analysis is the articulation between EU cooperation policy with those countries (inparticular the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and the European Neighbourhood Policy) and itsmigration policy towards them, and more specifically to what extent those cooperation instrumentsincorporate and implement the Global Approach to Migration.53 See Chapter IV, Article 13 of the Directive.54 See Preamble Article (22) of the Directive.92